This has made me depressed all day. Horrible, horrible situation. I pray for all those affected by this tragedy, and I pray for all those mentally ill in the world that they will find outlets to resolve their internal issues....

I am a proud alumna of Va Tech and words cannot express my sadness with these events. I think it all hit home when I saw the pic of the young man in his band uniform (I was in that band and could have known him in my time at Va Tech)
A very sad time for all. I hate that this group of students will live with this horrible memory as part of their time at a wonderful place like Va Tech.
Stay strong Hokies!

Nikkiluv said:

Also read this morning that in Lousiana some left a note "If you think that was bad, you haven't seen anything yet." I hope and pray nothing happens after this. The mind can only handle but so much.

i am going to guess that the "girlfriend"
was more like the object of his affections
perhaps she didn't even know him very well
but she might have symbolized everything he hated.

i have no clue though... just theorizing.

Did you guys watch the video that he sent to a major network. I caught a preview and wow. I think they probably shouldn't show it. I would be even more outraged to see this if I knew somebody involved.


M

evenstar3 said:

Not now. Unfortunately the bed's been made and America's gonna have to lie in it. It's sad, but inevitable. It won't be the last time this kind of thing happens.

Fauxie said:

yup. there's nothing we can do, even with tighter gun control people will still be able to get them if they try hard enough. we're really screwed.

MIGUELGOMEZ said:

i can't BELIEVE they're showing any of the stuff he sent them. mention it, maybe, but to actually broadcast & distribute that exactly as he wanted? really insensitive.

evenstar3 said:

Right. So what if it may actually encourage similar campus killings in the future? They're in the news business, after all.

Ocean said:

july said:

Gun control. If it's even possible. Guns are easy to come by in the United States.

I've seen shooting ranges along some rural highways in the western USA.
Were they let anyone in. It's $5 for a pistol and $10 for a rifle.

Fauxie said:

there's already been many copycat threats at high schools & other college campuses.

july said:

Yeah. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that that's the problem here. Make it hard for people to obtain guns... The guy was even put in a facility for mental illness... The professors, administrators and doctors did what they could. The fault is with the gun laws.
[Edited 4/18/07 22:30pm]

evenstar3 said:

What to do, now?

'makes me wanna holla, throw up both my hands'

Fauxie said:

reaching out to people is the only thing i can think of, but it's not like everyone's going to do that.

coolcat said:

True.

july said:

"Cho Seung-Hui returned in video form to terrorize members of the Virginia Tech community still reeling from his deadly shooting rampage, painting himself as a persecuted martyr in a rambling and paranoid multimedia message."

This is a text on cnn.com below a picture from that video, you can also watch the video there. Why are they giving him a forum for his BS? Why?

Imago said:

Agreed.

Shawnt24 said:

Yes, the weak and isolated tend to stay that way in this society -- weak and isolated. Especially the mentally ill.

coolcat said:

Very true Coolcat, But I don't think that tougher gun laws would've stopped this fool. He was insane, And determined to do what he did. He would've found another way to get those weapons.

ThePunisher said:

I have to say, I doubt that. Or at least it would have made it sooooo much harder that it was near impossible. Look at the countries that don't allow guns - this sort of thing doesnt happen there.

luv4u said:

CO-SIGN

Fla. Gun Law to Expand Leeway for Self-Defense
NRA to Promote Idea in Other States

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 26, 2005; Page A01

MIAMI -- It is either a Wild West revival, a return to the days of "shoot first and ask questions later," or a triumph for the "Castle Doctrine" -- the notion that enemies invade personal space at their peril.

Such dueling rhetoric marked the debate over a measure that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) could sign as early as Tuesday. The legislation passed so emphatically that National Rifle Association backers plan to take it to statehouses across the nation, including Virginia's, over the next year. The law will let Floridians "meet force with force," erasing the "duty to retreat" when they fear for their lives outside of their homes, in their cars or businesses, or on the street.

NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said in an interview that the Florida measure is the "first step of a multi-state strategy" that he hopes can capitalize on a political climate dominated by conservative opponents of gun control at the state and national levels.

"There's a big tailwind we have, moving from state legislature to state legislature," LaPierre said. "The South, the Midwest, everything they call 'flyover land' -- if John Kerry held a shotgun in that state, we can pass this law in that state."

The Florida measure says any person "has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm."

Florida law already lets residents defend themselves against attackers if they can prove they could not have escaped. The new law would allow them to use deadly force even if they could have fled and says that prosecutors must automatically presume that would-be victims feared for their lives if attacked.

The overwhelming vote margins and bipartisan support for the Florida gun bill -- it passed unanimously in the state Senate and was approved 94 to 20 in the state House, with nearly a dozen Democratic co-sponsors -- have alarmed some national gun-control advocates, who say a measure that made headlines in Florida slipped beneath their radar.

"I am in absolute shock," Sarah Brady, chair of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said in an interview. "If I had known about it, I would have been down there."

The lessons of history do not bode well for gun-control groups and their leaders, such as Brady, who became a crusader after President Ronald Reagan and her husband, then-White House press secretary James S. Brady, were seriously wounded in a 1981 assassination attempt.

Florida has a track record as a gun-law trendsetter. In the mid-1980s, the NRA chose Florida to launch a push for "conceal carry" or "right-to-carry" laws, which allow states to issue permits for residents to carry firearms. Democrat Bob Graham, who was then governor, vetoed the measure, but it was resurrected after he left office and was signed in 1987 by Gov. Bob Martinez, a Republican.

At the time, fewer than a dozen states had right-to-carry laws. Now there are 38.

LaPierre thinks the new Florida measure -- nicknamed the "Castle Doctrine" by its conceiver, Florida lobbyist Marion P. Hammer, a former NRA president -- can create the same momentum.

Critics argue that the measure is so broad it will encourage fights between neighbors, parents at soccer games or drinking buddies to escalate into gunfights.

"It's almost like a duel clause," said state Rep. Dan Gelber, a Miami Beach Democrat and former federal prosecutor whose wife is a state prosecutor. "People ought to have to walk away if they can."


Gelber believes that Florida's major prosecutor groups, populated by state attorneys who must run for reelection, stayed out of the fight and many lawmakers supported the bill because they fear the NRA.

Law enforcement did not try to block the measure, siding with the NRA rather than opposing the group, as many sheriffs and police officials had done during the debate two decades earlier over right-to-carry.

Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, a leading candidate for the Republican governor's nomination in 2006, was among those who wrote letters of support. With that kind of high-level backing, Rep. Dennis Baxley, a Republican from Ocala who sponsored the House measure, could ridicule critics as "hysterical."

"Disorder and chaos are always held in check by the law-abiding citizen," Baxley said.

As in the mid-1980s fights over the right-to-carry law, the state's big newspapers have almost unanimously lined up against Baxley's measure, although their outrage did little to stop its easy glide. South Florida Sun-Sentinel columnist Howard Goodman said the state was "getting in touch with its inner Dirty Harry." Martin Dyckman of the St. Petersburg Times told tourists, indisputably a bedrock of the state's economy, to stay away: "Lebanon might be safer."

Hammer, a 4-foot-11 dynamo with a national reputation for her persuasive powers, dismissed the papers as "liberal, anti-gunners" and "Chicken Littles." The current law unfairly forces Floridians to make split-second decisions about a criminal's intent, she said, and NRA lobbyists like to note that was deemed impossible generations ago by legendary Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. "Detached reflection," Holmes said in one of his most oft-quoted pronouncements, "cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife."

Hammer stresses that violent-crime rates in Florida have dropped since the right-to-carry law was signed. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement reports that violent crimes dropped from 1,136 per 100,00 residents in 1989 -- two years after the law went into effect -- to 727.7 per 100,000 in 2003.

Her opponents counter that Florida's drop is not tied to the gun law and note that national violent-crime rates have been trending down. More important, Gelber and others say, is that Florida still ranked second in the nation, behind only South Carolina, in violent crime in 2003, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics.

Brady's best hope, as a national fight appears inevitable, is that there will be a backlash -- much like the bounce that gun control got in Florida in the 1980s when the loss on the right-to-carry law was followed by victories on waiting periods and background checks.

"This," Brady says of the new Florida measure, "will be the thing that will awaken the sleeping great number of Middle Americans who will think this is so absurd."

But, for now, it is the thoughts of another group that really matter, the ones with guns. In this state of 17 million people, permits to carry guns have been issued more than 1 million times in the past 18 years.

my heart goes out to all the victims. its so hard to come back from those things. i know a classmate who has a friend who went through Columbine and was @ VTech the day of the shooting. she's so troubled.

I really feel bad for the shooter's parents. For the rest of their lives, they are gonna be wondering what they did wrong, or if they could have prevented him from doing what he did. No parent deserves that kind of torture. They will never get answers to those questions... and many ppl are gonna look down on them b/c of what their son did.

Imago said:

A typical ploy by the media to distance themselves from the reality. You know, he wasn't home grown, just same crazy Asian guy.