Va Tech forges kinship with cities hit by violence
17 Apr 2007 19:42:31 GMT Source: Reuters
By David Morgan WASHINGTON, April 17 (Reuters) - Virginia Tech university's community, stunned by the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history, received an outpouring of knowing sympathy on Tuesday from newspapers in cities stricken by other mass shootings. "We offer not only our condolences but our understanding to the residents of Blacksburg, with whom we now have too much in common," said the Austin American-Statesman in Austin, Texas, where University of Texas student Charles Whitman killed 13 people and wounded 31 in an August 1966 spree. Until this week, Whitman's rampage had been the worst school shooting incident in the United States. "We weren't used to this kind of violence in 1966. Sadly, we are now," the newspaper said. At least eight major shootings at U.S. schools and colleges over the past decade have fueled an ongoing debate about underlying social issues that some say prompts violence, from gun control and television violence to the psychological effects on youth of violent video games. "This tragedy could have happened at any school," observed Virginia Tech's student-run Collegiate Times. "The victims of this senseless violence could have been any of us, and that is the saddest part." On Tuesday, police identified 23-year-old student Cho Seung-Hui of South Korea as the gunman who killed 32 people and himself on Monday on the campus in the Blue Ridge mountains of southwestern Virginia. In Colorado, residents on Friday will observe the eighth anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre that left 14 students and a teacher dead. "As we wrote on these pages the day after the Columbine killings, we must commit ourselves to a new determination to nurture each other, and the children committed to our care, in ways more meaningful than we have ever known before," the Denver Post said in an editorial. DANGERS OF OVERREACTING Other newspapers warned about the dangers of overreacting to the shootings and Virginia Tech's decision not to take more stringent security steps after the first shooting that claimed two lives. The Rocky Mountain News urged readers not to second-guess decisions by Virginia Tech administrators and police, and warned that stringent security could undermine the open atmosphere that is the hallmark of college campuses. "For now, we can only grieve, and hope that as the investigation unfolds, reasonable preventive measures that now seem elusive become more obvious," the News said. In Jonesboro, Arkansas, where two boys aged 13 and 11 in 1998 set off a school fire alarm and killed four students and a teacher as they left the building, the Sun newspaper noted that anger will inevitably become an issue for Virginia Tech students and the victims' family members and friends. "The important thing for Virginia Tech now is dealing with the aftermath," the newspaper said. "School shootings have become only too common in this country, and we in Jonesboro know well that it can happen anywhere."
