News is in about at least 22 killed and 21 injured.

BBC News

I heard on a local radio station that the death toll is 30.

I, still to this day, do not understand why someone who wants to kill has to take several others with them. How sad for all those families and students.

Edit to add: my local Fox station has it at 32.

Fox 4 News

I've been keeping watch on TV this morning regarding this awful event. As of this moment, the television report said 29 people have died.

Edited to add: Just saw Dave's post. I wonder if the gunman is the 30th person?

The reports are still coming in, and details are sketchy, but it sounds as though this could end up being the worst mass shooting ever in the U.S.

CNN on line states "at least 21 dead." Reading the article is chilling.

Massacre

My Yahoo news thing just said 21 and the shooter was killed bringing it to 22.


"A White House spokesman said President Bush was horrified by the rampage and offered his prayers to the victims and the people of Virginia.

"The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed," spokeswoman Dana Perino said."



I found the statement from President Bush significant in the way gun control is mentioned.


I also wonder how students will keep on going after this has happened in their world.

When I was in school, something very similiar to this ALMOST happened. A guy walked into an Actuarial Science classroom with an M-16. Thankfully, he'd overloaded his magazine and the gun jammed.

We don't yet know anything about the identity of the shooter or shooters, but my first thought was: It's astonishing. We're spending millions on "Homeland Security," in order to protect the country from terrorists, but we do next to nothing to keep guns out of the hands of our own home-grown lunatics.

This is not the first time that has occurred to me.

Some early questions being raised include a puzzling one - why were students [ apparently] not told over the PA system to 'lock down' after the early shooting took place?

My first reaction to your question ktstew is that possibly because the first shootings took place in a dorm, maybe not too close to classrooms. Lots of "maybe" for right now.

In any case I'm sure it will be a little while yet before all the details are accurate. CNN now states at least 31 killed. Sad, sad, sad.

That's probably right. Everybody assumed the shooting was over early in the morning because it didn't seem possible the situation could turn into a campus - wide slaughter.
How horrible that in this modern day we have to think so far out of the box to be one step ahead of disaster.

So Sad..... I live appx 50 miles from the University and can see how this guy could get lost in the crowd and hard to find... It's 2600 acres University. This just makes me so sad.... I will NEVER understand why.......

I'm listening to the press conference now and it has been confirmed 33 dead including the gunman. The gunman still has not been identified. This whole situation is just awful.

Also, the school had had two bomb threats in the past two weeks. It's currently unknown if the bomb threats were related to the shootings this morning.

When the gunman entered the engineering building, he chained the doors shut so no one could get out.

http://www.cnn.com/

I can't link directly to it, but there's a video someone took on his camera phone while the shootings took place. The link is labelled "I-Report: Gunshots captured on a cell phone". (On another website, it said the student who took this video was from the Middle East and said 'shootings are commonplace for me' or something like that.)

Also, a former FBI agent (Gregg McCrary) on MSNBC right now said to be on the lookout for copycats right now - an event like this might push someone who was on the edge over.

The possibility of copycat shootings is a very real one, ladymacb. I was also struck by the report that doors had been chained shut. There's a novel about a school massacre, Lionel Shriver's "We Need To Talk About Kevin," in which the young killer chains shut the doors to the high school gymnasium in which his victims are meeting. The idea was terrifying enough in fiction. I shuddered when I heard this had actually happened at Virginia Tech.

What kind of anger or rage could drive someone to do this? I just don't understand.
Last year when I was teaching high school I kept thinking that "something like Columbine could happen here." I don't know whether societal pressures, biochemical anamolies, or unchecked and unattended anger and rage cause someone to do this. But look how many times it does happen.
I will be watching this story closely, hoping we can all figure out some of the reasons people snap like this.

My sympathy and compassion goes out to everyone touched by this tragic mass murder and selfish suicide.

The UK has very strict gun laws and we had just over 100 deaths by shooting last year: the USA has very slack gun laws and has (on average) 80 gun-related deaths a day! I'm sure Charlton Heston will be trotting out his 'cold dead hands' speech again and the NRA will remind every American that George the third could invade any minute. I'm sure that will be great comfort to the friends and family of the victims.

My sympathy goes out to all the families.

This is so wrong. I don't care what the problem was that the shooter had it doen't give him the right to take anyone else's life.

I so believe in gun control and I know it isn't a perfect system but too many loonies are able to get guns and then you have shootings like the one today.

Even here in Canada we have had mass kilings at schools and we are suppose to have very strict gun control laws but they aren't tough enough as far as I am concerned.

This is just my opinion.

PF

Quote:

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Edit to add: The university did use the sirens to warn the students, email and a phone tree.

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This is the absolute first I 've heard about sirens or any kind of warning being used - though I 've tried to listen for such information all day. Hoping to hear that somebody had thought of it, maybe.

The reason I thought of the PA system? When I was a junior in high school, racial tensions ran high, and there were often police cruisers parked at strategic locations on campus. On more than one occasion, riots were out of control and a few stabbings occurred. Those lock down situations occurred with swiftness and precision because of both the intercom system and the outside PA which if necessary could be heard across the four lane. Of course that was long ago, and possibly shows how out of touch I am with the intra- structure of a modern school.

I can't believe the school carried on business as usual after two of its resident students had just been murdered anyway, much less without a suspect in custody and without a full-on lock-down situation at all entry and exit points of the university. Did they think that the killer escaped with pixie dust and Hermes' boots?

Although it is easier to cast blame about right now than look for causes for this terrible effect.

Call me enraged but barely rational.

I'm probably wondering about things in a "sideways" direction here (what else is new ?) but, after watching all the gruesome coverage last night on this, I was slightly unsettled by more than that this was a horrific event, full of pointless violence, shock waves from a rage that soundly defies what rage even stands for, another example of "is anywhere, anything, any daily act as we act it, safe?". The combination of grief, shock, human nature, rock solid fear and the like causes us to instinctively "act funny" in the shadow of these horrors, I think. But I, for one, was really daunted by that press conference. The dean was there, (the police [chief, I think], too). At that point they were still notifying parents/families of victims. No names had been offered of those involved. Speculations as to motives were running wild (I thought one more time how odd it seems when we waste a lot of energy assgning reasonable motives to a lunatic...by definition, I don't think lunatics work using understandable motives - but I'm never sure ). Clearly, though, those school/local officials were taking a SERIOUS beating! There are so many questions here that need answers. Or, if no good answers are available, the questions need raised anyway. We NEED to talk about real (and not just discussed/"what if?") public security, both in colleges and elsewhere. We NEED to talk about gun control and especially how it is or should be viewed in tandem with mental health. We NEED to get a substantially better grip on that, in unexpected matters such as this one, the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. Even though we should be wired to do it better in these times, we NEED to presuppose just how bad things can become before they become that way. These things are mighty important issues, but I (personally) believe they should be dealt with in a more dignified and sensible order than they were yesterday. At the press conference the "officials" were being soundly pummeled (pretty much blamed) for the death of 30+ people. Not exactly surprising, I guess, for the media to do that - but exactly what service was being done in the process? The locals were just as rattled by this [OK, probably MUCH more so] as much as you or I but yet they had to stand there, while the wounds were still so fresh as to not have been fully identified as to who they belonged to just yet, being no more or less in the face of a brutal firing squad. It always makes me wonder (I've seen that sort of thing happen SO MANY times before) ~ "Whew. Now we have someone to hold accountable. Someone to blame. Carry on, kids. This problem can now be almost safely filed away for now..." To me, the one accountable is the nutcase with the gun. If negligence was in place in key regions, let that be worked out later. It seemed to me the order of reactions AFTER the event was downright unnecessary, almost cruel and hardly purposeful.

Maybe it's just me. I was raised in a time when, at school as a kid, we had "drills" as to what to do in the case of a nuclear war. It seems funny now, but it was serious business then. What were our instructions? 'Get under your desk, and get under there in a hurry!' We all know, now, that that riickety little desk wouldn't have helped much in terms of sparing our fledgeling lives against radiation. But it DID make us feel a bit empowered to think so. It seems to me, though, that if the current mindset were in place back then that is in place now, we'd all be much more immediately concerned (in the case of that threatened "bomb", were it to drop) with nailing the Desk Companies for not making our assigned spots in our classroom out of substantial enough lead.

Just my thoughts, though. I'm sure they don't reflect those of the majority on this one...