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I wonder what Alex Jones has to say about this..
You completely contradicted yourself trying to make a statement that has no relevance to the tragedy that happened today. I'm aware that there are a bunch of undeserving idiots that get degrees, and I'm sorry you're so bitter as to use something like this as an excuse to about it.
I wonder what Alex Jones has to say about this..
The thing that gets me, and obviously the press so far, is the delay in reaction. President Steger has said over and over again that they didn't lock down the campus because it's like a "mini city.' Most colleges are. I wouldn't care if I were a commuter on my way to class and got turned around by police at 8:45 for my 9 am class, at least I would have been safe. The fact that they had already had two bomb threats should have put them on a heightened state of alert.
And the fact that the fact that they're calling these two "incidents" independent is load of . Several experts, forensic pschyitrists, FBI investigatots, and police on msnbc and cnn that I've seen today have even said so. If that has changed, I apologize for my rant, that's the last I heard from the redneck cop at like 6:30 tonight. Domestic issue my ass.
Point taken. Sorry. Apparently it was a lover's quarrel anyway, though I haven't had that confirmed.
I guess my point was that a large population of students feel disenfranchised by the system. They work themselves long nights and days for nothing. The stress around finals is palpable, and far worse than anything I've experienced outside of college. I'm just wondering where the breaking point is.
However, I'll just stop now, out of respect for the Va. Tech students. Our thoughts and prayers should be with them tonight.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/virginia_...RGdIEB1xes0NUE
Pretty good summary of events so far.
Rather comforting that someone on a visa can pick up a couple of 9s.
Trying to ban guns is always the reflexive action when something like this happens. Its foolish and ignores the true sociological reasons for these situations.
Does anyone remember the comedian that said the solution for violent crimes isn't gun control, but for everyone to have guns. People would be less likely to try to jack someone if they knew everyone was packin'. I thought that was pretty funny
Typical Manny. Even with that said it still doesn't change the fact that it would decrease the likelihood of something like this happening. Even you aren't stupid enough to disagree with that.
Although it ignores the real problem it still acts as a deterent.
Kind of like how prohbiiting drugs lowers the likelyhood of use? Kind of how prohibition on alcohol worked? Kind of like how we're able to ban things and they just go off into never never land and are never seen again?
Right.
Me for one. It may be a cliche bumpersticker, but it's the truth: They can have my guns when they pry my cold, dead fingers from around them.
I'm willing to bet alcohol use was lower during prohibition. Its clearly not the answer because there isn't one but its ignorant to think it wouldn't help.
I think having everyone never leave their house would cut down on situations like this from happening, why don't we impliment that? You see whats wrong with your logic? Whether or not something helps is far too simple a way to look at things because we don't live in a one issue vaccuum and the right to bear arms goes much further than "can we prevent maniacs from killing other people". And thats if I concede your point that it will help - which i'm not doing because there is nothing outside of extremely weak cir stancial evidence saying it would.
You don't even know the reason WHY this person did what he did yet you're already on athe "ban guns" bandwagon. Do you realize how stupid that is?
We should ban airplanes to prevent 9/11 from happening again. I say we ban fertilizer to prevent OK City from happening again. Ban Kool Aid to prevent cults from commiting suicide.
I mean hey, that all helps, right?
By law abiding citizens, sure.
Oh and you want to know what really pisses me off about this entire situation? That now all the media trucks will roll onto that campus and cover this event like a national tragedy and proclaim how its so horrific it is while watching the advertiser dollars pour in. Anyone want to lay a bet on just how much of a ratings jump the news networks saw in the past 24 hours?
There will be plenty of people waiting in line to offer interviews in order to get their 15 minutes (or seconds - who's counting really?) of fame and time in the spotlight. It's ing disgusting. And while I realize that there is going to be huge news coverage on they can save their "geniue" farse. I promise you that accross the inner cities of this country there have been more shooting deaths than occured there yesterday. Anyone care about those?
Yeah - something tells me that law abiding citizens aren't the ones that are killing people. The people who commit murder tend to break laws not follow them so I guess I"m just missing the point as to how those people will all of a sudden listen to prohibition laws.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070417/..._tech_shooting
BLACKSBURG, Va. - A Virginia Tech senior from South Korea killed at least 30 people locked inside a classroom building in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, the university and police said Tuesday.
Ballistics tests also found that one of the guns used in that attack was also used in a shooting two hours earlier at a Virginia Tech dorm that left two people dead, Virginia State Police said.
Police identified the classroom shooter as Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a senior from South Korea who was in the English department and lived in another dorm on campus. They said Cho committed suicide after the attacks, and there was no indication Tuesday of a possible motive.
"He was a loner, and we're having difficulty finding information about him," school spokesman Larry Hincker said.
Two law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information had not been announced, said Cho's fingerprints were found on the guns used in both shootings. The serial numbers on the two weapons had been filed off, the officials said.
One law enforcement official said Cho's backpack contained a receipt for a March purchase of a Glock 9 mm pistol.
Col. Steve Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said it was reasonable to assume that Cho was the shooter in both attacks but that link was yet definitive.
"There's no evidence of any accomplice at either event, but we're exploring the possibility," he said.
Cho was a permanent legal resident of the United States, according to a Homeland Security Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information had not been announced.
A memorial service was planned for the victims Tuesday afternoon at the university, and President Bush planned to attend, the White House said. Gov. Tim Kaine was flying back to Virginia from Tokyo for the 2 p.m. convocation.
The first deadly attack, at a dormitory around 7:15 a.m., left two people dead. But some students said they didn't get their first warning about a danger on campus until two hours later, in an e-mail at 9:26 a.m. By then the second attack had begun.
Two students told NBC's "Today" show they were unaware of the dorm shooting when they walked into Norris Hall for a German class where the gunman later opened fire.
The victims in Norris Hall were found in four different classrooms and a stairwell, Flaherty said. Cho was found dead in one of those classrooms, he said.
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.
A federal law enforcement official said Tuesday he had been told by other federal law enforcement officials that the two guns recovered in the shooting had had their serial numbers scraped off. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the information had not been announced.
The slayings left people of this once-peaceful mountain town and the university at its heart praying for the victims and struggling to find order in a tragedy of such unspeakable horror it defies reason.
"For Ryan and Emily and for those whose names we do not know," one woman pleaded in a church service Monday night.
Another mourner added: "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 immediately 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 20 people were taken to hospitals after the second attack, some seriously injured. 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 near Calhoun's room, 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 sop re 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.
University President Charles 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.
Nine students remained hospitalized Tuesday at Montgomery Regional Hospital, all of them stable, CEO Scott Hill said. Two others had been transferred to other hospitals with a Level I trauma center.
Their families "are by the bedside, which is a good thing," Hill said.
Lewis-Gale Medical Center in Salem had three remaining patients, all in stable condition, with one expected to be discharged later Tuesday, Hill said.
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."
___
Associated Press Writers Justin Pope in Blacksburg and Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington contributed to this report.
I never said I was on the bandwagon you ing monkey. I never said it was an answer to the problem. I never said we should do it you ing loon. I said it would make a difference. Its just one point that is easy provable but I never said that was my stance. Can you not ing read before just blabbing like a know it all .
Just because it would help doesn't mean I said we should ing do it. Jesus Christ. I was simply pointing out that you are stupid to think it wouldn't make a difference. I WAS NOT SAYING IT SHOULD BE DONE. Plenty of countries ban most guns and yes it does cut down on the problem. I don't see how you can deny that.
Just to further pound it into your furry little head YES banning planes would cut down on hijacking. Is that the answer NO stop reading too deep and just comprehend what is actually being said.
NO ING WHERE IN MY POSTS DID I SAY WE SHOULD DO IT OR IT'S THE ANSWER.
I didn't read the rest of the thread, so I don't know if this has been covered, but those "press conferences" yesterday were ing jokes.
Half of the media idiots were repeatedly asking irrelevant questions or questions common sense should have told them they weren't going to get answers to, and the other half were asking leading, argumentative, and downright hostile questions condemning the school administration for their handling of a situation I guarantee you they weren't EVER expecting to have to handle.
I'm sick to death of the media in this country no longer doing their jobs and reporting the FACTS. Most journalists these days are activists who think their notebooks are the keys to changing the world.
And the dumb broad who actually had the audacity to ask "Were the doors chained from the inside or the outside" should be fired for asking the stupidest question in the history of journalism.
Name calling one of the most respected and well liked members of the board is not going to earn your point of view any points, bag.
Heh, cut back on the cynicism a little.
Fact of the matter is, the media WILL always blow up situations like these. Also, I think a mass murder in your own backyard IS a national tragedy.
Also, I hardly think your 15 minutes of fame, is a motivation for anyone involved with the situation. You're really inferring flawed rational bases.
Also the innercity connection and that reasoning about "ignored" tragedies is ridiculous. Tragedies are tragedies regardless, and 32 innocent students are dead not due to socio-economic cir stances but a completely senseless act. There's reason why the country flip out over losses like these because it has nothing to do with anything or causes. It's a freak occurrence with no real answers. Your outrage, or disgust is unwarranted griping about inner-city scenarios which hardly proves that no one "cares about " those. It's no different than saying those shouldn't give sympathy to someone mourning over their family member dying of cancer, because out there, someone else is dying of a more debilitating painful disease.
There's always more to the story than what happened. We need a Fall Guy, someone to look at and say, "If I was in that position I would have done a better job." It makes us feel better about ourselves while we waste our lives away with people we don't like and jobs we can't stand.
I wouldn't be so angry, though, the coverage from yesterday WAS scrambled but that could have more to do with the fact that no one had MUCH if any real conclusive evidence. So they were like chickens with their head cut off. I had to google news GUNMAN to actually get real facts off the situation, and interview accounts of the unfolding details. Other than that it was a bit fluff. But expect news channels like NBC to put sentimentality into their coverage during primetime, they started it already last night.
That said, some of you guys act like you're learning of this "media behavior" for the first time.
In no way have I said there should be a shortage of sympathy for these people and I have not said it is not a tradgedy. I have said that our sensationalist society will play it up for all its worth and make it stand out on its own. The fact that the inner city IS vastly ignored is all the proof needed. Last time I checked, Compton wasn't being overun by CNN satellite trucks.
Not to worry, by next week we'll find another baby that may belong to Anna Nicole or some other talkshow host will say something stupid and we can all go back to whats important in life feeling great that we realy took a look at whats wrong with our society with several CNN special news events.
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