NDR..But....

[MercedesMama]

I dont know how many of you may have heard about this, but there was a shooting at Virginia Tech this morning. I dont know anyone down there that I can think of, but it is close to home. Anywho, 33 students were killed and there are 20+ injured. Many in critical condition. Some were lined up and killed execution style. Others were shot through windows, etc. The man who has done this is dead, so IMO justice wasnt, and will not ever be served. So, what I am asking is for prayers for those who were lost, those who are injured, and all of the families. They need peace and healing at this time. Even the family of the suspect, they need prayer just as badly. So please, just say a little prayer tonight. This hit me hard, I guess being as it is close to home and a lot of those students were my age. In my eyes there is nothing more tragic than a life cut short...... Thank you all and God Bless.

[WWII]

This is why gun free zones are BS. They should allow CCW on campuses and for that matter, anywhere in the USA.

[Fedor23]

Dam, that sucks, a lot of people dying in April. This seems to be a bad month for every one.

[JuckingFerk]

There are no gun free zones for criminals, only for lawful gun owners.

Ferk out

[ChiaPit]

Yeah, I saw this today...its awful...they were all someones babies, sisters, brothers, friends...and to meet a senseless fate of no fault of their own...its just sad.

[Verderben]

There are no gun free zones for criminals, only for lawful gun owners.

Ferk outSo true :(

[LegendsMami]

That is so tragic.:(
Dam, that sucks, a lot of people dying in April. This seems to be a bad month for every one.It does seem like a bad month. My uncle just died and my brothers grandmom just died. And my grandpa just told the family his heart is slowly detrioriating(sp) and there's nothing the doctors can do for him at this point.:(

[Attila]

QUOTE=WWII]This is why gun free zones are BS. They should allow CCW on campuses and for that matter, anywhere in the USA.[/QUOTE]I agree. But you probably already knew that.

I feel for those families

But even though he is dead he will pay with his soul now. It will be worse than living. He should die for what he did. That is the only justus for that type of person. Too bad it wasn't from a rope around his neck. Sad thing is many murders go on and never caught, same with other terrible crimes like rape and child pedifiles. It is a sick time. I am just glad he was taken down and isn't out free killing more innocent people. I will never understand why they just don't kill themselves insted of taking it out on a buch of college kids or school children.

My prayers for you, them and the families, friends and loved ones.
.

[Attila]

That is so tragic.:(
It does seem like a bad month. My uncle just died and my brothers grandmom just died. And my grandpa just told the family his heart is slowly detrioriating(sp) and there's nothing the doctors can do for him at this point.:(
I am sorry to hear that my dear sweet friend. I will add this to my prayer list.

I vote to end this month early.

[Lethalpits]

Yes, justice will be served far worse than what we here can do.

We do indeed need to pray for those we lost and the families of those that have fallen victim to this.

[Attila]

Yes, justice will be served far worse than what we here can do.

We do indeed need to pray for those we lost and the families of those that have fallen victim to this.
you've got that right.

beings that I don't watch tv or do the news. Can any one fill me in on the why this idiot would do such a horrible thing? I know there isn't any logical reason but the stupid reason he had. How many steps of him messing up in the past were over looked or not taken seriously enough. I am betting that he is the same type of person we catch being mean to dogs.

[clutch billups]

This is why gun free zones are BS. They should allow CCW on campuses and for that matter, anywhere in the USA.

AMEN BROTHER ....

[MercedesMama]

By ADAM GELLER, AP National Writer 25 minutes ago



BLACKSBURG, Va. - Virginia Tech's president said Tuesday that a student was the gunman in at least the second of the two campus attacks that claimed 33 lives to become the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.

Though he did not explicitly say the student was also the gunman in the first shooting, he said he did not believe there was another shooter at large.

Two hours after two people were killed at a dormitory Monday, 30 more people were killed at a campus building by a gunman who finally killed himself with a shot to his head.

"We do know that he was an Asian male — this is the second incident — an Asian man who was a resident in one of our dormitories," university president Charles Steger said in an interview with CNN, confirming for the first time that the killer was a student.

Steger also defended the university's delay in warning students after the first shooting. Some students said their first notice came in an e-mail at 9:26 a.m., after the second shooting had begun.

Steger said the university was trying to notify students who were already on-campus, not those who were commuting in.

"We warned the students that we thought were immediately impacted," he told CNN. "We felt that confining them to the classroom was how to keep them safest."

He said investigators did not know there was a shooter loose on campus in the interval between the two shootings because the first could have been a murder-suicide.

Two students told NBC's "Today" show they were unaware of the dorm shooting when they reported to a German class where the gunman later opened fire.

Derek O'Dell, his arm in a cast after being shot, described a shooter who fired away in "eerily silence" with "no specific target — just taking out anybody he could."

After the gunman left the room, students could hear him shooting other people down the hall. O'Dell said he and other students barricaded the door so the shooter couldn't get back in — though he later tried.

"After he couldn't get the door open he tried shooting it open... but the gunshots were blunted by the door," O'Dell said.

The slayings left people of this once-peaceful mountain town and the university at its heart praying for the victims, struggling to find order in a tragedy of such unspeakable horror it defies reason.

Laura Bush (http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/news/?p=Laura+Bush) were planning to attend a 2 p.m. convocation Tuesday, and people sought comfort Monday night at a church servide.

One mourner pleaded "for parents near and far who wonder at a time like this, 'Is my child safe?'"

That question promises to haunt Blacksburg long after Monday's attacks. Investigators offered no motive, and the gunman's name was not released.

The shooting began about 7:15 a.m. on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston, a high-rise coed dormitory where two people died.



Police were still investigating around 9:15 a.m., when a gunman wielding two handguns and carrying multiple clips of ammunition stormed Norris Hall, a classroom building a half-mile away on the other side of the 2,600-acre campus.

At least 15 people were hurt in the second attack, some seriously. Many found themselves trapped after someone, apparently the shooter, chained and locked Norris Hall doors from the inside.

Students jumped from windows, and students and faculty carried away some of the wounded without waiting for ambulances to arrive.

SWAT team members with helmets, flak jackets and assault rifles swarmed over the campus. A student used his cell-phone camera to record the sound of bullets echoing through a stone building.

Inside Norris, the attack began with a thunderous sound from Room 206 — "what sounded like an enormous hammer," said Alec Calhoun, a 20-year-old junior who was in a solid mechanics lecture in a classroom next door.

Screams followed an instant later, and the banging continued. When students realized the sounds were gunshots, Calhoun said, he started flipping over desks to make hiding places. Others dashed to the windows of the second-floor classroom, kicking out the screens and jumping from the ledge of Room 204, he said.

"I must've been the eighth or ninth person who jumped, and I think I was the last," said Calhoun, of Waynesboro, Va. He landed in a bush and ran.

Calhoun said that the two students behind him were shot, but that he believed they survived. Just before he climbed out the window, Calhoun said, he turned to look at his professor, who had stayed behind, apparently to prevent the gunman from opening the door.

The instructor was killed, Calhoun said.

Erin Sheehan, who was in the German class next door to Calhoun's class, told the student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, that she was one of only four of about two dozen people in the class to walk out of the room. The rest were dead or wounded, she said.

She said the gunman "was just a normal-looking kid, Asian, but he had on a Boy Scout-type outfit. He wore a tan button-up vest, and this black vest, maybe it was for ammo or something."

The gunman first shot the professor in the head and then fired on the class, another student, Trey Perkins, told The Washington Post. The gunman was about 19 years old and had a "very serious but very calm look on his face," he said.

"Everyone hit the floor at that moment," said Perkins, 20, of Yorktown, Va., a sophomore studying mechanical engineering. "And the shots seemed like it lasted forever."

At an evening news conference, Police Chief Wendell Flinchum refused to dismiss the possibility that a co-conspirator or second shooter was involved. He said police had interviewed a male who was a "person of interest" in the dorm shooting and who knew one of the victims, but he declined to give details.

"I'm not saying there's a gunman on the loose," Flinchum said. Ballistics tests will help explain what happened, he said.

Some students bitterly complained that the first e-mail warning arrived more than two hours after the first shots.

"I think the university has blood on their hands because of their lack of action after the first incident," said Billy Bason, 18, who lives on the seventh floor of the dorm.

Steger emphasized that the university closed off the dorm after the first attack and decided to rely on e-mail and other electronic means to spread the word, but said that with 11,000 people driving onto campus first thing in the morning, it was difficult to get the word out.

He said that before the e-mail was sent, the university began telephoning resident advisers in the dorms and sent people to knock on doors. Students were warned to stay inside and away from the windows.

"We can only make decisions based on the information you had at the time. You don't have hours to reflect on it," Steger said.

The 9:26 e-mail had few details: "A shooting incident occurred at West Amber Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating."

Until Monday, the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history was in Killeen, Texas, in 1991, when George Hennard plowed his pickup truck into a Luby's Cafeteria and shot 23 people to death, then himself.

The massacre Monday took place almost eight years to the day after the Columbine High bloodbath near Littleton, Colo. On April 20, 1999, two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before taking their own lives.

Previously, the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history was a rampage that took place in 1966 at the University of Texas at Austin, where Charles Whitman climbed the clock tower and opened fire with a rifle from the 28th-floor observation deck. He killed 16 people before he was shot to death by police.

Founded in 1872, Virginia Tech is nestled in southwestern Virginia, about 160 miles west of Richmond. With more than 25,000 full-time students, it has the state's largest full-time student population. The school is best known for its engineering school and its powerhouse Hokies football team.

Police said there had been bomb threats on campus over the past two weeks but that they had not determined whether they were linked to the shootings.

It was second time in less than a year that the campus was closed because of gunfire.

Last August, the opening day of classes was canceled when an escaped jail inmate allegedly killed a hospital guard off campus and fled to the Tech area. A sheriff's deputy was killed just off campus. The accused gunman, William Morva, faces capital murder charges.

Among the dead were professors Liviu Librescu and Kevin Granata, said Ishwar K. Puri, the head of the engineering science and mechanics department.

Librescu, an Israeli, was born in Romania and was known internationally for his research in aeronautical engineering, Puri wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

Granata and his students researched muscle and reflex response and robotics. Puri called him one of the top five biomechanics researchers in the country working on movement dynamics in cerebral palsy.

Also killed was Ryan Clark, a student from Martinez, Ga., who had several majors and carried a 4.0 grade-point average, said Vernon Collins, coroner in Columbia County, Ga.

His friend Gregory Walton, a 25-year-old who graduated last year, said he feared the nightmare had just begun.

"I knew when the number was so large that I would know at least one person on that list," said Walton, a banquet manager. "I don't want to look at that list. I don't want to. "It's just, it's going to be horrible, and it's going to get worse before it gets better."

[Attila]

Gesh, a system that relies on emails as an allert system is lacking. Good ole fashon PA system. Make it loud. Back when I went to college half of us had rifles in our trucks, I personally carried my side arm at all times. Now there isn't any way for one to protect themselves and others from this kind of horror.
I know what he did now. I suppose we have to wait for the why. And the logistics of it all. It is a very long lag in time of two hours between the shootings. I hope that people learn a lesson about using emails as some sort of warning system. One would think they would have had champus police on high alert and more police comming in as back up from the time of the first event. America needs to wake up and smell the shit we have created in a slow system that depends upon others to handle our safty. Go back just 20-30 years ago and think of how this would have been handled then.
If I remember correctly years ago at that clock tower deal a civilian with a rifle assisted those police officers. That was a norm. Police cannot be in every location at every second. Some times it obviously takes at least two hours. Now we know that for those two hours some one could have stopped this young man if they would have had the means. They had nothing but to hid and run like sheep. It is sad very sad and sickning to think of. Those poor kids having to behaive like sheeple. I want more sheep dogs in the flocks. Not cops either. But some folks that went to a cfa class and that carry one. cost me 250 a year and I think it is well worth it. the FFL is more and I am a collector so the insurance with that is more but is still worth it. I payed for my elderly neighbors and paid for her class after her daughter was killed in a parking lot up in the city.
People get out and take these classes and stop depending on some cop to save you. As you can see it may take hours. And a gun man can keep shooting several rounds a second with mutiple guns. There is allot of seconds in two hours. It isn't hard to shoot back let me tell you it becomes natural real fast. Which would you rather be a hero or a victom? Sheep or the sheepdog. Sure don't want to be the shepherd either. Next time you hear a democrat or liberal talking about gun rights and your right to defend yourself think of this. And then think of how long it took for their idea of safty with cops took. That is a damn shame. Now for those that think or thought I am nuts about using a shot gun as my security system. Think again. I also carry a side arm at all times. Something I learned in the military. Yes I have had to use it in public. Obviously I am not in prision so I reckon I used them in a legal manor. Take the classes folks, get your lisence and be people not sheeple. Depending on others for your safty is just stupid. Take responsibility for you and your own family. It is the only way.