TV footage showed heavily armed officers walking around campus, caravans of SWAT vehicles and other police cars with emergency lights flashing as they patrolled nearby.

Virginia State Police will be taking over the investigation, according to the news release.

“The campus community should continue to shelter in place and visitors should not come to campus,” the school said.

The suspect was described as a white male wearing gray sweat pants, a gray hat with neon green brim, a maroon hoodie and backpack.

A message left with the university wasn’t immediately returned. Campus police referred all questions to the university.

“It’s crazy that someone would go and do something like that with all the stuff that happened in 2007,” said Corey Smith, a 19-year-old sophomore from Mechanicsville, Va., who was headed to a dining hall near the site of one of the shootings, but stayed inside after seeing the alerts from the school. “It’s just weird to think about why someone would do something like this when the school’s had so many problems.”

Harry White, 20, a junior physics major, told The Associated Press in a phone interview that he was in line for a sandwich at a Subway restaurant in a campus building when he received the text message alert about the shooting.

White said he didn’t panic, thinking instead about a false alarm about a possible gunman that caused the campus to be locked down in August. He used an indoor walkway to go to a computer lab in an adjacent building, where he checked news reports.

“I decided to just check to see how serious it was. I saw it’s actually someone shooting someone, not something false, something that looks like a gun,” White said.

White said the campus was quieter than usual because classes ended Wednesday and students are preparing for the start of exams. He said he didn’t see anyone outside from the windows of the computer lab after he received the alert. But he also didn’t detect any signs of panic.

The shooting came the same day as Virginia Tech, which has an enrollment of about 30,000, was appealing a $55,000 fine by the U.S. Education Department in connection with the university’s response to the 2007 rampage, when a student gunman killed 32 students and faculty and then shot himself.

A report of a possible gunman at Virginia Tech on Aug. 4 set off the longest, most extensive lockdown and search on campus since the 2007 bloodbath led the university to overhaul its emergency procedures. No gunman was found, and the school gave the all-clear about five hours after sirens began wailing and students and staff members started receiving warnings by phone, email and text message to lock themselves indoors. Alerts were also posted on the university’s website and Twitter accounts.

That incident marked the first time the entire campus was locked down since the 2007 shooting, and the second major test of Virginia Tech’s improved emergency alert system. The system was revamped to add the use of text messages and other means besides email of warning students.

The system was also put to the test in 2008, when an exploding nail gun cartridge was mistaken for gunfire. But only one dorm was locked down during that emergency, and it reopened two hours later.

Eric Tucker and Ben Nuckols in Washington and Michael Felberbaum and Larry O’Dell in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.

With such a steady attrition of rights, it’s hard to keep up the momentum, anger and outrage that we felt this winter and spring. But people should still be outraged, because a number of states are avidly participating in a race to the bottom, determined to outdo each other in restricting access to abortion, chipping away at the fundamental promise of Roe v. Wade, and belittling women and their healthcare providers in the process.

Leading the way are Ohio, Virginia, Kansas and South Dakota. Other states, like Indiana and Missouri, already have so many restrictions of various types in place that they’re going to be hard to catch up with.

Here’s a rundown of what’s happening state by state, and which states are really making it worse for woman.

Ohio: A fetal heartbeat law that would outlaw abortion before most women know they’re pregnant

Ms. Magazine’s Holly L. Derr reports from Ohio on a new law that has dire implications:

Now that the Ohio Senate is back in session, the bill may be taken up at any time. The measure would outlaw abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is often as early as six weeks into the pregnancy. At that point, many women don’t even know they are pregnant. The bill passed the House in March and stands a good chance in the Republican-dominated Senate. It then needs just the signature of proudly pro-life Governor John R. Kasich.

Derr notes that this law, too extreme even for Ohio Right to Life, is designed to trigger a lawsuit and get entangled in a costly court battle — even though its proponents claim to be against frivolous government spending. She writes that the situation in Ohio is already dire: “I hate that this same state Legislature has already passed House bills to ban abortion after 20 weeks (before the Supreme Court-recognized threshold of viability), to prevent private insurance companies from covering abortion and to prevent public hospitals from performing the procedure altogether.”

Indeed, it’s the combination of restrictions like these that makes it more and more difficult for women to find help when they need it.

Kansas and Virginia: Back-door regulations to shut down clinics

There’s another kind of threat at work in Kansas and Virginia. TRAP, or “targeted regulation of abortion provider” laws, are burdensome restrictions that are designed to put abortion clinics out of business. And in Virginia, passing a new set of these laws has been deemed an “emergency.”

The new rules attracted the attention of the editorial board of the Washington Post, which called them “onerous and unnecessary”:

The rules will require existing clinics to meet construction and design standards mainly intended for new hospitals — not existing outpatient facilities such as abortion clinics. The rules mandate the minimum width of hallways; ceiling height; the size of operating rooms; numbers of parking spots; and other requirements that will be physically impossible, or prohibitively expensive, for many clinics to satisfy.

In a state where abortions are already difficult to obtain, these regulations mean one thing: Clinics will shut their doors, and low-income, disabled, single parents, and otherwise disadvantaged women who can’t travel out of state will be out of options and out of luck.

These laws are based on similar TRAP regulations in Kansas that are now the subject of an intense legal battle.

South Dakota: “Informed consent” laws full of lies and manipulation

South Dakota has been the focus of endless legal, legislative and ballot-box battles over abortion — even though the Guttmacher Institute tells us there are barely any providers in the state: “In 2008, 98% of South Dakota counties had no abortion provider. 76% of South Dakota women lived in these provider-free counties.”

Nonetheless the Legislature and anti-choice lobby in the state has remained zealous, producing a number of insanely difficult restrictions that center around the bogus concept of “informed consent.” Right now a judge has upheld parts of a law requiring any woman seeking an abortion to be told that she will “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being,” a statement that of course is subject to debate. The court did strike down the part of the law that says abortion can lead to suicide.

Another judge blocked an even worse law, perhaps the most paternalistic, biased and dangerous law of its kind, requiring a 72-hour waiting period combined with a visit to an anti-choice, almost exclusively Christian, “Crisis Pregnancy Center” before an abortion could be obtained. This law actually made it through the legislative process.

Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Utah and others: Nearly every restriction on the book, including limitations on insurance coverage.

While these states vie for the most obscene anti-women laws, a number of other states continue to have a panoply of restrictions, as this interactive chart from “Remapping Debate” indicates (see this post for the chart).

Indiana, for instance, isn’t one of the states with the fewest number of providers. But it does have limitations on abortion coverage for insurance, counseling and waiting periods, parental involvement laws, hospital requirements, and TRAP laws on the books, among others.

The “limitations on insurance coverage” stipulation that well over a dozen states have adopted is a particularly alarming restriction because it means that abortions will have to be paid for out-of-pocket, creating a nearly insurmountable obstacle for poorer women.

Fighting Back Strategically

With this race to the bottom seeing no end in sight, what are pro-choicers doing to fight back? The answer is, carefully vetted lawsuits that aim to hit the anti-choice movement where it’s most vulnerable.

Back in May, as the war on women gained national attention, Emily Bazelon covered the issue for the New York Times Magazine, explaining which lawsuits the pro-choice movement was focusing on:

Instead, lawyers representing their side have been challenging the laws that hurt women most — which are also the ones most likely to sway public opinion back to their side. Can it really be good politics for a state to tell private health insurers what kind of coverage for women’s health they can and can’t provide? Or to take away the money that allows Planned Parenthood to prescribe birth control and treat S.T.D.’s? Quinnipiac and CNN polls from earlier this year both found majority support for continuing government financing of Planned Parenthood. There’s also a clear argument against laws like the ones that permit Virginia to regulate abortion clinics like hospitals …

Bazelon wrote that she believed this strategy would work, even though it’s frustrating not being able to go on the offensive and push back against every single bad law coming down the pipes:

These are precisely the kinds of cases that lawyers in support of reproductive rights should pursue, because they portray abortion foes as radical. The South Dakota fight shows that in the name of protecting women, abortion opponents are willing to demean them — by forcing them to visit a crisis pregnancy center and listen to unsupported medical claims … It’s not just a good legal strategy; it also offers the movement the strongest chance of taking back the statehouses, where the real action is.

She’s right, of course, that the end-game has to be electoral: Only changing the makeup of state legislatures, electing more Democrats and, more important, more pro-choice women, will be able to effect a more widespread rollback of these restrictions.

Only a solidly pro-choice government can stop the endless competition between states to make themselves more and more inhospitable to women at a time when jobs, money, childcare and healthcare are already sparse.

<p>The school posted an update on its website around 1 p.m., saying authorities were combing through buildings on campus. Classes were canceled for the day, and the school said searching the buildings would be a long process. Police had received no other reports nor found anyone fitting the description the children gave. A composite sketch was posted on the school’s website.</p>

<p>Officials told students, employees and others on campus to stay indoors.</p>

<p>Several thousand students attending summer classes, as well as the school’s 6,500 employees, were on campus when the alert was issued, said University spokesman Larry Hincker. Many of the school’s 30,000 students are on summer break and will return when the fall semester begins Aug. 22.</p>

<p>Maddie Potter, a 19-year-old rising sophomore from Virginia Beach, said she was working on a class project inside Burchard Hall when a friend received a text message from the school at 9:41 a.m. Soon after, staff locked the doors and turned off the lights.</p>

<p>Potter, an interior design major, said she was still holed up in a wood shop inside the building Thursday afternoon. She said things had calmed down since the alert went out.</p>

<p>”I was pretty anxious. We had family friends who were up here when the shooting took place in 2007, so it was kind of surreal,” she said. “I had my phone with me and I called both my parents.”</p>

<p>Hincker said he was not certain when the lockdown might be lifted.</p>

<p>”That’s the $64,000 question,” he said. “You get this report of a sighting that someone might have had a weapon. Then you’ve got this one-square-mile campus, 150 major buildings with several million square feet of space to search.”</p>

<p>The school’s website was inundated throughout the morning, and school officials said they were bringing additional servers online to deal with the traffic.</p>

<p>The children told police they saw the man quickly walking toward the volleyball courts, carrying what might have been a handgun covered by some type of cloth.</p>

<p>The children who made the report were visiting the campus as part of a summer academic program for middle schoolers in Washington, Richard Tagle, CEO of the group Higher Achievement, said in an emailed statement. All the students who were with the group are safe, he said.</p>

<p>An alert on the school’s website said the gunman was reported near Dietrick Hall, a three-story dining facility steps away from the dorm where the first shootings took place in the 2007 rampage.</p>

<p>”We’re in a new era. Obviously this campus experienced something pretty terrible four years ago … regardless of what your intuition and your experience as a public safety officer tells you, you are really forced to issue an alert, and that’s where we believe we are right now,” said Hincker, the Virginia Tech spokesman.</p>

<p>S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy for Security On Campus, a nonprofit organization that monitors how colleges react to emergencies, said it appeared Virginia Tech responded appropriately. Carter’s organization had pressed for an investigation into the school’s handling of the 2007 shootings.</p>

<p>”You have to take all of the reports seriously because you cannot take the risk that there’s something serious going on and you failed to act,” Carter said. “The key is the community was informed so they were able to take steps to protect themselves.”</p>

<p>Carter said having various forms of notification — sirens and message boards in addition to text messages and e-mails — are important in instances like Thursday’s, when many on campus are there for summer camps or otherwise not registered to receive alerts individually.</p>

<p>Virginia Secretary of Public Safety Marla Decker said the lockdown would have to remain in effect until the entire area is searched. She said she was glad the children reported what they saw.</p>

<p>”We’d rather have a report come to us, investigate it and later in the day say there was nothing to it,” she said.</p>

<p>Rachel Larson, a 22-year-old English and communications student from Winchester, Va., got a text message alert at her off-campus apartment.</p>

<p>”At first I was a little confused because Virginia Tech — ever since 4/16 — we’ve been so paranoid. We hear about everything that goes on on campus, which is good, but sometimes people freak out when it’s a false alarm,” she said. “Then I realized my boyfriend was on campus and I started to freak out a little bit.”</p>

<p>Larson said her boyfriend was locked down in the student union for several hours but eventually was allowed to leave.</p>

<p>”In the morning everyone was kind of concerned, but as the day went on we kind of realized it’s not anything. No one is really that worried anymore,” she said.</p>

<p>Last month, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli issued a legal opinion that said public university policies generally can prohibit people from openly carrying firearms in campus buildings and at events. However, such a policy would not apply to someone who had a valid concealed carry permit and carried a concealed firearm.</p>

<p>Federal authorities fined the school in March after ruling that administrators violated campus safety law by waiting too long to notify staff and students about a potential threat after two students were shot to death April 16, 2007, in West Ambler Johnston Hall, a dorm near the dining facility.</p>

<p>An email alert went out more than two hours later that day, about the time student Seung-Hui Cho was chaining shut the doors to a classroom building where he killed 30 more students and faculty and himself. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.</p>

<p>The school’s alert system also was activated in 2008, when an exploded cartridge from a nail gun produced sounds similar to gunfire near a campus dormitory. It was the first time the system was activated after the 2007 massacre. After the shootings, Virginia Tech started using text messages and other methods besides emails to warn students of danger.</p>

<p>In 2009, a woman was decapitated while having coffee with a fellow student in a campus cafe. Police said at the time that officers detained the suspect within minutes of being called. The school said it sent some 30,000 notifications by voicemail, email and text message, though they were not sent as emergency alerts because the suspect was already in custody.</p>

<p>On Thursday, officials said they were looking for a 6-foot-tall white man with light brown hair. Officials said the person was clean-shaven and wearing a blue and white striped shirt, gray shorts and brown sandals.</p>

Because discriminating against people based on many of those categories is why they get up in the morning, these culture warriors instructed their minions to flood the Virginia Department of Social Services with their comments. And in order to get everyone nice and mad, people like Maggie Gallagher and the foot soldiers of other religious right and anti-gay groups told everyone that these rules would force god-fearing child-placement group to shutter their doors rather than give children to deviant homosexuals (or atheists). And then the children would suffer!

After the Internet commenters did their important work, the elected Republican officials joined the fight. Governor Bob McDonnell and conservative superstar Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli adopted the talking points of the right-wing groups wholesale, with Cuccinelli declaring that the Board of Social Services was forbidden from forbidding discrimination, and with McDonnell having everyone in his administration work together to make the board vote on new regulations without the discrimination language. The new regulations were voted on before members of the board had time to fully review them, due to pressure from the governor’s office.

From a Virginian-Pilot editorial:

Vice chairwoman Trudy Brisendine also pleaded for a one-month extension, noting that staff with the attorney general’s office and social services had refused to answer questions about the regulations until the day of the meeting.

“Unfortunately, I’m in a position of being forced to vote on this before I’m ready,” she said.

The Virginian-Pilot also says that Republicans were incorrect when they said the regulations as drafted would’ve allowed gay couples to adopt children, as that is already prohibited by Virginia law (because they are so, so pro-family there).

So misinformation and bigotry won the day in Virginia. And the children, I’m sure, will be so grateful:

“There are many people in the system who cannot find people who will adopt them,” said Guy Kinman, a 93-year-old former Presbyterian minister.

“We have a problem when it comes to wonderful faith-based groups that have to do with adoption. But we also have a problem if, in recognizing their rights as churches, we do not find other families that would adopt the children we’re concerned with.”

As the Washington Post reports, there are 1,300 children in Virginia ready to be adopted, out of 5,700 children in the foster-care system. And Virginia currently forbids unmarried couples — heterosexual or otherwise — from adopting.

The Human Rights Campaign and other LGBT civil rights groups got involved in the fight eventually, but the anti-gay groups got there first and were much louder about it. And they won.

You know those lists of “wacky” old laws from across America that are still on the books? (A widowed man cannot wear a striped hat on Sundays in Missouri!) Well the rules banning gay couples in Virginia from adopting are like those, except they’re blatantly anti-children and still being enforced, in 2011. So not that funny.