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Questions remain after worst
U.S. shooting rampage
Andrea Hopkins and Patricia Zengerle
Reuters
Tuesday April 17, 2007
Police and university officials faced pressure on Tuesday to explain
how a gunman evaded detection between killing two people and going
on to kill 30 others two hours later in the United States' worst
shooting rampage.
The man killed himself in a classroom at Virginia Tech university
after opening fire on students and staff in an apparently premeditated
massacre on Monday morning, leaving the sprawling rural campus reeling
with grief and shock. Two people were shot dead earlier in a shooting
at a dormitory.
The gunman was an Asian male who was a student at the university
and a dormitory resident, Virginia Tech president Charles Steger
told CNN. His name was not released.
"I don't even know if any of my friends were killed, because
it was so hard to get in touch with anyone last night," said
Brittany Jones, a 19-year-old Tech student from Urbanna, Virginia,
early on Tuesday morning.
"Even if they weren't, it wouldn't make it any less sad. You
don't expect this to happen at your school. We're just kids,"
she said, as she watched members of the university's military corps
drill before class.
Some of the uniformed cadets were crying and hugging one another
on the drill field, which was to host a candlelight vigil in memory
of the shooting victims on Tuesday night.
President George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush were to attend
a memorial service at Virginia Tech on Tuesday afternoon.
Television images of terrified students and police dragging out
bloody victims revived memories of the Columbine High School massacre
in 1999 and were likely to renew heated debate about America's gun
laws.
Police said the gunman appeared to have used chains to lock doors
and prevent victims from escaping. Fifteen people were wounded,
including those shot and students hurt jumping from windows in a
desperate attempt to flee the gunfire.
'SHOOTING TO KILL'
"There were leg, arm, head, face (injuries), the more critical
ones actually had head or facial shots. There were chest shots,
leg shots, arm shots. He was just shooting to kill," Dr. Joseph
Cacioppo, an emergency room physician who treated the wounded, told
Reuters.
Many students expressed anger that they were not warned of any
danger until more than two hours after the first attack at a dormitory
-- and then only in an e-mail from the university.
"We knew that there was a shooting but we thought it was confined
to a particular setting," Steger told reporters, explaining
the lack of more urgent measures such as evacuating the sprawling
grounds or shutting down the whole campus, which has more than 25,000
full-time students.
Although police said earlier there appeared to be only one gunman,
they declined to confirm the two incidents were linked. Steger said
the investigation was still unfolding but that he did not believe
there was a second gunman still at large.
Steger defended campus police from criticism they failed to take
adequate safety measures after the first shooting.
"They have worked very professionally and handled this as
skillfully as anybody might be able to do it," he said.
The first shooting was reported to campus police at about 7:15
a.m. (1115 GMT) in West Ambler Johnston Hall, a dormitory housing
some 900 students. Two hours later, dozens of shots were fired a
half-mile away at Norris Hall, site of the science and engineering
school.
Witnesses said the killer was a black-clad Asian male who calmly
shot students and staff.
Authorities have not released the names of the victims but Israeli
media reported one of the dead was Liviu Librescu, an Israeli citizen
and engineering professor at the university.
HEATED GUN DEBATE
More than 30,000 people die from gunshot wounds in the United States
every year and there are more guns in private hands than in any
other country.
But a powerful gun lobby and support for gun ownership rights have
largely thwarted attempts to tighten controls.
Advocates of gun ownership rights saw Monday's massacre as evidence
of the need to relax gun laws, not tighten them.
"All the school shootings that have ended abruptly in the
last 10 years were stopped because a law-abiding citizen -- a potential
victim -- had a gun," said Larry Pratt, executive director
of Gun Owners of America.
"The latest school shooting at Virginia Tech demands an immediate
end to the gun-free zone law which leaves the nation's schools at
the mercy of madmen."
In an editorial, The New York Times said the shooting was "another
horrifying reminder that some of the gravest dangers Americans face
come from killers at home armed with guns that are frighteningly
easy to obtain."
Some international commentators also said condemned U.S. gun laws.
"The Virginia Polytechnic Institute slaughter forces American
society to once again examine itself, its violence, the obsession
with guns of part of its population, the troubles of its youth,
subjected to the double tyranny of abundance and competition,"
said France's Le Monde newspaper
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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