Faced with any crisis, the standard media cliché is to say that no one could anticipate such a tragedy.
And, certainly, one could not watch 20 minutes of talking-head commentary during the wall-to-wall coverage following the mass murder of 32 individuals at Virginia Tech University without encountering some permutation of that phrase.
Such a comment is fine as a cliché, but not as an excuse. Any administration not only has to be prepared for how to respond in a ...