Update: 33 Now Dead at VA Tech

[mwfanelli]

EDIT: Now the worst school shooting in America

Worst school shooting since Columbine. Numbers right now indicate about 21-22 dead and about 25 wounded. The only bright spot is that the shooter was killed. Terrible...

[adina]

I saw that. I'm hesitating to click the link and read about it, those always make me cry. So the shooter was killed, but do they know why he/she did it?

The whys are always so hard to understand...it might be easier on those left behind if they knew...

[mwfanelli]

I saw that. I'm hesitating to click the link and read about it, those always make me cry. So the shooter was killed, but do they know why he/she did it?

The whys are always so hard to understand...it might be easier on those left behind if they knew...

I'm betting we will never know why. Some people are just pure evil.

At least the cops responded and acted quickly. During Columbine, the police were too frightened to enter the school so they stood around outside listening to children being murdered. I lived in Golden, CO at the time and was horrified by their inaction.

[walterick]

My sister lives a few hours north of Blacksburg and she's pretty upset about it. It is the deadliest shooting in America, in schools or otherwise. She works for the phone company that serves that area and says the lines have been jammed all morning.

btw Michael, it's Virginia Tech not UVA

[livin4lax09]

I'm betting we will never know why. Some people are just pure evil.

At least the cops responded and acted quickly. During Columbine, the police were too frightened to enter the school so they stood around outside listening to children being murdered. I lived in Golden, CO at the time and was horrified by their inaction.

actually i have a friend who goes to VT... he says there are a few rumors that are circulating that could be true. I'm sure in time we'll figure out what happened.

[Frog]

The news coverage sucked basically 6 hours of speculation.
Fox, Cnn, Msnbc, and even Walter are saying its the biggest massacre in American history. I guess they never heard of Wounded Knee or dozens of other massacres of Native americans and how many settlers did the Mormons kill in that massacre after saying they were there to protect them. Not denegrating how horrible the tradgedy is but for 'informed' news stations to say its the worst is just showing their ignorance.

The school is getting a lot of heat for not doing a lock down after the early morning murders which may or may not have led to the students being killed later.
Its a huge campus without walls and 23,000 students. Doing a lock down would be like saying we should lock down a whole city every time there's a murder.

[MJS]

33 dead counting the shooter. They're waiting for ballistics results to tie the two scenes together. It seems that the person of interest description from double homicide at the dorm didn't match the dead shooter at the engineering building. According to LE sources, the shooter took himself out after exterminating the 30 people at the second location. I'm glad that I train regularly with my LE friends and am licensed to carry in two states. Guys like this one scare me.

[MJS]

The shooter was a South Korean senior undergrad student studying English. He had 2 smei-automatic handguns, a 9 mm and what is reported to being a .22 target pistol. Ballistics has linked one of the guns to both the Dorm and the engineering building. Common sense dictates the same shooter, but until the rest of the evidence is in, they can't rule on a single shooter. Rumor mill among my media contacts is a Glock 9mm and Walther target pistol.

[mwfanelli]

Fox, Cnn, Msnbc, and even Walter are saying its the biggest massacre in American history. I guess they never heard of Wounded Knee or dozens of other massacres of Native americans and how many settlers did the Mormons kill in that massacre after saying they were there to protect them. Not denegrating how horrible the tradgedy is but for 'informed' news stations to say its the worst is just showing their ignorance.

I had been hearing them say "the largest school shooting in American history." Perhaps as the hours went by they became a bit sloppy.

[walterick]

Hey Michael I hope you don't mind I updated your thread title to keep the facts current.

I guess it will suffice to say it is the largest shooting in modern American history. The genocide of the Native American peoples notwithstanding. The importance of noting this I assume is in saying that these shootings appear to be happening more frequently, thus drawing more attention to the problem. So maybe we can direct some Iraq money to our own country.

[another view]

This is very difficult to read, but really puts a face (or faces) on the story.

[cyberlord]

From the rumors I've been hearing today (not from news sources) it sounds like the guy was a nut case and should have had a physc exam and removed from the school a long time ago.

Like I said though, only rumors at this point.

[mjs1973]

From www.cnn.com

Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui said his shooting rampage could have been avoided but "you forced me into a corner," in a videotape that was part of a package of writings, pictures and videos mailed to NBC News. The package included a 1,800 word statement described as a manifesto. "You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," he said in one of the videos.

You can watch the video on cnn.com

[livin4lax09]

OK, I'm just going to chime in here...

obviously there was something wrong with this kid. I did an entire research project on Columbine for social psychology, and I believe that eric and dylan were just victims of the school, kids, faculty, etc. Everyone played a huge part in that. But that was highschool. Highschool was hell. If you didn't fit in, you got picked on. This is college. If you don't want to see someone, you don't. Simple as that. You can be whoever you want to, and with 23,000 students, you will be accepted no matter who you are. If he felt excluded or people were making fun of him, he simply lacked the intelligence or sense to get away from those people. College really is NOT hard to fit in to. Speaking from personal experience, I absolutely hated high school. I wasn't a loser, in fact I was probably one of the better known kids at my school, and I still hated it. I can't even imagine what it was like to be one of the kids who got picked on all the time. But in college, people are more mature and more respectful, for the most part. If he felt "pushed over the edge" there is no one to blame except him for putting himself in that position. Seriously.


And yes the campus is 23,000 or whatever, but they specifically stated after the second shooting occured, they announced it on the emergency speaker system. If the system's in place, it's not hard to get the word out. I can't imagine VTech's campus is much bigger than the one we have here at UNH, but I am certain that within 2 hrs we could have every place on lockdown. With the amount of enforcement, faculty, and just security it could probably be done in less than an hr. There really is no reason that it couldn't be done at VTech. They didn't not do it because they couldn't, they didn't announce it because they didn't want to, because they felt the incident was isolated.

Whether they should have believed they were all safe with a shooter at large even if it was an isolated incident is a whole different story.