Burress Hall
description: Campus has taken on a whole new look... Original source: http://share.shutterfly.com/action/slideshow?a=67b0de21b3292af30542&auto=0&idx=3&m=1&d=1180361415083 Photo courtesy of Krissy Watson
creator: Krissy Watson
date: 2007-05-28
contributor: Chad Newswander
rights: Photo courtesy of Krissy Watson krissywatson@gmail.com
language: eng

Death in America, an ode to siblings
description: Monday, April 16, 2007 It was a crisp, clear, bright autumn day, the kind of day you drink in with every essence of your being. I was sleepy, woken early by my parents for the drive from Nashville to Blacksburg. But I was excited. Not only were we attending a Virginia Tech football game, I was going to see my brother, a student at VT and horn player in the marching band. The campus was quiet, beautiful, almost idyllic, and I was overwhelmed by my first views of college life. My brother attended Virginia Tech in the mid-80's and graduated with a degree in nuclear engineering. His devotion to his alma mater has continued, as an alumnus and frequently attending football games. It isn't surprising, the mood of the campus that day was intoxicating, and had I showed any inclination towards engineering, science or mathematics, I might have returned there for my own college education. Blacksburg itself was a village filled with charm and friendly people, hip hangouts and the best record store I had ever been in. I am grieving the shootings at Virginia Tech, the shots that rang out across the peaceful campus, killing many, wounding others, and deafening the ears of college students that today learned one of the hardest lessons life can teach. I mourn the deaths with the families, friends, and teachers, and wish them all peace in the days and months ahead. But mostly I mourn for the siblings who, unlike me, will never again have the joy of seeing their brother or sister on campus after a sleepy drive through the fog laden mountains to that small college town that has lost so much today. posted by melusina at 9:15 PM -- Original Source: http://litochoro.blogspot.com/2007/04/death-in-america-ode-to-siblings.html Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5.
creator: Melusina
date: 2007-05-27
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5
language: eng

NBC Should Never Have Aired the Virginia Tech Video
description: By: Jack Myers / Jack Myers Think Tank (Blog) May 07, 2007 The more I think and talk to people about NBC's handling of Cho Seung-Hui's videos following the tragedy at Virginia Tech, the more convinced I am the decision was mishandled and wrong. Roger Delaney of Zephyr Media Group commented "I think that, even knowing that the data would make it into the public domain though other channels, NBC erred when they decided to air Cho's 'multimedia manifesto'. There is no question that he accomplished exactly what he'd hoped to - his heinous actions gave him a forum through which he could spew his venomous message to the entire nation. Did any of us need to see that? Did airing that footage do anything other than grant Cho the postmortem glory he was clearly seeking? And was there any way for NBC to air that footage without appearing to be chasing ratings? The answer to all those questions is, in my mind, unequivocally 'no'." Neale Martin of Ntlec, whose daughter is a sophomore at VT, added, "NBC should never have provided a platform for this lunatic; it will encourage every sociopath to strive toward even more carnage. Even posted on YouTube, it would not have the same impact as being put on broadcast news. My daughter is a sophomore at VT and three classmates from her Monday 8 am class were killed the next period. As a former journalist I am sickened by how low this profession has sunk." There are endless arguments about free speech, about how the videos would have found their way into the public eye and, of course, NBC's responsibility not only to the audience but to shareholders as well, for whom any ratings opportunity is more important than issues of the public good. My initial instinct was to accept that NBC aired the videos, but to criticize both NBC and other networks for the gratuitous promotions they ran and the hype leading up to the news reports. In retrospect, I believe NBC has done great harm to the NBC network news brand, to Brian Williams, and to the overa…
creator: Jack Myers
date: 2007-05-27
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5
language: eng

Defenseless Victim Zones
description: Harold X. O'Boyle / The Extremist (Blog) May 03, 2007 Mass murder invariably gets the Victim Disarmament Lobby into a lather promoting safety through helplessness. The Virginia Tech shooting is no exception. A brief but honest look at how the world works, however, should convince any but the most craven cowards that there is not much safety in being as helpless as a newborn. Acts of senseless violence will never be stopped by simply declaring them illegal. It is ironic to me that many of the same people who so adamantly oppose self-defense in the face of violence are the same who claim that boosting "self-esteem" is the highest goal of education. Once we've created people enthralled with their own individuality and inestimable worth how can it be that the lives of those people are not worth defending? Education authorities create "defenseless victim zones" where if confronted by violence students are expected to stand and deliver, whether the delivery involves their property or their dignity. The theory is based on the idea that life is immeasurably precious, to be preserved at any price and that a sane criminal, like a thief or a rapist, will let you live if you just lie nice and still. But what if he isn't a nice sane criminal? What if he just wants to kill you? There was a time, long before years of government schooling and media propaganda had removed the spine from so many Americans, when the failure to defend yourself was considered the equivalent of suicide. That theory was based on the idea that life was a gift from the Almighty, not to be taken lightly or abused. Educational discussion in those days more often centered on "self-respect" and "courage" than "self-esteem." In keeping with the modern preference for self-esteem over self-respect Virginia Tech is a "gun free school zone." That means only law enforcement personnel and psychopathic killers can have weapons on campus. On the day of the recent shooting not a law enforcement officer could be found unt…
creator: Harold X. O'Boyle
date: 2007-05-27
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5
language: eng

What Cho learned
description: April 20, 2007 Friday Natalie Solent (Essex) Nikki Giovanni found one of her Creative Writing students a trial. "And every class I'm saying, 'Mr. Cho, take off your (sun)-glasses please, take your hat off please. Mr. Cho, that's not a poem. Can you work on it please,'" Giovanni recalled. "And then I finally realized that something is not wrong with me, something is wrong with him, and I said to him, 'I'm not a good teacher for you.'" One day, she arrived and found her class of about 70 students had dwindled to fewer than 10. When she asked a student after class about it, he confessed that "everybody's scared of (Cho)." Giovanni later had him removed from her class after she threatened to resign. Why did it have to come to that? Imagine if every class Cho Seung-hui had attended had taken place at the invitation of the teacher- an invitation that could be rescinded at any time. In reality his memories of school were of humiliation, but imagine if, from the age of twelve onwards, or from even earlier if your imagination can stretch that far, school had been an option he could choose if he wanted it. What if Cho's concepts of "school" and "college" had been formed by classes like the Karate class described by Brian Micklethwait? What struck me, so to speak, about these "martial arts" classes was that although the children present may have supposed that all there were learning was how to be more violent, what they were really learning was no less than civilisation itself. The children were all told to get changed into their Karate kit in an orderly fashion, and to put their regular clothes in sensible little heaps. They all lined up the way he said. They all turned up on time. They left the place impeccably clean when they'd finished, all helping to make sure that all was ship-shape and properly closed-up when they left. Were these children being "coerced"? Certainly not. They didn't have to be there, any more than The Man had to teach them Karate if he didn't want to. I…
creator: Natalie Solent
date: 2007-05-27
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 1.0
language: eng

What's "Korean" got to do with it?
description: by J Lee | April 19, 2007 When I was growing up in the 80s, it often seemed that the world was holding its breath, keeping its fingers crossed to prevent some sort of nuclear disaster. The apocalypse that I imagined then had to do with the world going up in a mushroom cloud, because of polarization along national and political lines. But this next generation's experiences (as E Wesp pointed out in his comment) have been punctuated by violence of a different type, enacted by one or a few individuals and relatively low technology. I want to pick up a few threads of conversation, starting with the comment by ms which addresses the idea of narrative and also points out that we have started this conversation with race. In our discussion and in many of the blog comments I have been reading on this side of the world, the use of the label "Korean" has been hotly debated, some arguing that the shooter's ethnicity may offer clues to his motivations, others charging that to invoke the term is racist. I am curious about how this label "Korean" gets deployed and what meaning it has. In other words, does it matter that he was Korean? What are the conditions under which someone's ethnicity becomes "visible" and how it gets worked into the stories we tell about why something happened, about who is responsible, and about our emotional relationships to the subject? In a basic way, the label "Korean" subverts the popular stereotype of the angry white middle class male shooter. It provides a potentially different kind of explanatory factor, complicating questions about Cho's mental health, his upbringing, ideas about the expression of masculine anger, etc. What I find interesting from our own discussion as well as other articles is how minorities have reacted. Personally, I heard "Korean," "parents own a dry-cleaning business," "sister at Princeton," and "Centreville, VA" and unconsciously began constructing my own narrative of Cho's life, filling in the blanks with my own experiences …
creator: J Lee
date: 2007-05-26
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0
language: eng

Gut Reactions
description: by S L Kim | April 17, 2007 1. Race Shame As soon as I saw the shooter's name--Cho Seung-Hui--in the NYT this morning, I knew he was Korean. Crap. Ever since I got home last night after teaching, and my husband told me about the deadly shooting spree at Virginia Tech, I'd been wondering, like everyone else, about the gunman. Knowing he was a "young Asian man" made me maybe slightly more curious than I normally might have been, and finding out his name made my heart sink a little more. He's being described in the NYT as a "South Korean who was a resident alien in the United States," a 23-year-old senior English major. At first I imagined one of those Korean students who are sent to the US by themselves, as high school or college students, by families eager for them to get an American education at whatever cost. These students, with varying levels of English-speaking skills, are sent all over, to far-flung corners of the US. But it turns out that this "resident alien" came to the states with his family in 1992, when he was 7 or 8 years old. Wouldn't that make him, culturally speaking, an American? It's not so much that I'm afraid of outbreaks of violence against Koreans or Asians in general, but I worry about the generalizations and pop psychology pablum that will reinforce ugly stereotypes and perpetuate tacit forms of racism in the name of "understanding what happened." You know, looking for things in his culture or his upbringing that might have contributed, all the while the implicit message is: watch out for the quiet Asian guys, because they might just go crazy. 2. Media Rhetoric Already, the shooter is described as a "loner," already the profiles emerge about these killers on a rampage. The photos of him are now circulating, and he's described as expressionless. Apparently, he left a note with a list of grievances and he wrote disturbing stories in his creative writing class. It seems too easy to map the symptoms of pathology onto the stereotypical features of …
creator: S L Kim
date: 2007-05-26
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0
language: eng

Media Coverage of the Virginia Tech Massacre
description: Charles Warner / Media Curmudgeon Blog Television has once again gone on a rampage of gluttony over the tragic murders at Virginia Tech. However, it depends on your definition of what constitutes gluttony and what kind of TV you're talking about. First, all television is not cut from the same cloth. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox are all-news cable channels, so they have a 24-hour news hole to fill. Because TV is inelastic, the three national news channels can neither expand or contract time nor add or subtract hours to the clock. Thus they fill those 24-hours with what each thinks the majority of their viewers will find compelling. And, of course, they all choose the same stories in what has become a cycle of competitive reinforcement, confirmation, and excess. If CNN airs a story, then Fox and MSNBC producers say, "That confirms that the story is importantÃƒÂ¢Ã¯Â¿Â½Ã¯Â¿Â½CNN (Fox, MSNBC) is running it." They also say, "We've got to run the story more often and devote more resources to it or viewers will go elsewhere." Thus, the news cycle spins out of control. Furthermore, the three cable news networks have structured their programming in hour-long blocks, often with personality-hosts who do talk segments (Larry King, Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly), and the assumption, generally, is that viewers watch for about an hour, so they have to repeat the news cycle and the top stories every hour. In all-news radio, the news cycles are usually shorter. For example, New York's WINS has the famous tagline, "Give us 20 minutes and we'll give you the world." TV and radio all-news outlets are like a news faucet. The notion is that you can turn on a news station or channel at any time and the latest, most important news spews out. Therefore, if you watch a TV news channel for longer than an hour, which happens with breaking news like the Virginia Tech story, you see the top story repeated, giving the impression of saturation and excess. And if you get sick of the coverage on one cable news netw…
creator: Charles Warner
date: 2007-05-26
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 1.0
language: eng

University Homicide: Trauma Revisited
description: Submitted by Shreya Mandal on 17 April 2007 - 2:34pm. Yesterday, as I sat in the lobby of the Elizabeth Detention Center waiting to testify at a hearing, I learned about the violent incident that took place in Virginia. A small flat-screen television hangs on a wall in the detention center's lobby. I sat there for almost six hours, each hour getting more and more agitated at the cell phone and video coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. Normally in these situations, I get up and turn the television off. But I was in a situation where I could not get away from the images bombarded at me. CNN shot the ongoing campus scenes throughout the whole day, reiterating over and over again that this was the biggest shooting ever to take place in American history. At first while I listened to the news reporters, I masked my fears, needing to act like I was in control, that everything was okay, and that I was strong enough to stomach the events they televised. I distracted myself from the flat-screen television and tried to focus on preparing for my testimony. But as the hours went by, officers at the detention center passed by me, shouting out the latest death toll. First 21, then 22, then 29, then 31, then 32, and finally 33. It was impossible to tune out. I felt my mind and my heart drift back to when I was 16 years-old, when I was also on campus during a college shooting rampage. That was almost 15 years ago. At various times yesterday, CNN provided history and statistical information of previous school shootings like Columbine and The University of Texas massacres. I waited for them to list my alma mater. But one school they didn't list was a small early undergraduate program called Simon's Rock College, tucked away in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. This is where a college campus shooting occurred on December 14, 1992, the first shooting to occur in the United States in the 1990s. Each moment I looked up at the television screen, heard the ringing of gunshots, or saw li…
creator: Shreya Mandal
date: 2007-05-26
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0
language: eng

What could have been done to prevent to massacre at Virginia Tech?
description: By Arlen Parsa Filed: Thursday April 19th 2007, 9:05 AM In the wake of the tragedy at Virginia Tech on Monday, April 16, many asked how such a thing could have happened. It was the deadliest shooting spree in American history, and already there seems to have been several moments where the incident could have been avoided. The killer, Cho Seung-Hui, himself said in a manifesto mailed to NBC News "You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today." While there probably weren't "a hundred billion chances and ways" to have avoided the massacre that claimed the lives of 33 people including Cho, but there were several common sense things that could have been done. It's important to recognize that this horrific incident didn't happen just anywhere: the shootings happened in Virginia; a state known for having some of the most relaxed firearm regulations in the entire country. In fact, critics and safety advocates had complained for years that VA firearm regulations were wholly inadequate and substandard when compared with the rest of the country. Here are a few ideas that the Virginia state legislature ought to consider implementing. I'm not holding my breath since it's made up of staunch NRA types and has been controlled by Republicans for years. But tragedies like these force everyone to reconsider their ideologies. First, how about a law that says if you've been classified as mentally unstable and an imminent threat to yourself or others by doctors and a court- then you're not allowed to walk into a store and walk out with a gun and enough ammo to kill dozens of students? This might sound like a no-brainer, but there is currently no mechanism in place in Virginia to stop mentally unstable people from buying as many deadly weapons and ammunition as they like. In this case, the shooter Cho Seung-Hui was diagnosed with mental disorders, had been taken antidepressants and been checked into a mental hospital in 2005. But that didn't stop him from buying deadly …
creator: Arlen Parsa
date: 2007-05-26
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0
language: eng

How to Stop a Killer
description: April 18th, 2007 by Ben The tragic massacre this week at Virginia Tech will be one of those events that you will remember how you first heard the news, where you were when you heard it, and what you were doing at the time. Like September 11, 2001, it will stick to the national memory for the rest of our lives. The shooting was the most violent act perpetrated on American soil since September 11. Coming almost eight years to the day after the Columbine shootings, the VT murders are the latest and most violent example of the psychotic, suicidal student rampage. Like Columbine, the VT shooter, now identified as senior English major Cho Seung-hui, was calculated and cunning. He chained potential exits shut to prevent possible escape routes. He was carrying multiple clips of ammo. He lined up students and shot them execution-style. On the Monday night newscasts, the networks went all-out, providing coverage with limited commercial interruption, and many reported directly from the campus. If you listened carefully you probably heard the most repeated phrase of the night: "This is the worst incident of gun violence in American history." This is true. But the story really has very little to do with guns. Did the anchors get hung up on "the worst incident of airplane hijacking" angle when covering September 11? The story has everything to do with a psychotic "loner" who decided it would be better to take as many innocent people with him when he ended his own worthless life. Acts of mass murder always follow a predictable pattern. First, there is the period of shock. Depending on the magnitude of the incident, this phase can last for days, even weeks. Then there is the healing process: the dead are mourned and remembered, moments of silence are observed around the country. Finally, there is the "let's-not-let this-happen-again" phase. With September 11, this phase was complex and expensive. More airport security. "No-fly" lists. Federal air marshals. All of these steps have d…
creator: Ben Blanton
date: 2007-05-26
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 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

Virginia Tech Massacre
description: A horrible tragedy. The bottom line is that sometimes awful things happen in life and there's not a satisfactory explanation as to why. Sometimes people fail to recognize this. There's a lot of idle chatter regarding whether or not Virginia Tech handled the situation properly. I'm reserving judgment until more facts come out (interesting concept, cable news). I will say it's a lot easier to fault decision in the hindsight of a disaster than it is to make them in real time with incomplete information. In the interest of saving many hours of TV airtime, I'll answer a few questions: --Yes, this could happen at X college. (Whatever your nearby school is.) --There are no security measures which will stop people intent on going on Kamikaze-style killing sprees. --No, we don't need metal detectors and other fortress-like security measures on college campuses. --No, right-wing radio, the fact that the shooter was an alien does not mean international students are about to lay waste to America. --This could have occurred regardless of what the Blacksburg gun laws are. --This could have occurred regardless of how many violent movies or video games were sold last year. [Not that those aren't legitimate issues, but speculative cause/effect chatter on these topics before you know anything about the suspect's background is silly.] A trivial matter in the grand scheme of things, but I thought this clip yesterday afternoon is insightful in how our news media works. Here Wolf Blitzer asks if President Bush will be attending today's ceremony at Virginia Tech: HENRY: No indication yet. Obviously, that's one event certainly the White House is weighing. Typically in situations like this, although there's never been anything quite like this on a college campus -- but whenever there's some sort of a disaster or tragedy, the president, and this president in particular, tries to stay away in the early days, let local and state official do what they need to do. And then within a few days he u…
creator: Brian Arner
date: 2007-05-26
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5
language: eng

People Already Profiting from Virginia Tech Shooting (Updated)
description: Posted On: April 16th, 2007 Normally that would take at least a couple days. The sad state of the domain squatting industry, and society in general, is that after a horrible shooting a bunch of "business people" sprint to grab up every VT shooting/massacre domain possible. If your first thought upon seeing the news of this horrible shooting, is "Oh crap, how can I make money off of this?", then you need to get off the computer because the internet has completely warped your ability to care for other people. After noticing that domains were popping up right after recent tragedies like Katrina, I was curious how often these tragedy induced domain buying frenzies actually happen, and the results were naturally disgusting and not surprising. This latest VT tragedy is just a long history of people snatching up tragedy domain names immediately and then selling them off later for a profit. The domains that were immediately purchased within 20 mins of the shooting are: virginiatechshooting.com virginiatechmassacre.com vtmassacre.com vtshooting.com Special Note: virginiatechschoolshooting.com is still avilable! Hurry, you too can profit from other people's suffering! UPDATES: The first domain is already up for sale already. These poor kids aren't even in the ground yet and this guy is already making his money: (Copy and paste if you want, I'm not linking to their auction.) http://cgi.ebay.com/Virginia-Tech-Massacre-info-Domain-name-lot-vatech-va_W0QQitemZ320104764149QQihZ011QQcategoryZ3767QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem Not only has virginiatechschoolshooting.com been taken quickly after posting this, but the following domains were grabbed up as well (hokiemassacre.com is probably the worst): Source 27BStroke6 on Wired virginiatechshooting.com virginiatechshooting.net virginiatechshooting.org virginiatechshooting.info virginiatechshooting.us vatechshooting.com vatechshooting.net vatechshooting.org vatechshooting.info vatechshooting.us vatechshooting.biz vtshooting.com …
creator: Seth Kravitz
date: 2007-05-26
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5
language: eng

VT Massacre: Could it Happen at Hampden-Sydney???
description: Submitted by JohnMaxfield on Tue, 04/17/2007 - 7:30am. Would this have happened at a school like Hampden-Sydney? That is the question. And the answer must be dealt with delicately, in the aftermath of such a horrendous massacre that hopefully we will never see repeated in our history. But the fact remains--could this tragedy have been down scaled and at best, diffused, if students were allowed to possess firearms on school campuses? I noticed Cliff Garstang's blog going through the aggregator. He had a post up about the tragedy and I thought for once, that he might have a kind word to pass along to the families in mourning. Instead, it ended up being a diatribe about how guns are bad, guns are evil, conservatives are wrong and reactionary, I'm right and you all are wrong, etc. etc. He went on to say how conservatives are of the mindset that if perhaps either some of the students or faculty had been armed, then this might have stopped the shooter. Of course, he disagreed saying, "Put a gun in the hand of every college kid in the country? That's not only absurd, it's just crazy. Arming the citizenry will mean more gun-related deaths, intentional and otherwise, not fewer. The sane approach is to make sure that there are fewer guns. Not more." What? So here is where my question comes in? Do you think that this tragedy would have happened--better yet--do you think the students would have ALLOWED it to happen at Hampden-Sydney College? Of course not. Why, you ask? Because Hampden-Sydney promotes and allows the use of firearms on campus! Students sleep with shotguns under their beds! They hunt, fish, and target shoot on school property. The Admission Office houses a literal armory of firearms and weaponry under neath that building in their vaults. Statically, the college flaunts, enough firepower to defend the campus against a small country. In talking with a friend after the incident who goes to school there, he said that had discussed this exact issue. They figured that …
creator: John Maxfield
date: 2007-05-26
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
language: eng

Mariacristina Blog Archive for Virginia Tech
description: Arms Control Begins at Home April 29, 2007 at 3:28 pm · Filed under Virginia Tech, compassion, meditation, violence I need to be hit with a ton of bricks for a message to sink in. For a long time I've spoken about gun control, nuclear disarmament, and crisis prevention, but it took the VT massacre to finally get the message. I know this must appear selfish to the millions of people across the globe who wake up to gunshots on a regular basis, but since my own personal life is relatively peaceful, I didn't do anything overt to help stop violence. Until now. I used to think that all I could do was to practice a non-reactionary life by not exploding in anger toward those who cross me. Even though anger management and meditation on a worldwide scale to me is the answer to violence, I now think political activism must also be added to my list of solutions. No more cheering from the sidelines. My voice will be heard beyond the walls of my comfortable home. -- Making sense of slaughter April 20, 2007 at 7:17 pm · Filed under Virginia Tech, violence At the Virginia Tech memorial service, Nikki Giovanni gave a moving and memorable speech. Her words were poetry in motion, urging the students to "embrace their mourning". She reminded us that no victim ever asked to be rubbed out, citing examples of atrocities from Africa to the Appalachians. As an individual, I can shape what I want my life to be by acting on my dreams. That's what the students and teachers at VT were doing. But somehow their dream got tangled up with a madman's nightmare. Caught defensless and unaware, they were slaughtered as if they were still targets on a shooting range. Easy to mark. No, this guy wasn't insane. He chose to commit evil. But a long time ago a shift had taken place in his mind that separated him from the rest of the human race. He wasn't born evil. He had to become the monster. Something or someone shaped him into what he was. Where does evil begin? How do I reconcile the opposing images of s…
creator: Christine Swint
date: 2007-05-25
contributor: Brent Jesiek
language: eng

It's time to confront the gun lobby
description: by D. Grant Haynes Thursday, Apr. 19, 2007 at 2:10 PM The senseless murder of 32 people at Virginia Tech underlines once again the necessity for stricter gun control laws in the United States. Americans are busily soul searching one more time after another mass killing at an educational institution. This time the setting was a university rather than a secondary school. But the ghastly spectacle that unfolded at Virginia Polytechnic University in Blacksburg, Virginia, on April 16 when a disaffected student--Cho Seung-Hui, 23--systematically executed 32 innocent students and faculty members was fully as terrible as other such recent massacres in America--only worse. More were killed at Virginia Tech than at Columbine High School in Colorado eight years ago. And the killer's cold-blooded and methodical resolve, as well as an inexplicable lack of appropriate and timely responses from police officers on the scene, will put the Virginia Tech massacre in a class apart always. Media pundits, politicians, university administrators, psychologists, clergymen and others talk endlessly now about what lessons might be learned from Virginia Tech. The university should have had a better evacuation or lock down protocol in place. University and other police officers should have been more diligent in protecting students from Cho Seung-Hui's rage after his first shooting spree in which he killed two individuals more than two hours before he reappeared on campus to kill 30 more students. The mental health community should have done a better job of intervention when Cho Seung-Hui had, over several years' time, displayed symptoms of mental illness. There is ample blame to go around in this botched and bungled phantasmagoric mess that, seemingly, could not have been handled in a worse way than it was handled. But in all of the hand-wringing 24-hour non-stop media reportage and speculation about Blacksburg, few professionals and fewer politicians with their fingers to the wind and their ca…
creator: D. Grant Haynes
date: 2007-05-25
contributor: Brent Jesiek
rights: (c) Los Angeles Independent Media Center. Unless otherwise stated by the author, all content is free for non-commercial reuse, reprint, and rebroadcast, on the net and elsewhere. Opinions are those of the contributors and are not necessarily endorsed by the Los Angeles Independent Media Center.
language: eng

We Are Virginia Tech
description: The memorial at the Drill Field near Burress Hall and Norris Hall. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxpower/468742227/ Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
creator: Max Power
date: 2007-05-25
contributor: Chad Newswander
rights: Permission Contact: Max Power (http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxpower/468742227/) Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
language: eng

Awesome
description: Messages that show the solidarity and the university community culture that exist at Virginia Tech. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxpower/468731200/ Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
creator: Max Power
date: 2007-05-25
contributor: Chad Newswander
rights: Permission Contact: Max Power (http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxpower/468731200/) Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
language: eng

Crime scene Tape
description: Individuals have placed flowers and other items at the crime scene outside of Norris Hall. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxpower/468730806/ Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
creator: Max Power
date: 2007-05-25
contributor: Chad Newswander
rights: Permission Contact: Max Power (http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxpower/468730806/) Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
language: eng