VIRGINIA TECH: GROSS NEGLIENCE EQUALS $$$$$$$

Virginia Tech President Steger’s annual salary is $748,892.00. This is a man who is being sued for gross negligence, who is about as inspiring as a turnip, and who completely bungled the April 16, 2007 tragedy. Governor McDonnell, what happened to merit pay and pay for quality of work?

Steger’s pay includes $479,842 in salary (including a $22,852 bonus), $245,000 from deferred compensation and a $20,000 car allowance.

Tech spokesperson, Larry Hincker, justified the princely sum by saying Steger has held he position for 12 years, making him one of the senior heads of a major university. Hincker made no reference to quality of leadership, and pretended that April 16^th never happened. Hincker did say that under Steger, Tech’s research budget has nearly doubled. Clearly Hincker puts money ahead of other leadership traits such as respect for human life and crisis management.

Hincker did not mention that under Steger’s administration the school has been found in violation of federal law in connection with the April 16, 2007 massacre and fined over $50,000. He also did not mention that a judge has ruled there is enough evidence of gross negligence against Steger to allow a lawsuit to go forward in connection with the shooting.

Realco guns tied to 2,500 crimes in D.C. and Maryland

By David S. Fallis

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, October 24, 2010; 12:34 PM

Outside a baby shower in Landover three years ago, Erik Kenneth Dixon snapped. As he argued with his sister and her boyfriend in a parking lot, the 25-year-old man whipped out a .45-caliber Glock and shot her in the leg. Then he chased down her boyfriend, firing between cars and at the running man's feet until he slipped on wet grass. As the prone man held his hands up in futile defense, Dixon executed him, firing seven times.

By law, Dixon was prohibited from owning a gun. He had spent almost three years in prison for shooting at a man. But three months before the baby-shower killing, he gave his girlfriend $335 and took her to an old brick house on a commercial strip just beyond the District line in Forestville, home to a gun shop called Realco.

"He knew which one he wanted and picked it out," the woman would later tell police.

Dixon's Glock was one of 86 guns sold by Realco that have been linked to homicide cases during the past 18 years, far outstripping the total from any other store in the region, a Washington Post investigation has found. Over that period, police have recovered more than 2,500 guns sold by the shop, including over 300 used in non-fatal shootings, assaults and robberies.

Realco has been known as a leading seller of "crime guns" seized by local police, but a year-long Post investigation reveals the magnitude of Realco's pattern and links the guns sold by the store to specific crimes. The Post compiled its own databases of more than 35,000 gun traces by mining unpublicized state databases and local police evidence logs.

The Post investigation found that a small percentage of gun stores sells most of the weapons recovered by police in crimes - re-confirming the major finding of studies that came out before federal gun-tracing data were removed from public view by an act of Congress in 2003. For the most part, these sales are legal, but an unknown number involve persons who buy for those who cannot, including convicted felons such as Dixon, in a process known as a "straw purchase." Such sales are illegal for the buyer and the store, if it knowingly allows a straw purchase. But cases are hard to prove. Law enforcement officials rarely prosecute gun stores, deterred by high bureaucratic hurdles, political pressure and laws that make convictions difficult.

The investigation also found that:

Nearly two out of three guns sold in Virginia since 1998 and recovered by local authorities came from about 1 percent of the state's dealers - 40 out of the 3,400 selling guns. Most of those 40 had received government warnings that their licenses were in jeopardy because of regulatory violations. But only four had their licenses revoked, and all are still legally selling guns after transferring their licenses, reapplying or re-licensing under new owners.

A gun store in Portsmouth, Va., transformed over the past seven years from a modest family-owned business into one of the state's top sellers of "crime guns," leading Virginia in the category of how quickly its guns moved from the sales counter to crime scenes.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which investigates gun trafficking and regulates the firearms industry, is hamstrung by the law, politics and bureaucracy. The agency still has the same number of agents it had three decades ago. It can take as long as eight years between inspections of gun stores. And even when inspectors turn up evidence of missing guns, they cannot compel a dealer to take inventory.

In Maryland, Realco towers over the other 350 handgun dealers in the state as a source of guns confiscated in the District and Prince George's County, the most violent jurisdictions in the area. Nearly one out of three guns The Post traced to Maryland dealers came from Realco. The rest were spread among other shops across the state.

The store is a paradox for law enforcement and politicians. Its owners say they scrupulously follow handgun laws. State and federal regulators have documented only minor problems in numerous inspections.

Since 1992, more than 2,500 guns recovered by police and tied to crimes in the Washington area have been traced back to their original sale at Realco Guns in Forestville, Md. The total is four times that of the dealer with the next highest number of gun traces.

"The owners of Realco Guns are cooperative with our detectives and have been compliant with all reporting requirements," said Maj. Andy Ellis, commander of the public affairs division for Prince George's police. "It shows a weakness in our system when a company like Realco can adhere to the law yet still be the source of so many crime guns. I can only imagine how much lower our violent-crime rate would be if Realco sold shoes instead of guns."

Dealers on the front lines

Tracing brings into sharp relief the fact that virtually all crime guns are first sold as new weapons by a licensed dealer to someone who cleared a background check. The criminal demand for weapons - especially new ones that cannot be tied to previous crimes - puts dealers at the front line of crime prevention.

One ATF study found that about half the guns in trafficking cases started as "straw purchases" from licensed dealers. As in the Dixon case, a person with a clean record buys a gun for a person who cannot or does not want to do so. The ATF looks to merchants to proactively weed out suspicious customers, such as a girlfriend buying for a boyfriend.

Most experts and ATF officials agree that the number of conscientious dealers far outweighs the minority that break the law. Straw schemes can be hard to detect. A gun traced to a merchant does not necessarily signal that the merchant did anything wrong, the experts say. The number of traces a store generates is shaped by many factors, including the type and number of guns sold, geography, clientele and how clerks vet customers.

The District has no walk-in gun shops but is ringed by more than 100 in Maryland and Virginia. Of the 996 guns successfully traced last year in the city, about one-fourth were tracked back to Maryland dealers, one-fourth to Virginia dealers and the rest to shops nationwide, according to the ATF.

To track crime guns in the District and Prince George's, The Post used public information requests to obtain local police logs listing 76,000 guns recovered by police in the two jurisdictions, then matched the serial numbers against a Maryland database of gun sales.

About 9,400 had no serial numbers and could not be matched. Another 13,300 were rifles or shotguns, which the state does not track. About 44,000 guns were not listed in state sales records, meaning the weapons were probably sold by dealers scattered across the country or had their serial numbers entered into police logs incorrectly.

About 8,700 guns were tracked to the Maryland merchants that last sold them.

Police in the District and Prince George's on average seized more than 160 Realco guns annually from 1997 through 2008. Realco's firearms end up at local crime scenes at a rate nearly twice that of any other active Maryland dealer that had 10 or more guns seized.

On a single day, police have logged two, three or even four guns sold by Realco, records show.

A Taurus .40-caliber pistol sold by the store in March 2004 was put to work in a murder three weeks later at a Popeyes in Oxon Hill, where 20-year-old Robert Garner Jr. killed 22-year-old Kelvin Braxton. Police learned that Garner's girlfriend had bought the gun.

A Glock .45-caliber the shop sold to Alfred L. Evans in June 2004 was used in October 2005 in Clinton at a busy traffic light to kill 28-year-old Keith Ingaharra. After one driver cut the other off in evening rush-hour traffic, Ingaharra stepped from his car waving his hands. Evans shot Ingaharra in the hip, leg and chest and then drove home.

"He had the gun right there at his fingertips," said Ingaharra's mother, Bonnie Rogers. "He just took it out and blew him away."

A Kel-Tec 9mm sold by Realco in January 2007 was used by Terris T. Luckett seven months later to shoot his wife 20 times, killing her at their Clinton home. He then killed a barber, John Scales III, in his shop. Luckett, who bought the gun, incorrectly thought the two were having an affair, police say.

Realco's president, Carlos del Real, declined repeated requests to be interviewed, dismissing the news value of gun tracing.

"It's such a ridiculous topic," said del Real, who took over the shop after his brother died in 2008. "Maybe we should just move our shop a few hundred miles away."

Glenn Ivey said that after he became Prince George's state's attorney in 2002, he asked law enforcement colleagues if he could do anything about the flow of guns from Realco, which he said he knew of from his time in the 1990s as a prosecutor in the District.

"I had an eye toward trying to take action," Ivey said. "The feedback we got was: They are doing it the way they are supposed to. They are following the letter of the law."

Asked about Realco, ATF spokeswoman Clare Weber said stores with greater numbers of traces are inspected more frequently.

"The number of traces that come back to a [gun dealer] is not a revocable offense if the dealer is found in compliance with record-keeping requirements," she said.

Joseph R. Vince Jr., who retired from the ATF's Crime Gun Analysis Branch in 1999 and has worked as an expert for lawyers who represent victims of gun violence, said the pattern prompts questions.

"If a gun store is bleeding crime guns, you have got to ask yourself what . . . is going on," Vince said. "I have no problem with somebody being in the firearms business. That is a legitimate business. But why can't the public be aware of where guns to criminals are coming from?"

Realco walks the line

Realco, one of dozens of dealers licensed over the years to sell handguns in Prince George's, opened more than 35 years ago when Carlos del Real's older brother Greg secured an ATF dealer's license.

The store - whose address is now in District Heights after an annexation three years ago - occupies a 1930 Craftsman-style house on a strip of Marlboro Pike, between the Loose Ends Hair Studio and the Black Ribeye drive-through. Across the street is a Dunkin' Donuts and a check-cashing service. Down the block is a liquor store and a police substation.

Stretched across one end of the front porch at Realco is a "Team Glock" banner, a marketing nod to the angular-shaped handgun. Bars line the windows. Customers enter in the back next to a sign announcing the "Realco Outdoor World & Gun Hospital."

Inside is a small paneled showroom lined with glass display cases and space for only a handful of customers. Rifle bags, gun safes, animal trophies and assorted gun gear fill the shop. Tacked behind the counter is a small yellow notice: "We will refuse the sale of ammo and guns to suspected straw purchasers."

Researchers in law enforcement, academia and the media first began to examine gun tracing data for clues to potential illegal sales in the late 1990s. (The efforts so angered gun supporters that they successfully lobbied Congress to impose a blackout on the once-public data in 2003.) In 1999, The Post identified Realco as the source of 493 guns used in crimes from 1996 to 1998, based on data from the ATF. That was twice the number of any other dealer in the region, and later researchers would rank Realco in the top 10 in the nation for crime-gun traces.

At the time, Greg and Carlos del Real disputed the numbers. They said they operated in a high-crime area but obeyed all laws.

"We step all over these people's constitutional rights to prevent these straw purchases," Greg del Real said.

Months later, Maryland State Police officials told The Post they were "taking an aggressive look" at Realco and potential straw purchases. Nothing came of the investigation, records show.

Greg del Real followed news of the state probe with a letter to The Post, disputing that "our store is in any way responsible for the flow of 'crime guns."

Guns, he wrote, are traced for many reasons that might not include "criminal use," including stolen guns and guns used in self-defense.

"We suspect that those reasons for traces, coupled with our high volume of sales, may account for the 'higher than average' number of gun traces attributed to our store," he wrote.

"The hundreds of sales that we have refused to make over the years," he also noted, "are not reflected in any statistical report."

Realco was back in the news in August 2007 when D.C. police issued a report that identified the leading sources of crime guns seized in D.C. in 2006 - Realco was No. 1 with 76, three times the number of the next-most-frequent dealer.

That month, prosecutor Ivey joined Jesse L. Jackson's Rainbow/Push Coalition and others outside Realco in a "protest against illegal guns." Inside the shop, Maryland State Police pored over Realco's paperwork. Investigators found little of concern.

"The brothers Del Real were cooperative during the inspection," they wrote.

Crime guns stack up

The gun industry often says that traces reflect little more than the number of guns a merchant has sold. But Maryland dealers that have sold almost as many or more guns than Realco have had their guns seized at much lower rates, records show.

Realco is listed in the Maryland database as selling 19,000 guns since 1984. Of every 1,000 sold, analysis shows, police later recovered 131.

About five miles away from Realco, near Andrews Air Force Base, is Maryland Small Arms Range Inc. The longtime dealer has sold about 15,000 guns over the past 25 years. For every 1,000 it sold, police later recovered 41.

Jack Donald, a longtime salesman at the shop, said police officers often use the range on site, potentially affecting who shops there.

"It may be some kind of a deterrent," Donald said.

Atlantic Guns, a long-established dealer in Silver Spring, has sold more than 18,000 guns in the past 25 years. For every 1,000 sold, police have recovered 28.

And in Rockville, a second Atlantic Guns location has sold more than 21,000 firearms since 1984 - the most listed in state records. Out of every 1,000 guns sold, police recovered eight.

One of the main ATF indicators of trafficking is how quickly guns are seized after they are sold, known as "time to crime." The faster guns are recovered, the ATF has found, the more likely they were bought by someone with criminal intent, sometimes through straw purchases. Anything less than three years is considered a potential red flag.

In general, Realco guns have been recovered more quickly than guns sold by other Maryland dealers. In Prince George's and the District, 55 percent of the recovered Realco guns were logged by police within three years, compared with 40 percent for the guns recovered from other Maryland dealers.

A Smith & Wesson .40-caliber handgun sold in March 2006 was recovered by Prince George's police 13 months later not far from a body, surrounded by shell casings, on a Landover street. A 26-year-old man was shot and killed after finding two men breaking into his car. The shooter told police that he asked a 21-year-old woman to purchase the handgun for him because he was 20 at the time and "not of legal age to purchase one himself," police said.

In a May 2006 straw purchase, a man bought a handgun at Realco for a felon friend who wanted to shoot abortion doctors. The plot was foiled after the felon's family called authorities weeks later.

In another straw scheme that ended later that year, a 22-year-old District man on probation for a handgun violation had his 47-year-old girlfriend, an office manager at a law firm who had a clean record, buy handguns for him on four shopping trips to Realco, prosecutors said. The scheme unraveled after police recovered one of the guns in the District.

The ATF trace revealed that the woman had bought it at Realco two months before. After talking with an ATF agent, she filed reports that one of the guns was stolen, but she eventually said she gave it to her boyfriend.

The man "went to Realco Guns with her on each occasion," she told the ATF, according to a document filed in court.

The straw purchase

When Erik Dixon first shot at a man, he had in his grip a relatively new Ruger .40-caliber handgun from Realco.

Dixon, then 21, had a string of arrests, was on federal probation, had abused drugs and complained of hearing voices in his head.

Standing outside his mother's home in Landover the night of May 3, 2003, he accused a man, an acquaintance, of attacking him. Dixon ordered the man to the ground, took $200 from him and pulled the trigger. The bullet struck the asphalt, and lead fragments ricocheted into the victim's face and shoulder.

As Dixon put the gun to the back of the man's head, a police car turned onto the street. Dixon fled.

When police arrested Dixon two days later, the gun fell from his waistband. Realco had sold the gun about eight months before, records show, to a man who had lived in the area.

Charged with attempted murder, Dixon claimed he was insane. The courts sent him to prison on a lesser charge of felony assault.

Once out, he met Cathy R. Anderson, 31, and soon asked that she buy a gun for him. In January 2007, the pair visited Realco, where she made a down payment on a Glock .45, signing a form saying she was buying the gun for herself. Dixon was in the store with her, she later told police.

She told investigators she didn't know of his criminal past. She said she never touched the gun after she picked it up on a return trip to Realco.

"I took it back to Erik's truck and gave it to him," she told police.

Two months later, Anderson called Maryland State Police, nervous about what she had done. That day, April 5, they opened a straw-purchase investigation to track down Dixon and the gun. Nine days later, he murdered his sister's boyfriend.

He was arrested nine days after that in Virginia. Anderson cooperated with prosecutors, who chose not to charge her. Dixon is serving a 60-year sentence.

In phone messages, Anderson declined to be interviewed, saying Dixon is no longer in her life.

"That was then; this is now," she said. ". . . I'm sorry for what happened."

Contributing to this report were staff writers James V. Grimaldi and Sari Horwitz, videographer Ben de la Cruz, staff researcher Julie Tate and former staff researcher Meg Smith.

TECH GETS MAXIMUM FINE

The Department of Education (DoE) has levied a $55,000 fine on Virginia Tech for violations of federal law in connection with the shootings on April 16, 2007. The fine is the maximum allowed. In issuing the decision, the DoE said, “While Tech’s violations warrant a fine far in excess of what is currently permissible under the statute, the Department’s fine authority is limited.”

Tech spokesperson Larry Hincker said the school would appeal the decision. The fine is pathetic and Hincker’s response even more so. To quote Andrew Goddard, whose son was serious wounded, “the amount is so minuscule that (Tech) should pay up and be done with it. … they (Tech) seem to be in denial on many fronts.”

McDonnell’s Soap Box Jingle Contest

Governor McDonnell is concealing from the electorate that he is doing little meaningful about school safety by launching the “College Campus Safety and Violence Prevention Public Service Challenge”—a jingle contest.

Students are to create 30-second videos; something like soap commercials. The Office of Substance Abuse Prevention will narrow entries for online voting. Neither of the two Virginia school shooters were substance abusers.

Why the contest? First, to draw attention away from, and perhaps undercut, the ongoing lawsuit against high ranking Virginia Tech officials; second, to appear to be doing something meaningful, when in fact you are not; third, to avoid tackling continuing weaknesses in the law regarding campus safety; and fourth to cover-up the governor’s abysmal record as Attorney General during the Tech tragedy.

As Attorney General, McDonnell:

--Did not utter a word when Tech—within four days of the shooting—set up a Web site to defend the school’s president and police chief, but waited nearly four months to establish a Web site for the victims;

--Did not challenge Virginia Tech’s spending $600,000 of taxpayers’ money on a public relations agency to spin the tragedy to the school’s benefit;

--Did not recognize the errors in the Review Panel Report’s timeline of the tragedy. He remained silent when TriData was paid over $500,000 for the flawed report. He said nothing when TriData’s incompetence was rewarded with $75,000 for making some corrections. Contract law was probably broken;

--Did not object when a Tech official boasted about the school’s $1 billion capital campaign. Then, referring to the shooting, he added, “you can’t just wallow in it forever.” The bodies of the dead students and faculty weren’t even cold. He should have been fired. Family values—McDonnell style?

Professor Lucinda Roy’s Article in The Chronicle following the Tuscon Tragedy

Below is an excellent article written by Virginia Tech’s Professor Lucinda Roy. It appeared in “The Chronicle” on February 12, 2011. I am posting the article in its entirety.

After Tucson: a Personal Assessment of Higher Education's Response to Threats

By Lucinda Roy

A few weeks after Jared Lee Loughner's attack in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson, the jury is still out about whether more could have been done to prevent the rampage. The spotlight has fallen on officials at Pima Community College because it was there that Loughner's strange behavior was noticed and documented, resulting in his suspension some three months prior to his rampage.

The phrase "Hindsight is 20/20" is being invoked frequently, just as it was after Seung-Hui Cho's attack in 2007 at Virginia Tech. How could anyone have known Jared Lee Loughner was as unstable and potentially homicidal as that? Besides, he wasn't even a student at Pima anymore. Moreover, it's impossible to predict attacks like these, and there's not much, if anything, you can do in America if deeply disturbed people are determined to go on a shooting spree.

At first glance, it looks as though officials at Pima had learned from the errors made by Virginia Tech and avoided making the same ones themselves. Instead of shuffling an unresponsive student through an unresponsive system, they had taken action to keep their campus safe. After viewing Loughner's menacing YouTube video, in which he appears to be fantasizing about harming people on the campus, they issued a letter of immediate suspension in September 2010. They also placed stringent conditions upon his return: Unless he obtained a mental-health clearance, Loughner could not come back to the campus.

Nor did college officials' due diligence end there. Aware of the fact that Loughner's behavior suggested he may not be able to make crucial decisions on his own behalf, law-enforcement officials hand-delivered the letter of suspension to Loughner's home. It's commendable that they did so. Again, this suggests that Pima officials had learned from Virginia Tech's mistakes. (Even though Cho had threatened suicide and was held overnight at a mental-health facility, his parents were never notified that he was in trouble.)

According to the statement issued by Pima following the shootings, Jared Loughner and his parents were also advised to attend a meeting with college administrators about his violation of the college's code of conduct, which they did in October.

During this meeting, Loughner indicated that he would withdraw from the college. A follow-up letter was sent to him three days later, indicating that if he intended to return, he had to resolve his code-of-conduct violations and obtain the mental-health clearance indicating, in the opinion of a mental-health professional, that his presence at the college did not present a danger to himself or others.

In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told The Washington Post that he supported Pima Community College's decision: "From what I read, they said to the family that 'he needs some help, and we won't take him back until you get him some help.' I'm not quite sure what else that community college can do. ... If I was the chancellor of that community college, I think that would have been my response."

Yet when you start to peel off the layers of that argument, it seems to have numerous flaws.

I think it's very likely that the members of Pima's Student Behavior Assessment Committee, which had been assigned to handle Loughner's case, believed they were acting in the best interests of their community. Their being relatively open about what occurred—acknowledging that they had a history with Loughner, releasing a fairly detailed statement, and releasing a confidential 51-page law-enforcement document almost immediately after the shootings—tells me they believed they did the best they could at the time. This is in stark contrast to Virginia Tech, where crucial documents still have not been released. Cho's mental-health records, for example, didn't show up until 2009, when Robert C. Miller, a former director of Virginia Tech's campus counseling center, discovered them in his home.

I believe that Pima officials were completely justified in suspending Loughner, given the grave concerns expressed by faculty and the shocking video he'd made. I also know firsthand how difficult—indeed, how dangerous—it can be to try to intercede. Not only is the student himself resistant, but also the system is horribly flawed. With a chronic shortage of psychiatric beds, and insurance companies unwilling to cover the cost of treatment for the mentally ill, it's difficult to obtain long-term treatment for those in need. Moreover, unlike Virginia Tech, Pima doesn't have its own mental-health clinic; instead, it refers students to other mental-health providers.

That being said, there are still some things that probably could have been done differently. Why, for example, was a concerted effort not made to get Jared Loughner evaluated?

When the college decided to suspend the student, it appears to have appointed his parents as the de facto responsible party. Presumably, if Loughner had obtained a mental-health clearance and agreed to abide by Pima's code of conduct, he'd have had a right to return to the campus—something that would no doubt have alarmed those faculty who already felt threatened by him.

Putting that aside, there are more-fundamental problems in the Jared-and-his-parents-as-responsible-party approach, and it's an obvious one: Loughner's suspension could have made him more rather than less of a threat to the campus. Here was an unbalanced, quite possibly enraged student, who, as far as the college knew, hadn't had a mental-health evaluation and so was unlikely to be getting treatment. This former student with a grudge had easy access to guns and the capacity to return to campus and seek revenge on the college that had rejected him. Again, I want to emphasize that I applaud college officials for recognizing the need to remove Loughner from the classroom. But in the absence of a mental-health evaluation, it's hard for me to see how precisely the campus was safer after the suspension than it was before.

The fact that Loughner was already behaving in ways others found bizarre and, at times, threatening tells us that he may well have been unable to comprehend the extent of his own condition. The fact that he was an adult and unruly to the point of being menacing to some suggests that his parents may well have had little control over him by this time. In the chilling four-minute YouTube video in which he refers to his college as a "genocide school" and "one of the biggest scams in America," we see indications that he may already have been fantasizing about attacking the campus. He didn't select Pima as the site of his attack, but that may have been in spite of his suspension. Like many school shooters, including Seung-Hui Cho, Loughner seems to have selected his target with care, choosing the one most likely to challenge authority and shock the world.

Colleges have some limited discretion and flexibility in cases like these. But many people, even those in positions of authority, don't necessarily know what they can and cannot do. As I understand it, even if Loughner had not made an overt threat and was not in imminent danger of doing harm to himself or others, it would still have been possible under Arizona law to require him to get a mental-health evaluation. According to some reports, there appears to have been some confusion about whether or not a mental-health evaluation could be required by the college. Because a clinical psychologist and a member of law enforcement were serving on the college's Student Behavior Assessment Committee, it's even more puzzling why an evaluation wasn't done, especially when there was legitimate concern that Loughner could pose a danger to the campus community.

It's important to remember, however, that you have few good options when you deal with troubled students. When I met with Seung-Hui Cho in 2005, after a faculty member contacted me about his writing and behavior, the choice was between putting him in someone else's class (at the time, departments at Virginia Tech were required to offer students an "equivalent academic experience" if they were removed from class) or persuading him to seek counseling voluntarily. It was a terrible choice to have to make—one I'd argued against in the past. Since Cho's shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, I've heard from faculty around the country who are still being asked to jeopardize their own safety by making similar choices, as well as from administrators who feel stuck between a rock and a hard place: If they act assertively to defuse a potential threat, they risk being tied up in litigation for years. Each case is different, each one nuanced. Many colleges don't have the time or the personnel needed to adequately assess levels of threat.

As far as we know, Loughner chose not to seek help from a mental-health professional, though we may learn during his trial that he sought it after all—or that his parents sought it for him. People assumed that Cho hadn't sought help, and it wasn't revealed until months after the shootings that he had gone to the campus counseling center on several occasions, even requesting one of the counselors I'd recommended to him. (He sought help from Virginia Tech's counseling service but was never diagnosed, only triaged, for reasons that have not yet been disclosed.)

It's possible that the Loughners did all the wrong things. But it's also possible that they tried as hard as they could to get help for their son. It's also possible that, like the parents of the 1998 school shooter Kip Kinkel, they were in denial. (Kinkel's parents, both schoolteachers, knew their son had a fascination for guns and explosives but, absurd as it sounds now, they hoped he'd become some kind of bomb-disposal expert. Seventeen hours before his attack on Thurston High School, in Oregon, Kinkel murdered his mother and father.)

When I was conducting research for my book No Right to Remain Silent, I was struck by how often these attacks occur when one constituency or cultural sphere fails to communicate essential information to another. We tend to forget that these spheres are interdependent: The individual/family sphere overlaps with the institutional sphere (schools, colleges, mental-health providers, law enforcement) and with the societal sphere (privacy and gun-rights laws, government, etc.). Deeply disturbed students become the flaming torches handed off from one sphere to another. Justifiably afraid of being burned, people often do what they can to avoid holding onto the torches for long. They're passed from one sphere to the other in an increasingly dangerous cycle. Each time, critical information may not be relayed.

For example, neither Cho himself nor his family revealed to Virginia Tech that he had chosen to stop taking medication when he reached adulthood, nor were they legally obligated to tell. We didn't know that he suffered from selective mutism, a condition in which extreme anxiety prevented him from speaking in certain social situations. (It should be noted that selective mutism does not predispose a person to violence.) Nor did we know that, in middle school, he had fantasized about the mass shootings at Columbine High School. But there were things we did know, and, as happened at Pima, a considerable number of faculty and students raised the alarm.

I don't wish to leave the impression that we have hundreds of Chos and Loughners stalking school corridors and the halls of academe. Some of the most tal­ented and sensitive students can appear "odd," and we need to guard against weeding out "difference" from the student population and adopting crude methodologies to identify those who pose a threat. The problem of severely disturbed students in our schools and colleges demands an engaged, holistic, enlightened response.

Although there have been positive changes when it comes to campus safety, there is still significant, sometimes crippling confusion about what can be done legally in situations like these. The issue is further complicated by the fact that an institution's legal responsibility may not be the same as its ethical one. In spite of there being some areas of concern related to actions taken by Pima officials, they should be applauded for trying to respond as purposefully as they did, involving the parents and releasing a fairly detailed statement to the public almost immediately, not to mention the campus-police documents. Open communication is crucial if we are to learn from what happened. The way leadership behaves after a crisis is almost as important as the way it behaves when it's in the middle of one.

Here are suggestions about how higher education can deal with this crisis. I certainly don't presume to have all the answers. But as someone who knows what it costs a community when things go horrifically wrong, I hope we'll confront this very complex issue in ways we haven't in the past.

• The Department of Education must take a greater leadership role in responding to troubled students. Under what circumstances, for example, should mental-health evaluations be mandatory? What kinds of safe-harbor provisions should be in place so that faculty members who report their concerns are not unfairly subjected to litigation? What structural changes are needed so schools and colleges are more responsive during times of crisis? What kinds of information about a student may be shared and under what circumstances? And, in concert with entities like law enforcement, parent-teacher organizations, municipalities, and security experts, we should look at the most contentious question of all—one too hot even for President Obama to touch upon in his recent State of the Union address: How can we better prevent children, criminals, and the mentally ill from obtaining weapons?

• We should consider requiring all colleges and universities with sizable student populations to have a mental-health-treatment facility on campus. Pima Community College has an enrollment of 68,000, more than twice the size of Virginia Tech's. Many colleges finance such facilities through student fees. Student access to mental health should be an essential component of a large campus.

• At the national level, we should try to determine whether judicial-appeals processes at colleges and universities are equipped to deal with the severity of problems regarding troubled students. Judicial-affairs bodies were set up to deal with students involved in minor misdemeanors; some are simply not designed to be responsive to deeply disturbed individuals.

• Faculty should be trained to teach students with differing needs and to recognize and respond to troubled students. In higher education, faculty members often receive little or no such training, the assumption being that expertise in a discipline automatically endows one with teaching skills. It doesn't. We need a nationwide initiative to deal with this problem.

• We should find out the extent of the challenge posed by troubled or severely disturbed students in higher education, so that we can better respond to it. Numerous faculty members from around the country have told me that they are afraid to say how bad the situation has become in their classrooms. We can't respond effectively if we don't know the scope of the problem.

I am hopeful that the events in Tucson will oblige us to look again at the laws and policies in place to make sure we are not empowering deranged and enraged people even as we disempower educators, law enforcement, and others who are supposed to intervene. The risk to colleges and universities is enormous. Our dream for a healthy higher-education system will become a nightmare if we don't find better ways to respond to this challenge.

Lucinda Roy is a professor of English at Virginia Tech. Her latest book is No Right to Remain Silent: What We've Learned From the Tragedy at Virginia Tech (Three Rivers Press, 2010).

SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY BILL DIES IN COMMITTEE

The Virginia Senate and Courts Justice Committee voted 12-3 to “pass by indefinitely” (or kill) Senate Bill #1381. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli requested the bill. Cuccinelli’s office is the lead counsel in the three civil suits filed against Virginia Tech and some of its employees and the bill was another attempt to derail the civil suit filed by the Pryde and Petersen families in connection with the April 16, 2007 tragedy.

Cuccincelli’s actions appear to be one of the most blatant abuses of power in recent Virginia history. His three previous attempts to claim sovereign immunity have been rejected by the courts. So what does he do? He tries to change the law to fit his own purposes. If that isn’t an abuse of power, I don’t know what is.

Had Bill #1381 passed, it would have been a major departure from the state’s established appellate procedure, could have suspended pending Supreme Court review, and added another year or more to the process--and added considerably to the plaintiffs’ litigation costs.

Lori Hass, whose daughter was wounded in the shooting, is quoted as saying the bill’s timing and the circumstances behind its proposal lends credence to the feeling among many of the Tech victims’ families that officials fear a trial might reveal how poorly the tragedy was handled.

The Attorney General was also silent when members of his party tried to delay the reappointment of Judge Alexander, the man who said there was enough evidence of gross negligence for the Pryde/Petersen lawsuit to proceed.

The actions cited above are from an Attorney General whose sentences consist of three parts—a subject, a verb, and the word Christian. Since when is it a Christian virtue to abuse power and deny a day in court to families whose children have been slaughtered at the state’s largest university?

VIRGINIA TEA PARTY UNDERCUTS SCHOOL SAFETY

A Tea Party-affiliated Republican is making Virginia ripe for a Tucson-style or Tech-type shooting. State Senator Bill Stanley has introduced a bill to protect Virginia Tech President Charles Steger and former school Executive Vice President James Hyatt from lawsuits. The issue is sovereign immunity.

Stanley wants special privileges for the two men—an immediate appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court over earlier lower-court rulings. (Special privileges for two men—can all Virginians get that?) The senator’s action follows the Department of Education’s finding that Tech broke the law on April 16, 2007 in not warning the campus, and a judges ruling that there is enough evidence of gross negligence for a lawsuit against Steger and Hyatt to go forward.

Steger and Hyatt lost three previous lower court appeals in which they claimed sovereign immunity. The last loss opened the door for the lawsuit by the Pryde and Peterson families to go forward. Having exhausted all legal options, Senator Stanley has tailored a bill to protect the two men. Under Senate Bill Number 1381, the two would be granted an immediate and automatic appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court.

The lawsuit is absolutely essential to holding people accountable for their actions. Virginia can spend millions on school security systems, but if the people in charge are negligent, the money is a complete waste. Without accountability, there can be no safety.

Stanley’s bill also has an implied threat. In Virginia, judges are elected by the legislature. Stanley seems to be saying to the Virginia Supreme Court justices, “Play ball with me, if you want to keep your job. If you don’t, I will organize the Tea Party against you.”

Corruption in the Tea Party appears to be as bad or worse than anything involving the Republicans or Democrats.