I think there’s really no good way to put spin on the deaths of 31 people.

That doesn’t stop them from trying.

From the LA Times:

There was criticism throughout the day that the university should have closed down between the incidents, but president Steger defended the school’s actions.

“We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,” Steger told reporters during the afternoon briefing. “We can only make decisions based on the information you had at the time. You don’t have hours to reflect on it.”

I really am offended that the University is defending their actions. They may not have suspected that there was reason for concern with a gunman on the loose.

But why didn’t they? What were they thinking? This is a small town where people don’t even feel a need to lock their doors. Do they expect the population to be prepared to deal with a murderer who has a gun?

Or were they more concerned with the school’s reputation, afraid that locking down the campus until the shooting suspect was apprehended would splash the school’s name luridly in the headlines and give them bad PR?

I don’t think that President Steger is to blame. He didn’t shoot those people. But this university’s administration denying that they made a catastrophic error in judgment is a wrong- headed, self- serving, and hypocritical insult to both the people who died today and the rest of us who were put in harm’s way unnecessarily by their inaction.

Nobody around here is going to feel safe in their classroom or office in the foreseeable future. Lawsuits are inevitable whether or not you admit you could have acted differently. So, for God’s sake, President Steger, just cut us a break and stop trying to spin this.