https://www.april16archive.org/index.php/items/show/381
description: A child attends the Virginia Tech vigil. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geeknerd99/464192730/in/photostream/ Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
creator: Daniel Lin
date: 2007-06-05
contributor: Chad Newswander
rights: Permission: Daniel Lin geeknerd99@gmail.com
language: eng

https://www.april16archive.org/index.php/items/show/382
description: A woman lights a candle near the main memorial site during the Virginia Tech vigil. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geeknerd99/464192946/in/photostream/ Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
creator: Daniel Lin
date: 2007-06-05
contributor: Chad Newswander
rights: Permission: Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin geeknerd99@gmail.com
language: eng

https://www.april16archive.org/index.php/items/show/383
description: Several cadets attend the Virginia Tech Vigil and participate in one of the various cheers that erupted from the crowd. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geeknerd99/464193182/in/photostream/ Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
creator: Daniel Lin
date: 2007-06-05
contributor: Chad Newswander
rights: Permission: Daniel Lin geeknerd99@gmail.com
language: eng

https://www.april16archive.org/index.php/items/show/384
description: Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieria of the Today Show broadcast from the drill field. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geeknerd99/464203561/in/photostream/ Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
creator: Daniel Lin
date: 2007-06-05
contributor: Chad Newswander
rights: Permission: Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
language: eng

https://www.april16archive.org/index.php/items/show/386
description: A student writes a message of support and love at message board near the main memorial site on the drill field. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geeknerd99/464205173/in/photostream/ Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
creator: Daniel Lin
date: 2007-06-05
contributor: Chad Newswander
rights: Permission: Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
language: eng

https://www.april16archive.org/index.php/items/show/387
description: This photo was captured at the Virginia Tech convocation in Lane Stadium. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geeknerd99/464201110/in/photostream/ Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
creator: Daniel Lin
date: 2007-06-05
contributor: Chad Newswander
rights: Permission: Photo Courtesy of Daniel Lin
language: eng

LETTER: Gun violence is what needs to be controlled
description: By:Daniel Ross Posted: 4/24/07 "The Changing Gun Debate," an article written by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in response to the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech, can be found in the April 30 issue of Newsweek. I applaud his insight and his efforts; Mayor Bloomberg is leading an uphill battle against gun crime. For as long I can remember, the gun debate has been about special interests -- on both sides. Our political leaders remind us that they are concerned about guns in America and either passionately advocate or decry gun regulation. Our two parties are entrenched in this opposition. Sadly, this debate is far more about ideology and not at all about restoring the peace and safety of American homes, businesses and schools. Mayor Bloomberg proposes a middle ground that sidesteps the dogma of regulation. He intends to stop gun crime, and he is making measurable progress doing so. In the past six years, murders in New York City have dropped 40 percent. Specifically, Bloomberg wants to stop crime perpetrated with illegally purchased guns. Although the Virginia Tech shooter legally purchased his weapons, most criminals do not. Most criminals who use guns purchase them illegally. "FBI statistics show that violent crime is on the rise across America," writes Bloomberg, and the weapon of choice is an illegal gun. Unfortunately, our federal government is doing little to help the fight against illegal guns. In fact, Bloomberg says federal regulations prevent his police department and cities across the nation from using the resources they need to bust illegal gun dealers. "Statistics show that 1 percent of dealers sell more than half of all illegal guns," Bloomberg said. In order to stop the sale of these weapons and keep them out of the hand of criminals, Bloomberg started a coalition called Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Now, more than 200 cities participate, sharing information about the sale of illegal guns. Our national debate on guns must change. Following Bloombe…
creator: Daniel Ross
publisher: The Daily Free Press
date: 2007-08-13
contributor: Sara Hood
rights: Matt Negrin <editor@dailyfreepress.com>
language: eng

Letters to the editor - April 17, 2007
description: VT tragedy requires look at gun control For too long this country has refused to take a realistic approach to gun control legislation, often pointing to the debatable phrasing of the Second Amendment. This negligence has led to the horrifying events that unfolded at Virginia Tech Monday, capping a disturbing trend that the American public has largely chosen to ignore. Demonstrating this, an article covering the shootings in the London Times contained a "Timeline in U.S. School Shootings," something that would be impossible for an American paper commenting on a similar story in Europe to include. Although the timeline detailed only the last 10 years, it contained 15 massacres at the cost of 72 lives and many more injuries. Lawmakers have to date been content to be bullied by the gun lobby into an inculpable submission, but they remain blameless no longer. If Columbine and Enoch Brown weren't enough to catalyze change, then Virginia Tech must, for the sake of schoolchildren across the country. Daniel Witt wittdd@muohio.edu -- Original Source: The Miami Students - April 17, 2007
creator: Daniel Witt
publisher: The Miami Student
date: 2007-08-14
contributor: Sara Hood
rights: "Skotzko, Stacey Nicole" <skotzksn@muohio.edu>
language: eng

Memorials are a positive force after tragedy
description: Published: Thursday, May 3, 2007 Opinion articles Danielle Tumminio Guest Column 4/17/07. When students from Virginia Tech struggled to make sense of the horror that struck their campus last week, they erected a banner on their student center with the date of the massacre. It provided a reminder of a time and a place, a way to express a trauma through white lettering on black canvas. It was an attempt to remember. Theirs is not the first — nor, unfortunately, will it be the last — commemoration of a tragedy. This desire to remember seems built into us. We sing, sculpt, hold one another, dance, write poems and pray in order to find solace in our most tumultuous moments. Using these forms, we try to incorporate trauma into our lives so that we can give meaning to events that feel meaningless. If we're going to move forward from the horrors we experience, this process seems essential. Otherwise, evil becomes something like a dangling participle not properly integrated into a sentence. It hangs there, and it has, quite literally, the last word. There's no hope in a worldview like that. So through our memorials, we try to find meaning. Perhaps that's why our nation's capital is peppered with commemorations of wars and those who represented our country in them. Through carved stone, we remember our history. Likewise, after the Columbine shootings, students draped flowers over Rachel Scott's car and sat on its hood, sobbing in grief. Leaning against red Acuras, we remember our loves. Or following Hurricane Katrina, memorial services were held in worship spaces across the country. In our religious homes, we remember the possibility of hope. But if there are right ways to remember, there are certainly wrong ways to remember as well. "Just move on" and "It's time to get over it" are common phrases in our culture, and they imply that the only way to recover from a traumatic event is to forget it. The trouble with these cliches is that they conflate remembering with relivin…
creator: Danielle Tumminio
date: 2007-06-11
contributor: Sara Hood
rights: Yale Daily News, Editor-in-chief - Sarah Mishkin <sarah.mishkin@gmail.com>
language: eng

Massacre of 32 at Virginia Tech shocks alumni in MetroWest
description: By Danielle Williamson/Daily News staff GHS Tue Apr 17, 2007, 12:07 AM EDT NO DATA - For Bill Saam, the slaughter yesterday at his alma mater resurrected the shock, sadness and anger he felt when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. "On a personal level, the feeling I had today was very much the way I felt on 9/11," said Saam, a Northborough resident and 1992 Virginia Tech graduate. An active member of the college's alumni association, Saam was in touch yesterday with other classmates who struggled to comprehend the news. "It's very much a tight-knit community," he said. "I hope no one from New England is directly affected by this." Saam described Blacksburg as a "small, rural area." "You don't hear about crime down there, never mind shootings," he said. For Milford native Jim Pyne, a 1993 Virginia Tech graduate, yesterday's murders are a sad reflection on the state of society. "We have people who fly planes into buildings ... and screwballs who have guns and shouldn't have them," said Pyne, a former professional football player. "It's the society we live in, and it's just despicable." Pyne, who was an All-American at Virginia Tech and played nine seasons in the NFL, said he watched much of the news yesterday but "couldn't keep watching it. It doesn't seem real." "I've been in all those buildings. I took classes there," Pyne said. "I feel for the parents of the 33 kids and I'm horrified about what happened and what it's like for them." Peter Darby of Charlestown, who leads the New England chapter of Virginia Tech's alumni association, said the Boston area has 1,300 alumni, many of whom were in contact with each other yesterday. "We're stunned just numb," Darby said. For Waltham native Marcus Ly, the shootings were particularly difficult to comprehend. "I called a lot of my friends in Blacksburg. They're all OK," said Ly, a Virginia Tech grad student speaking by phone yesterday from Minneapolis. "But it's just a lot of confusion, they don't really know anythin…
creator: Danielle Williamson/Daily News staff
date: 2007-07-17
contributor: Na Mi
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0
language: eng

Shooting points to need for less restrictive gun laws
description: By: Danny Mistarz Posted: 4/24/07 After the tragic events that took place at Virginia Tech April 16, the anti-Second Amendment crowd has once again reared its ugly head. The usual claims of guns causing violence and the necessity to ban personal ownership have come out. But what if one person, a student, a professor, the RA in the dorm, had been carrying a gun? Would dozens of lives have been spared? The state of Virginia's legislature had a bill proposed last year, HB 1572, proposing that handguns be permitted on college campuses for those persons with proper permits and certification. The bill was shot down in subcommittee, never making it to the house floor. At the time, it was celebrated by a VT spokesman as a stride toward continued public safety. Was the wrong decision was made? Guns are used 2.5 million times in self-defense annually, saving approximately 2,575 lives for each life lost annually according to the Second Amendment Foundation; could HB 1572 gave saved thirty-one lives on the morning of April 16, or even just one? Let's assume that guns were permitted on campus at Virginia Tech, and that one student or one professor in the engineering building was carrying that day. This coward would never have been able to level a gun on hundreds of his classmates had he known there was the possibility of having to defend himself. What if a student on the hall of the dormitory had a gun, just in the room for protection? Certainly the first two gunshots, would have been heard and within a minute of the start of a rampage, 31 lives could have been saved. All it would take is one person, carrying one gun. No gun law could stop people who want to get guns from getting them any better than our current drug laws work. Perhaps the gun laws that need arguing against are the gun laws that limit us, not the laws that protect us. Danny Mistarz Pratt '09 -- Original Source: Duke Chronicle - April 24, 2007
creator: Danny Mistarz
publisher: Duke Chronicle
date: 2007-06-24
contributor: Sara Hood
rights: David Graham <david.graham@duke.edu>
language: eng

sell.com donating all proceeds to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund
description: As a graduate of Virginia Tech, I wanted to do something positive in response to the recent tragedy. My web company (sell.com) will donate ALL PROCEEDs for the rest of April to the Virginia Tech Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund. Go Hokies! http://www.sell.com/announcements/virginia-tech/
creator: Darren Dittrich
date: 2007-04-25
contributor: Darren Dittrich
language: eng

Ire and Vice: The Dead
description: May 22, 2007 By Darren Franich Suicide is so much less embarrassing than homicide. Can you imagine the shitstorm maelstrom that would engulf our pretty campus if someone shot five people? Shot them so their blood splattered across the tables of Stern dining hall. Or their blood covered the pull-out desks in the chem building. Or their blood filled the fountains until the water sprayed dark bitter red. Five Stanford students dead. Hell, it doesn't have to be five. Make it three. Make it one. Think of the black cloud that would descend on our lives. Our own little Virginia Tech. The blood, damn it, the fucking blood! Pouring out of open wounds. Choked out of lungs that will never breathe again. On our campus. On our hands. Flowing out of pale bodies until the heart just stops pumping, tired, empty. Fortunately, people don't kill other people at Stanford. They just kill themselves. No one ever talks about the suicides, but everyone talks about how no one ever talks about the suicides. "Can you believe," we shake our heads, "four suicides at Stanford in one year, and nobody notices, nobody cares." Someone says, "I heard there were five." "That's what I'm talking about." Stanford is killing people. We shouldn't hold that against Stanford. There is so much joy here. There are thousands of students who live happy lives of quiet desperation, for whom suicide is never more than a passing fancy, the dream of an eternal vacation from one's own brain. But for a school that prides itself on its happiest-place-on-earth reputation, one suicide is a misfortune. Five is just awkward. To a high school senior, Stanford is the anti-Cornell: happy people living happy lives under the happy, happy sun. And now there is a suicide epidemic. Intelligent young people — who have worked hard their whole lives to get here, who have so much to look forward to — are eliminating themselves from the humanity continuum. Asphyxiation. It's not a good way to go. These people would have been great. …
creator: Darren Franich
publisher: Stanford Daily
date: 2007-06-13
contributor: Sara Hood
rights: Permissions granted by James Hohmann Editor-in-Chief The Stanford Daily <jhohmann@stanford.edu>
language: eng

Pundits wrong to blame society's woes on entertainment industry
description: By: Dave Arey Posted: 4/25/07 Hours after the Virginia Tech shootings, people were already looking for something to blame. Fox News had on lawyer and "school shootings expert" Jack Thompson, an infamous critic of video games. He gave the dubious statement that when looking at most school shootings there was a common thread, that being "the immersion of the perpetrators in incredibly violent entertainment, most notably violent videogames." This was before the killer had even been named. When it was found out that Seung-Hui Cho had little contact with violent videogames, other possible explanations were discussed. In a video sent to NBC, Cho can be seen holding a hammer in a pose reminiscent of the movie "Oldboy." As a result, many began wondering if the killings were influenced by that. In reporting on the story, Jake Coyle of the Associated Press wrote that, "Notorious killers are commonly linked to movies or music." Such an assumption is very dangerous, but sadly, it is also common. It is true that John Lennon's killer read "The Catcher in the Rye." It is also true that Charles Manson loved The Beach Boys and The Beatles. But they were very troubled people who did not need entertainment to inspire their actions. The killings at Virginia Tech have followed a never-ending string of cases where entertainment has been blamed for the actions of an individual. One of the more ludicrous recent examples was Don Imus' comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team. Ever since, many people in the media have blamed rap music as much as they have blamed Imus himself. Imus started the conversation by mentioning on his show that he was simply repeating the vernacular of rappers. Many others in the media picked up on this. In a column printed April 11, Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star wrote that, "I'm sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent's or Snoop Dogg's or Young Jeezy's l…
creator: Dave Arey
date: 2007-08-23
contributor: Sara Hood
rights: Peter Waack <pwaack@dailyorange.com>
language: eng

Blacksburg
description: Published by Dave April 18th, 2007 This past weekend was the middle weekend of April. That's the time universities put on dog-and-pony shows for students who have been admitted, to help them make up their minds. My daughter has been admitted to several universities, and she managed to narrow it down to James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and Virginia Tech. Somewhat at the last minute, she decided she needed to see both campuses to make her final decision. So on Saturday she and my wife drove down to Blacksburg from our suburban DC home, about a four-hour trip. They stayed near Blacksburg and then spent Sunday in Tech's pre-orientation sessions. Monday they had moved up Interstate 81 to JMU, but my daughter had pretty much decided that Tech was the place she wanted to attend. Standing on the campus Sunday, looking around, she began to see herself as a student there. As I was walking back from the cafeteria in my high school on Monday, one of the Spanish teachers had his classroom TV on. There was a map of Virginia with the town of Blacksburg highlighted. I saw a graphic indicating "21 dead, 21 injured." It didn't take long for the news of the massacre to filter through, as well as the instruction from our administration that we were to keep TV sets off and not talk about the news in class. Many students from our area attend Virginia Tech. It is one of the more competitive universities in the Virginia system. Hokie loyalty is more intense than that of alumni of other places. Hokie pain is now intense. To see Virginia Tech on the front page of all the world's newspapers because of a rampage that wiped out 33 young lives is deeply disturbing. My daughter will probably still attend Tech next year. She realizes that Tech is the place she saw on Sunday, not the crazy-man-land it became on Monday. But it will always be unsettling to walk the campus where the worst shooting massacre in American history took place. -- Original Source: http://davesmidlife.com/2…
creator: Dave Shepherd
date: 2007-06-08
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5
language: eng

Blacksburg, violence, and America
description: Published by Dave April 25th, 2007 I have been on the sidelines of quite a number of handgun deaths in my life. Thank God, I haven't really been in the crossfire, nor has any member of my family. But gun violence has come close enough to me to be very unsettling. In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student in German at Vanderbilt, a German exchange student, Thomas Weser, was gunned down in a parking lot on campus in the very early morning hours. The murder seemed to be a robbery gone wrong. It became a murder because the mugger had a handgun. On Christmas Eve 1991, I was living in the Belmont Heights section of Nashville, a cozy suburban neighborhood near several university campuses. My kids were very young. We got along well with our neighbors. There were families all around us. Diagonally across the street from us lived two brothers. They got into an argument in the middle of the night after much alcohol had been drunk. One brother fetched a loaded handgun and killed the other. Without the loaded handgun in the house, this argument would probably have remained a drunken fistfight, maybe a stabbing. In February of 1997, our family accompanied my wife on a weekend trip to New York City. My wife had to attend an arts conference, and I was left to explore the city with the kids. On Sunday afternoon we wanted to go to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, but we weren't sure whether we should wait until Mom got finished with her afternoon meeting. We decided that I would go ahead and take the kids up to the top while Barbara was in her session. After we returned home to Northern Virginia, we learned that a man had opened fire with a handgun on the Empire State Building's observation deck later that afternoon. Seven people were shot; one was killed, in addition to the gunman, who committed suicide. If we had waited for Barbara, we might well have been there to experience the shooting firsthand. Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani blamed weak gun laws for…
creator: Dave Shepherd
date: 2007-06-08
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5
language: eng

Beyond Words
description: Dave Vogt / davedot.com I am honestly at a loss for what to say about the events that unfolded on the Virginia Tech campus this morning. I was walking across the Drillfield towards GBJ when firing broke out in Norris hall. I had heard nothing about the previous shootings in West AJ. While I recognize that the decision to go on with classes was an informed one, I still feel that it was the University's responsibility to inform the students of potential danger. I consider myself extremely fortunate that neither I nor anyone I know was involved. I spent the morning trying to touch base with as many people as possible until the phone network here became absolutely saturated. I hope that I was at least able to set up a cascade so that people wouldn't have to be worried about my safety. That being said, it's extremely difficult to place my reaction. Obviously I am not as heavily affected as those whose loved ones have been injured or killed. At the same time though, this is very jarring for everyone involved. I don't think I'll really know how I feel for a while yet. They don't tell you how to react to this sort of thing. UPDATE 17 Apr 2007 11:21p: I have been mostly disgusted by the media coverage of this event. I think that larger and more distant news outlets get things the most wrong, and locals do the best job. CNN's article is as sensationalizing as the rest, but if you scroll down towards the bottom, Gov. Tim Kaine's remarks perfectly echo my sentiment. "People who want to take this within 24 hours of the event and make it their political hobby horse to ride, I've got nothing but loathing for them." I don't deny that there are questions that need to be asked, but there are more important things to deal with right now. On the other side of the coin, I am deeply touched by the outpouring of support from universities and individual students across the country and abroad. There has been a huge "We are all Hokies" movement, with students wearing maroon and orange to sho…
creator: Dave Vogt
date: 2007-05-26
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5
language: eng

In Cho's defence...
description: Saturday, April 21, 2007 "this is a lesson for all o. i think those American parents should learn a lesson or 2 from this. with the way their kids tease other people of different nationalities. i went to school abroad as well, and i can tell you that most people, even the adult students have no regard for others. if you aint speaking the language like them, or don't look like them, its hard to mix. i'm not generalizing, but its a pattern ive noticed. hence it leaves people feeling isolated from others. i think people should be taught these subtle signs and not to ignore others. no be by force, but at least make an effort to make other people feel welcome. this matter was a big issue in the school i went to. if you aint white, forget it. no-one wants to have anything to do with you, no matter how extroverted or social you are." - Soulpatrol (Nairaland) Being a foreigner myself set me thingking... what could have made a man shoot 31 innocent people before taking his own life? It's easy to plant flowers at memorials, write words we don't mean on tombstones and whiteboards, talk about how good people were on facebook. . . if only we did this when we each could appreciate each other perhaps such episodes could be a thiing of the past. How could a fellow not have any friends for 4 years?? Everyone is talking about him being the weird kid who never talked, some are busy posting his plays on the internet, professors are describing a disturbed kid they think they did a huge favour by sending to see a psychiatrist. Where was everyone when a simple "how did your day go" would have averted this problem? How many times was Cho abandoned in the back of the class with everyone sniggering at that "weird asian kid who never talked"? I find it so difficult to imagine me sharing a room with another individual and him having issues that warranted psychiatric evaluation and police questioning and yet doing absolutely nothing! Only to appear on CNN after the shootings to hug the limeligh…
creator: David Adenuga
date: 2007-06-02
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5
language: eng

Blacksburg Mayor Ron Rordam
description: Blacksburg Mayor Ron Rordam being interviewed on April 18,2007, two days after the Virginia Tech Tragedy.
creator: David Arnold
date: 2007-04-27
contributor: David Arnold
language: eng

Cho Seung-Hui: A Lone Deranged Gunman?
description: Thursday, April 19. 2007 As all of America mourns the deaths which occurred on the Virginia Tech campus, bloggers are drawing comparisons to the body count that issues daily from Iraq. See a particularly poignant post from Floyd Rudmin of commondreams.org titled "32 Senseless Deaths: A Chance for Empathy, Change of Heart, and Change of Course" which concludes: The tragedy at Virginia Tech was caused by lone gunman, probably deranged. It was a one-time event. It is finished. The tragedy in Iraq was caused by the US government, with the over-whelming support of the US Congress, most of the US media, and much of the US population. This war was planned and executed by rational men and women, none of them deranged. The US decided to start the war against Iraq. The US decided to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq. The US decided to destroy the Iraqi government and to disband its police and army. The US decided to send too few soldiers to secure the nation after doing these destructive deeds. And the tragedy of Iraq is not a one-time event. It is not finished. It continues, apparently without end. By many reports, the US is now preparing to start another war, this time against Iran. Americans feeling the shock and grief of the tragedy at Virginia Tech should look into their hearts and realize that they through their government are bringing this same tragedy again, and again, and again, and again, and again, endlessly and needlessly, to other people in the world who also have hearts that can be torn out, who also feel grief and loss when family and friends are suddenly killed when doing ordinary things of life, like going to school. Tragic deaths force us to feel our humanity and to see we are similar to others in the world. The tragic deaths in Virginia might serve to motivate Americans to curb their militarism and to minimize the tragedies of sudden death that they have been bringing to other families in the world. Read the full article. It is heartening to witness a vigo…
creator: David Barker
date: 2007-06-06
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5
language: eng