Student Newspaper
Hmm.... Several more gun rights type posts I need to respond to a little later.
Well, in the interests of those who want this board for information about the incident itself, NPR this morning said that the website of Virginia Tech's student newspaper has become a good early source of breaking news.
I'll go hunt up the link to their website and either edit it into this post or post it in a reply.
Re: Student Newspaper
oralloy wrote:Hmm.... Several more gun rights type posts I need to respond to a little later.
Well, in the interests of those who want this board for information about the incident itself, NPR this morning said that the website of Virginia Tech's student newspaper has become a good early source of breaking news.
I'll go hunt up the link to their website and either edit it into this post or post it in a reply.
Oralloy, thanks for ceasing to subvert this thread about dead and wounded students.
BBB
Re: Student Newspaper
oralloy wrote:Hmm.... Several more gun rights type posts I need to respond to a little later.
Well, in the interests of those who want this board for information about the incident itself, NPR this morning said that the website of Virginia Tech's student newspaper has become a good early source of breaking news.
I'll go hunt up the link to their website and either edit it into this post or post it in a reply.
Student Newspaper regular site:
http://www.collegiatetimes.com
Due to heavy traffic they are temporarily redirecting to this site:
http://collegemedia.com
Doesn't look like they have anything new at the moment I am posting this, but there is a list of reports that were timely when they were released.
South Korean undergraduate identified as VA Tech shooter
South Korean undergraduate identified as VA Tech shooter
By Kytja Weir, Dave Montgomery, Jane Stancill, Lisa Zagaroli and Greg Lacour
McClatchy Newspapers
4/17/07
BLACKSBURG, Va. - Authorities on Tuesday identified the shooting suspect in the rampage that left 33 people dead at Virginia Tech a day earlier as a 23-year-old South Korean undergraduate student who lived on campus.
Cho Seung-Hui was a senior and English major who came to the United States as a resident alien, school and police officials said. Korean last names are listed first.
Cho listed a Centreville, Va., address as his U.S. residence and lived in Harper Hall, an on-campus dormitory near the site of Monday's first shooting. Police would not confirm whether Cho was also the shooter in the first incident that killed two people, but they said ballistics testing showed one of the guns was used in both shootings.
They said Cho carried a 9mm handgun and a 22-caliber handgun at the time. They did not specify which gun was used in both shootings, now the deadliest civilian massacre in American history.
Police, who briefly detained a boyfriend of a female student, appeared to focusing as a potential love triangle as a motive for the killings.
The initial shooting spree in a coed dorm, at 7:15 a.m., was initially described as a domestic incident. The second set of shootings, more than two hours later across campus, led to sharp questions about why authorities had not closed the school sooner or done more to protect other students.
"Our security people thought it looked like, perhaps, a murder-suicide or a sort of lover's quarrel that went on there," Virginia Tech University President Charles Steger said Tuesday on ABC's "Good Morning America."
Authorities "consequently concluded that the event was confined to those two people and to that particular place," Steger continued. "And we then closed down that dormitory immediately, surrounded it with security, cordoned off the road, notified the students in the building and began to question witnesses to see what we could learn about what had gone on."
By then, Cho had moved across campus.
University spokesman Larry Hinker called Cho a "loner" and said university officials were having a hard time finding information about him. Police officials have been in touch with his family, Hinker said.
In the well-kept, peaceful neighborhood of townhomes where Cho's parents live in Centreville, their next-door neighbor, Abdul Shash, said he normally only saw the young man during summers, when he was home from school.
"He was very quiet. ... He was playing basketball mostly."
Shash knows Cho's parents well, he said.
"They're very, quiet, very nice people. ... They worked very hard for him. It's very sad."
Another neighbor who lives two doors down, Gary Higgins, knows the parents but not their son. "They're very nice, always friendly. They spoke to us," he said.
Police were in the neighborhood very early Tuesday, Higgins said, and his first thought was that police were there to protect the family of one of the victims.
When found out Cho had been identified as the shooter, he was shocked.
"It's almost inconceivable," he said.
Chief Medical Examiner Marcella Fierro said it may take days to positively identify all 32 of those killed - other than Cho -- and notify their families.
Classes were cancelled for the rest of the week, while students grappled with the immensity of the tragedy.
Zach Petkewicz, a student in the science and engineering building where the second set of shootings occurred, recounted how he barricaded a classroom door to keep the gunman out. The gunman shot through the door:
"Me and two others got up, threw a couple of tables in front of it and had to physically hold it there while there were gunshots going on," he told CNN. "He came to our door and tried the handle. He couldn't get in because we were pushing up against it. He tried to force his way in and got the door to open up about six inches and then we just lunged at it and closed it back up. That's when he backed up and shot twice into the middle of the door, thinking we were up against it trying to get him out."
Tom Duscheid of Pittsburgh, who lived on the fourth floor of the dorm Cho lived in, said, "I feel very lucky he didn't come in our building and do what he wanted to do to people. It's very scary, but I'm thinking about being lucky."
The co-ed dorm houses mainly upperclassmen. It has suite-style rooms that typically house six students. "It's possible to stay isolated, but people are very mature and kind," Duscheid said.
The shootings stunned the sprawling campus in southwest Virginia and shocked the country.
None of the students milling around Tuesday at Harper Hall, the dorm where Cho lived, knew the gunman.
Mike Yates, of New Kent, Va., said he's heading home to be with his family. "I got lucky," he said. "I'm shocked. ...I want to stay with my parents for a while."
Rachel Gaydos, of Stephens City, Va., said she didn't recognize the name of the shooter. She had assumed he lived in the dorm where the first shootings occurred, and she was relieved he didn't open fire in the dorm where he lived.
"He could have very easily done it here," she said.
Stephen Scott of Marlton, N.J., was hanging out of his window Tuesday with friends watching media outside the dorm. Police came to his room Monday night and showed him a photo of what he now believes is the shooter and asked if he recognized him. Neither he nor his friends did.
"It's remarkable. We didn't feel connected to (the tragedy) before, but now that it's our own dorm it hits close to home," he said.
The dorm is usually completely silent, Scott said.
"You don't ever hear a noise at night, during the day, nothing," he said. "We're confused, outraged. Disbelief. It's a beautiful campus."
The shooter started at West Ambler Johnston Hall, a coed dormitory, opening fire around 7:15 a.m. and killing a man and woman in a room there. Two and a half hours later, he appeared in Norris Hall, a classroom building across campus, where he apparently had chained the front doors shut, then went from room to room killing 30 more people, then himself, police said.
"Everybody's in complete shock," said freshman Rachel Wirth, 18, of Charlotte, N.C. "Everybody's wondering if they know anybody who was killed or wounded."
"It was about four or five shots pretty close together," said Justice Goracke, 21, a junior who was near the classroom building at the time.
"When I heard it, it kind of sounded like bullets, but there was construction going on nearby," Goracke said. "Then about 20 seconds later I heard another six shots. Then I knew: This wasn't right."
Students and onlookers across the campus were dazed, asking which of their friends had been shot, and why they were left uninformed and exposed to danger for hours.
Casey Burke, an 18-year-old freshman biology major who lives in Ambler Johnston Hall, where the initial shootings happened, said she wasn't aware that anything was amiss until she left her seventh-floor dorm room for class at about 8:50 a.m.
She saw a note from her residential adviser written on the dry-erase board mounted on her door: The police want everyone to stay in their rooms until further notice. Burke saw the RA talking to some other girls down the hall. She asked the RA what was happening. She didn't know, either.
"It was just confusion," she said. But the RA let her go to her 9:05 chemistry class.
Kyle Blasser, a 19-year-old freshman from Annandale, Va., stood on the drill field in the evening, wearing a VT hoodie sweatshirt and a VT baseball cap, staring at the classroom building where the shootings occurred. He said he still hasn't heard from a female high school friend who had a French class on the building's second floor when and where the shootings occurred. He was waiting for word of her fate.
He said nothing like this ever happens at Virginia Tech. "The worst thing that happens here is petty larceny," Blasser said.
Graduate student Darryl Price, 23, described seeing 20 ambulances lined up as he tried to leave the area. "At that point, you fully realize the scale of what just happened."
Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine cut short a trip to Japan and rushed home for a service Tuesday on the shaken campus. The U.S. House of Representatives marked the shootings with a moment of silence.
University officials and police faced persistent questioning from the news media about how they handled the first reports of gunfire and their delay in alerting students and locking down the campus.
Campus police received the first 911 emergency call from the West Ambler Johnston Hall - reporting multiple gunshot victims - at about 7:15 a.m., according to Steger. They sent the first e-mail alerting the campus of a homicide investigation at 9:26 a.m., but it didn't reach many of them until after the second eruption of gunfire.
Police were still at the first shooting site investigating when at around 9:45 a.m. they received reports of the shootings across campus at the Norris Hall classroom building, which houses the engineering school.
Police didn't secure the campus immediately after the first incident because they thought the first shootings were domestic in nature and that the gunman had left the building and fled the campus.
"We acted on the best information we had at the time," Flinchum said. He added that students had been just arriving on campus and that made it difficult to lock them in place.
But some students felt they should have been notified sooner.
"I just feel like there was a lack of communication, the fact that they didn't shut down campus right away, which is what they should have done. I think it's absurd," said senior John Huddle, 22.
"I don't blame the university for how they acted," said junior Todd Atkins, 22. "But I feel as though it could have been a little more timely, in terms of the info being given the student body via e-mail."
The killings reignited the debate over access to guns.
"Mass shootings have come to define our nation," said Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, a Washington-based group that advocates gun control.
"These tragedies are the inevitable result of the ease with which the firepower necessary to slaughter dozens of innocents can be obtained. We allow virtually anyone the means to turn almost any venue into a battlefield."
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino suggested that enforcing existing laws was adequate. "The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed," she said.
Best known for its engineering school and its football program, Virginia Tech has more than 26,000 full-time students on a 2,600-acre campus in the Blue Ridge Mountains about 160 miles west of Richmond.
-----------------------------------------------
,i. Montgomery and Zagaroli of the McClatchy Washington Bureau, Stancill of the Raleigh News & Observer and Weir, Lacour and Tommy Tomlinson of The Charlotte Observer reported from Blacksburg. Bruce Henderson, April Bethea and Jenny Song of the Observer reported from Charlotte. Douglas of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported from Centreville. Kevin Diaz of the Washington Bureau contributed to this article from Washington.
BBB, I know the song to Moonlight on VPI. I can only imagine how the survivors of the horror must be feeling right now. The alleged killer.
To have made that many victims with only two pistols, Cho must have been a pretty good shot, which leads one to assume he was not a novice to guns, and if the descriptions of him are correct he was a quiet law-abiding resident until he went on he rampage. Makes one think...
Killer's Note: 'You Caused Me to Do This'
Many Media still have not corrected Cho's name. In Asia, his name order would be Seung-Hui Cho. CNN is still calling him Seung-Hui as his last name. ---BBB
Killer's Note: 'You Caused Me to Do This'
Cho Seung-Hui, 23-Year-Old Student, Identified as Gunman
By DAVID SCHOETZ, NED POTTER and RICHARD ESPOSITO
ABC News
April 17, 2007
Cho Seung-Hui, the student who killed 32 people and then himself yesterday, left a long and "disturbing" note in his dorm room at Virginia Tech, say law enforcement sources.
Sources have now described the note, which runs several pages, as beginning in the present tense and then shifting to the past tense. It contains rhetoric explaining Cho's actions and says, "You caused me to do this," the sources told ABC News.
Sources say Cho, 23, killed two people in a dorm room, returned to his own dorm room where he re-armed and left the note, then went to a classroom building on the other side of campus. There, he killed 30 more people in four classrooms before shooting himself in the head.
Cho, born in South Korea, was a legal resident alien of the United States. He was a senior at Virginia Tech, majoring in English.
Sources tell ABC News Cho bought his first gun, a Glock 9 millimeter handgun, on March 13; they say he bought his second weapon, a .22 caliber pistol, within the last week. The serial numbers on both guns had been filed off, they said.
Authorities found the receipt for the 9 millimeter handgun in Cho's backpack. They say the bag also contained two knives and additional ammunition for the two guns.
Legal permanent resident aliens may purchase firearms in the state of Virginia. A resident alien must, however, provide additional identification to prove he or she is a resident of the state.
Sections of chain similar to those used to lock the main doors at Norris Hall, the site of the second shooting that left 31 dead, were also found inside a Virginia Tech dormitory, sources confirmed to ABC News.
Positive Fingerprint Match
Cho's identity has been confirmed by matching fingerprints on the guns used in the rampage with his immigration records.
"Lab results confirm that one of the two weapons seized in Norris Hall was used in both shootings," Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said at a press conference Tuesday morning.
At this time, police are not looking for a second shooter, though they did not rule out the possibility that Cho could have had an accomplice.
Full coverage continues on "World News With Charles Gibson," and an ABC network special Tuesday at 10 p.m. EDT
Cho, according to law enforcement officials, had entered the country through Detroit with his family in 1992, at the age of eight. He last renewed his green card in 2003. As of yesterday, his home address was listed as Centreville, Va., and the university reported he was living in a campus dormitory, Harper Hall.
Cho's parents live in a townhouse development in Centreville, a suburb of Washington. On Tuesday, no one was answering their door.
One neighbor, Marshall Main, describes Cho's parents as quiet and polite -- a couple that kept to themselves. Neither Main nor another neighbor recalled seeing the son in recent years.
Cho graduated from Westfield High School, a Fairfax County public school, in 2003.
"He was a loner, and we're having difficulty finding information about him," said Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker.
Two-Hour Gap Between Shootings
Police say they believe Cho killed two people in West Ambler Johnston Hall, a dormitory near his own, shortly after 7:00 a.m. Monday. Then, two hours later, he opened fire in Norris Hall, a classroom building across campus.
Reporters continued to ask today why administrators did not cancel classes after the first shooting, and why it took more than two hours to inform the university community via e-mail about the first incident. The first e-mail notifying students of the dorm shooting was not sent by the school until 9:24 a.m -- by which time the second shooting was already over.
According to President Charles Steger, the administration locked down West Ambler Johnston Hall dormitory after the first shooting. But he said classes weren't canceled because the shooting was believed to be tied to a domestic dispute and campus police believed the shooter had left the campus.
Steger defended the school's response in an interview Tuesday with "Good Morning America's" Diane Sawyer, saying that they believed the first shooting was confined to the dormitory.
"The second shooting, no one predicted that was also going to happen that morning," Steger said. "So if you're talking about locking it down, what is it you're going to lock down? It's like closing a city. It doesn't happen simultaneously."
Steger also said he would not step down, and at Tuesday's press conference, John Marshall, secretary of public safety in Virginia, came to Steger's side.
"It's important we get this done, but more importantly, we must get this done right," Marshall said.
Police Monday stopped a car driven by a male "person of interest," an acquaintance of the female victim who had been in the dorm where the first shootings had occurred. They interviewed and released the driver, and police said that they will continue to look for him for information.
By Monday night, investigators also had ruled out the possibility of a murder-suicide in the first dormitory shooting. Ryan "Stack" Clark, a member of the school's marching band, the Marching Virginians, and a student resident assistant, was killed there by a shot in the neck. The second victim in the dorm shooting was a female.
At Norris Hall, the gunman left a trail of bloodshed, which Flinchum, the Virginia Tech police chief, called "one of the worst things I've seen in my life."
Flinchum would not name any of the victims, but said that university staff members were among the dead.
There have been at least 15 shooting victims identified in press accounts, including four professors and 11 students. A state medical examiner Tuesday said the identification process could take several days to complete.
President Bush and the first lady will attend a convocation on the Virginia Tech campus at 2 p.m.
"Schools should be places of safety and sanctuary in learning," the President said Monday. "When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American classroom and every American community."
No identification was found on Cho's body, police said. He apparently shot himself in the head after the killings; part of his face was missing when his body was found.
It is unknown at this time if his guns had standard or extended clips, which, depending on the weapon, can fire as many as 30 shots before the gun has to be reloaded.
No Confirmed Connection to Earlier Bomb Threats
Police today said they could not confirm that two separate bomb threats last week targeting Virginia Tech engineering buildings are connected to Monday's rampage.
The first of the two threats was directed at Torgersen Hall, a classroom and laboratory building, while the second was directed at multiple engineering buildings. Students and staff were evacuated, and the university sent out e-mails across campus, offering a $5,000 reward for information about the threats.
Virginia Tech -- formally known as Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University -- is located in the western end of the state near the borders of West Virginia and Tennessee. It has more than 25,000 full-time students. Its campus, which spreads over 2,600 acres, has more than 100 buildings.
The number of dead is almost twice as high as the previous record for a mass shooting on an American college campus. That took place at the University of Texas at Austin on Aug. 1, 1966, when a gunman named Charles Whitman opened fire from the 28th floor of a campus tower. Whitman killed 16 and injured 31.
Paaskynen wrote:To have made that many victims with only two pistols, Cho must have been a pretty good shot, which leads one to assume he was not a novice to guns, and if the descriptions of him are correct he was a quiet law-abiding resident until he went on he rampage. Makes one think...
Makes one think...that this is an isolated incident, by a deranged person, that has nothing to do with gun control.
Bush pissed me off
I could not believe what I saw as George Bush spoke at the memorial service at Virginia Tech today. He actually was reading a speech someone wrote for him.
Can't the man at least speak from his heart at a time like this instead of from a script.
What a jerk!
BBB
Re: Bush pissed me off
BumbleBeeBoogie wrote:I could not believe what I saw as George Bush spoke at the memorial service at Virginia Tech today. He actually was reading a speech someone wrote for him.
Can't the man at least speak from his heart at a time like this instead of from a script.
What a jerk!
BBB
I saw him saying his little thing. I hate it when presidents do tributes to the grieving victims at times like this. It always sounds so hollow, phony and manipulative, no matter who does it. Bush saying it gives it an added air of smarmy fallaciousness though, in my opinion, since he is a completely worthless prick.
Funny how he was quick to the school shooting offering comfort but not to Louisiana..
You might say that that was a horse of a different color . . .
Setanta wrote:CerealKiller wrote:hamburger wrote:if cerealkiller is right , he must be living in the safest country in the developed world . since most countries in the developed world have much lower crime rates than the united states , i wonder if cerealkiller would enlighten us why that is so .
perhaps cerealkiller has never experienced what it feels like to live in a "safe" country .
to get an idea what that is like he might want to read aidan's entry ... but i'm not going to hold my breath .
hbg
Today's events prove that violent, deadly crime can happen anywhere, at any time - especially where people feel the most secure, are least able to defend themselves. Why would anyone insist that such a basic right of self protection should be denied to law abiding citizens?
I'm not going to wade through pages and pages of self-serving tripe by people who oppose gun control, so i'll just take this as an example.
In the first place, such appeals to the alleged right for everyone walking around packing heat almost always include the emotive expression "law-abiding citizens." Well, how the hell do you know any particular citizen is law-abiding? All a background check tells you is that the person in question has not been convicted of a felony in the last 20 years, and in many jurisdictions, the records are only kept for 10 years. You don't know if they have been accused of a felony, and you don't know if they've committed a misdemeanor or a felony, and gotten away with it.
Even if the citizen in question neither had been convicted of a felony, nor ever committed one, it would be small consolation if the first criminal act by a citizen were to shoot down one or more people, but had legally acquired a firearm and carried it concealed, because they had no previous record of criminal behavior. Appeals to the rights of "law-abiding citizens" are red herrings.
This nation is awash in firearms, and i can think of few arguments more stupid than that the dead were doomed because of gun control laws. I've seen firearms pulled from under the seat of a pick-up truck and sold in a back corner of a parking lot, with no paperwork, no background check--and that was not an isolated incident. People at gun shows sell firearms without paperwork and without background checks on a regular basis. Finding and buying guns on the street is a relatively simple affair. The gun that shot Robert Kennedy was stolen during the Watts riots (from a presumably "law-abiding citizen"), passed through several hands on the street, and ended up in the possession of Sirhan-Sirhan. When Canada passed new gun laws a few years ago, i was crossing the border at night, and asked the border guard (whom i had seen a few times before, enough to be conversational) why he was wearing a flak jacket and carrying a machine pistol, because i'd never seen him decked out like that before. He replied that since the new law came into effect, they had repeatedly stopped American yahoos who had loaded the trunk with shotguns, rifles or handguns, and attempted to cross the border to make a quick buck.
Gun control didn't put a gun in the hands of this shooter, and the lack of it would not have saved anyone. Someone fleeing the shooter could as easily been mistaken for the shooter, and killed by a hand-gun toting vigilante. Training doesn't change that either. When i was in the army, i was spotting for a guy at the rifle range. He pulled the bolt on his M16, and it jammed. When i looked over, the door to the chamber was open, and i could see the round jammed against the cleaning rod which he had failed to remove the night before when he cleaned his weapon. That also means that the ordnance NCO failed to notice that the cleaning rod had been left in the weapon when the trainee turned it in, and had re-issued the weapon to him in this dangerous state. In the first example, weeks of training had not prevented the trainee from making a stupid mistake, and in the latter case, years of experience did not prevent the NCO from failing to correct the stupid mistake.
The problem we have is not that there is gun control, but that there is no effective gun control. A hundred years of effective gun control would be needed to begin to clean up the mess that two hundred years of selfish and self-serving stupidity has created.
what a pleasure to read such decent common sense.
Re: Bush pissed me off
BumbleBeeBoogie wrote:I could not believe what I saw as George Bush spoke at the memorial service at Virginia Tech today. He actually was reading a speech someone wrote for him.
Can't the man at least speak from his heart at a time like this instead of from a script.
What a jerk!
BBB
Yeah, I don't know what is more pathetic. The fact that he had what he was going to say written down or you trying to turn all of this into one more reason to bash Bush.
Re: Bush pissed me off
fishin wrote:BumbleBeeBoogie wrote:I could not believe what I saw as George Bush spoke at the memorial service at Virginia Tech today. He actually was reading a speech someone wrote for him.
Can't the man at least speak from his heart at a time like this instead of from a script.
What a jerk!
BBB
Yeah, I don't know what is more pathetic. The fact that he had what he was going to say written down or you trying to turn all of this into one more reason to bash Bush.
well clearly Bush is not to be trusted to engage brain before opening mouth.
Steve, I thought that was a classic post by Setanta, one I'm going to put in a file for future reference. It explains what I think better than I could've word it.
Fishin
Fishin, You have a right to be annoyed. But I was appalled by the sight of this suposedly religious man unable to speak from his heart at such an occasion. I've gotten my disgust off my chest, so we can move on.
BBB
ossobuco wrote:Steve, I thought that was a classic post by Setanta, one I'm going to put in a file for future reference. It explains what I think better than I could've word it.
Yeah wording is difficult but Dr Set is a master. (But as famous Brit comedian said..."Not necessarily in the right order"...when challenged over his piano playing...sorry Set you can expect a complement without barb).
Setanta wrote:woiyo wrote:"The problem we have is not that there is gun control, but that there is no effective gun control. A hundred years of effective gun control would be needed to begin to clean up the mess that two hundred years of selfish and self-serving stupidity has created. "
Enforcement of existing laws, reviewing and increaseing penalties for violations would be a good start. Not sure if it woud have stopped this particuliar incident, but it sure would stop others.
I agree with that, although i'd point out that the laws come on a state by state basis, and there are lots of holes. That suggests federal intervention, something with which i am never comfortable--but this is an extraordinary situation, and one which is out of control.
Federal gun control laws already exist, Set. State gun control laws apply while one is a resident of (or a visitor to) a particular state. The moment you bring a firearm across a state line -- legaly or illegally -- you become subject to Federal jurisdiction in case you misuse that weapon. The ATF is in charge of prosecuting you if you buy a gun in a state which has lax laws (or, like some SW states, NO laws) regaarding fiearms and bring same to a state like Massachusetts, which has quite stringent laws. You can't do it with impunity. There is also a Federal law against private ownership of fully automatic weapons of any kind, except for gun collectors who need to get a special Federal license in addition to whatever Federal permits are needed.
The whole problem with gun control laws, as they exist today, is that they are generally not enforced, not that they don't exist.
