INDEX
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WVU’s Independent Student Newspaper
1. News 2. WV History/Crime 3. News 4. Culture 5. Opinion 6. Chill
MONDAY APRIL 16, 2018
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Is WVU prepared for a shooting on campus?
A LOOK INSIDE
Today marks the 11 year anniversary of the shooting at Virginia Tech. This can leave students and faculty thinking, “Are we prepared?” WVU Police Chief says the public needs to be “aware and trained.” BY JORDYN JOHNSON
Victims of Virginia Tech. shooting
CULTURE EDITOR Eleven years ago today, the one deadliest mass shootings took place at a college campus about four hours from West Virginia University. On April 16, 2007, Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia experienced the worst day in its history. Beginning at around 7:15 a.m., a string of events occurred that would rock not only the Virginia Tech campus, but the entire country. SeungHui Cho, a senior at Virginia Tech, went on a shooting massacre that ended in the death of 32 innocent students and faculty members. Other than the Columbine High School massacre that happened almost eight years prior, an event like this had never occured in the United States. Immediately after the incident, college campuses around the country and the world were concerned about the safety of their students. In the past decade, mass shootings have become increasingly more prevalent: with schools being a major target. This can have some wondering: “Is WVU next?” WVU Police Chief Bob Roberts was chief at the time of the Virginia Tech shooting, and for him, it hit very close to home. “I think there’s a piece of you that just feels disbelief,” Roberts said. “But, it too changed a lot of things we do. Right now we have shotguns, we have automatic weapons, we have things that we didn’t have then.” A shooting event has not taken place at WVU since before 1999, and Roberts and the rest of the WVU Police Department would like to keep it that way. After the Columbine shooting in
PHOTO VIE WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Virginia Tech. students place flowers and cards in memory of their classmates and faculty who lost their lives. April of 1999, WVU PD changed the way they operate if they are dealing with an active shooter situation to help be much more proactive and protect the community even better. “Over the history of my time here and going back to Columbine, we really took a two-fold approach,” Roberts said. “One was to actually educate the community, and time gives you an advantage to step back and look at things. If you look at it over time, there’s the argument that we should put more guns out there, but actually if you look at the instances that were prevented, most of them were prevented by citizens unarmed who knew what to do or took action.” Because of that, the WVU Police Department aimed to educate the WVU community as well as Morgantown on the basics of active shooter situations. Two programs went into place, “Shots Fired” and “Flashpoint,” and those programs have been in place for around 15 years. Roberts feels that if the public is “aware and trained” on what to look out for regarding mass shootings,
they can give police information, too. This can be key to preventing these shootings. Rapid response from police has also gone into place to prevent shootings. Rapid response is quick action taken from officers closest to wherever a shooting may be occuring to stop the event from happening and save lives. “All of our officers on WVU’s campus have been trained in a program called “Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training,” Roberts said. “What that really means is that when we show up, as soon as we can get two or three officers together, they don’t have to be from our department, they know certain formations that they put together, and they enter and go towards the gun shots. We don’t wait.” The WVU Police Department has also provided students with active shooter training in residence halls and around campus, as well as table top discussions on what to do. The WVU Alert program was added to notify students of emergencies, and the Live Safe app was added.
Ross Alameddine, 20 Christopher Bishop, 35 Brian Bluhm, 25 Ryan Clark, 22 Austin Cloyd, 18 Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, 49 Kevin Granata, 46 Matthew Gwaltney, 24 Caitlin Hammaren, 19 Jeremy Herbstritt, 27 Rachel Hill, 18 Emily Hilscher, 19 Jarrett Lane, 22 Matthew La Porte, 20 Henry Lee, 20 Liviu Librescu, 76 G. V. Loganathan, 51 Partahi Lumbantoruan, 34 Lauren McCain, 20 Daniel O’Neil, 22 Juan Ortiz, 26 Minal Panchal, 26 Daniel Cueva, 21 Erin Peterson, 18 Mike Pohle, 23 Julia Pryde, 23 Mary Read, 19 Reema Samaha, 18 Waleed Shaalan, 32 Leslie Sherman, 20 Maxine Turner, 22 Nicole White, 20 INFORMATIION VIA THE WASHINGTON POST
GoFundMe started for student’s funeral Money is being raised for family of Colton Hodge
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Could Trump take things too far on Twitter? President Trump has had a difficult week with the FBI raiding his attorney’s office and the Syria air strike
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Early projection of WVU’s starting offense Mountaineers will return with multiple starters
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