Honouring The Dead VA Tech Massacre

[lonebyrd 0]

In my opinion, all school shootings are a tragedy. People these days, in the US, seem to snap all the time. I remember a long time back where it was postal workers who 'lost it' and were shooting all over the place. The media finds every way to dig through piles of police reports and look at things in one perspective. There can be a million reasons why someone 'snaps', but the only people who know exactly what is going on, is the attacker. I live in the Northeastern US, and I hear all the time about Dorchester, MA and all the shootings that happen there. There is never a ton of press about it because it happens so often. It is a shame what the US has become.

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This reaffirms my fear of Asians.

That is such a typical American comment though. This isn't attacking you personally, I'm now speaking generally of the American public. You fear what is different and what you don't understand. If the person is Asian, if he's black, or brown, or Arab, or Muslim, the first thoughts you think of him are negative. And if he doesn't live up to those expectations, you dismiss it as an exception, and if he does, you see it as confirming your suspicions. But what about the guy who just threatened a copycat killing spree, that would make this one look mild? Are you now going to be afraid of all whites as well? Of course not. Why does a person's race or color of their skin have to determine your attitude towards them?

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

That is such a typical American comment though. This isn't attacking you personally, I'm now speaking generally of the American public. You fear what is different and what you don't understand. If the person is Asian, if he's black, or brown, or Arab, or Muslim, the first thoughts you think of him are negative. And if he doesn't live up to those expectations, you dismiss it as an exception, and if he does, you see it as confirming your suspicions. But what about the guy who just threatened a copycat killing spree, that would make this one look mild? Are you now going to be afraid of all whites as well? Of course not. Why does a person's race or color of their skin have to determine your attitude towards them?

Wasn't that the cause of American isolationism during the 1930s? To isolate oneself to protect the people within it?

xboxrulz

[SilverFox1405241541 0]

So are you Asian or not? lol

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

So are you Asian or not? lol

lol, I am.

xboxrulz

[Grafitti 0]

In no way do I support his actions, but see this mentality I described above as contributing to this calamity.

Va. Tech Shooter Was Picked on in School
By MATT APUZZO

BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP)âLong before he boiled over, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was pushed around and laughed at as a schoolboy in suburban Washington because of his shyness and the strange, mumbly way he talked, former classmates say.

Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., with Cho in 2003, recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation.

Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said.

"As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, 'Go back to China,'" Davids said.

Cho shot 32 people to death and committed suicide Monday in the deadliest one-man shooting rampage in modern U.S. history. The high school classmates' accounts add to the psychological portrait that is beginning to take shape, and could shed light on the video rant Cho mailed to NBC in the middle of his rampage at Virginia Tech.

In the often-incoherent video, the 23-year-old Cho portrays himself as persecuted and rants about rich kids.

"Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats," says Cho, who came to the U.S. at about age 8 in 1992 and whose parents work at a dry cleaners in suburban Washington. "Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything."

With a backlash developing against the media, Fox News said it would stop running the pictures, and other networks said they would severely limit their use.

"It has value as breaking news," said ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider, "but then becomes practically pornographic as it is just repeated ad nauseam."

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

Well, I was understand where he is coming from, I too had difficult with English during my early grades (having studying in Hong Kong during my kindergarten years). However, even other people had picked on me in the past, but none of these actions led me to snap or be quiet about it.I understand how he feels, but I definitely don't agree with him to come to the point of snapping and ranting to the NBC.xboxrulz

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

This just in from Toronto Star:

In Virginia, the search for a new normal

BLACKSBURG, Va.âOn Monday morning, engineering student Joe Aust will remove his belongings from the Virginia Tech room he shared with the deadliest gunman in modern U.S. history.

 

"There's no way I can keep living in that room," said Aust, 19, who spent eight months living with mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho. "I'm usually a pretty calm guy, but this thing has hit me very hard.

 

"I just want to finish my degree and live a normal life," Aust added. "But I don't know if I'll ever understand what happened."

 

How to get on with life after 32 students and professors were murdered weighed heavily on the minds of staff and students yesterday as church bells tolled across the sprawling campus.

 

They gathered at noon for a moment of silence at the heart of the campus, wearing the university's orange and maroon colours and determined to forever remember the victims.

 

Nearby stood Norris Hall, where all but two of Cho's victims were gunned down. What to do with the building â reopen its classrooms, turn it into a memorial, or tear it down â symbolizes the uncertainty of how to move forward after an overwhelmingly traumatic event.

 

Many students expressed faith in the healing power of time. Authorities, for their part, have launched investigations into a somewhat botched police response to the shootings, and on the treatment Cho received after being identified by a Virginia court as mentally ill and an imminent danger to himself and others.

 

Academics, both on and off campus, focused on the effects of a culture that sees guns, and their availability, as a symbol of freedom. They pointed to yesterday's anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., as a stark reminder that shooting sprees are an all too common horror in the United States.

 

"It's a confluence of factors," says Virginia Tech psychologist Danny Axsom. "You've got disturbed personalities and access to a lot of lethal weaponry."

 

Cho, an English student whose violent writings raised concern among his professors, is the latest in a long line of mass murderers who unleashed shooting sprees in the past 60 years.

 

There were 45 mass killings during this period, all but a dozen or so in the United States, according to a database compiled by Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia University.

 

A third of them occurred in schools or universities. Only three of the killers were women, and a third were disgruntled employees. All but one of the mass murders used guns.

 

Often cited as the first to unleash indiscriminate murder on a university campus is Charles Whitman, the ex-marine who killed 13 people with a rifle from the top of a clock tower at the University of Texas in 1966.

 

But the post-World War II shooting sprees began 17 years earlier, when unemployed war veteran Howard Unruh shot people at random in his Camden, N.J., neighbourhood, killing 13 people in 12 minutes with a German-made Luger pistol.

 

Another benchmark came in 1984, when Patrick Sherrill, 44, shot and killed 14 fellow employees in an Oklahoma post office, and the term "going postal" was coined to describe workplace-related violence.

 

The 1990s saw several shooting rampages in U.S. schools, including Columbine High School, where two teens killed 12 students and teachers with semi-automatic weapons. Cho described the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, as "martyrs" in one of his video rants.

 

The weapons of choice are semi-automatics, which fire as fast as the trigger is pulled.

 

"These guys were all losers," said Gary Lavergne, author of a book on Whitman. "When it came to killing, they wanted to be as efficient as possible."

 

Stone said the almost exclusive use of guns in the attacks satisfies the killers' psychotic needs.

 

"These people seem to want to see their victims momentarily and blow them away in a more personal way than tossing a bomb in a school," he said in an interview.

 

He said Cho fits the profile of the typical shooter, particularly younger ones. A "paranoid loner" who may have been schizophrenic, Cho's choice of a handgun allowed him to "stare down" the people he blamed for feeling worthless, Stone said.

 

"For two hours he suddenly became a somebody who had control over the people he envied," he added.

 

Psychiatry professor Frank Ochberg partly explains the choice of guns as consistent with the image of the gun-totting avenger that gained prominence in popular culture after World War II. Cho tapped into that image with the frightening photo album he mailed to NBC TV.

 

"In Cho's pictures, the image of the avenger is a menacing young man with guns in each hand," said Ochberg, a founder of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Disorder.

 

"That was the picture he wanted to create for himself. That's a picture that combines the post-World War II image and the demons in this young man's brain," he added in an interview.

 

Both Stone and Ochberg see the massacre as yet another example of the need for tighter gun-control laws in the U.S.

 

"The only reason for owning a pistol is to kill someone," Stone said.

 

Yet even the worst gun massacre in U.S. history couldn't provoke a noticeable public debate on the issue. A handful of congressmen expressed concerns the day after the shootings, but an astonishing silence prevailed after that.

 

Ochberg, who gave dozens of interviews during the week, said the only journalists who asked about the need for tighter gun-control laws were foreign ones.

 

"America has given up on the political debate about sane and civilized gun availability," said Ochberg, also chairperson emeritus of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.

 

Indeed the loudest voices heard were lobbyists calling for more, rather than fewer, guns.

 

Philip Van Cleave, head of the Virginia Citizens Defence League, said he would use the massacre to renew a push for legislation that would allow guns on the Virginia Tech campus, where a university policy now bans employees and students from carrying them.

 

The campus gun ban made students sitting ducks, Van Cleave argued.

 

"I guarantee you that people in those classrooms were wishing they had access to a handgun during the shootings," he added. "The lesson is that more good people should be armed."

 

Not one of a dozen students randomly polled by the Toronto Star backed the idea. They described it as a recipe for further bloodshed: How would police know who the killer was if they arrived on the scene to find several people with guns drawn?

 

Yet few felt moved to protest for more restrictive laws. A common refrain was that criminals and madmen would get a hold of guns no matter what the laws.

 

Calls for tough gun-control laws after the Columbine shooting failed to weaken the influence of gun lobbies on politicians. Students had to look for other ways to find meaning in the horror.

 

The high school's library, where several students were shot, was torn down and a memorial was built, noted Ochberg, who advised high school officials at the time.

 

The decision caused tension among students, some of whom believed the best way to defy the killers was by keeping the library open. There were also differences between those who wanted specific religious symbols used inside the school to commemorate the dead and those who thought they would be inappropriate in a multi-faith institution.

 

Ochberg said he expects similar differences to occur at Virginia Tech during the weeks ahead.

 

In the meantime, counsellors at the university's Cook Center have posted a notice on their website warning students they may never find a satisfactory answer to why a gunman would open fire on a campus.

 

It also warns about "survivor guilt" â a feeling of guilt for escaping the massacre while others died â and tells students they may have trouble sleeping and eating. "Remember that grief is a long process," it says.

Source

 

xboxrulz

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

Most deranged news I've ever read about the killer:

Virginia Tech killer's tracks traced to eBay

BLACKSBURG, Va.âThe Virginia Tech killer went to the Internet less than a month before the massacre to get ammunition clips that fit one of the two handguns he used in the rampage, an eBay spokesman said today.

 

Seung-Hui Cho also used the account to sell items ranging from Hokies football tickets to horror-themed books, some of which were assigned in one of his classes.

 

The online auction site lists the purchase date of the empty clips as March 22, about three weeks before the attack in which Cho, 23, killed 32 people and himself.

 

EBay spokesman Hani Durzy said the purchase of the clips from a Web vendor based in Idaho was legal and that the company has co-operated with authorities.

 

A search warrant affidavit filed yesterday stated that investigators wanted to search Cho's e-mail accounts, including the address Blazers5505@hotmail.com, which Durzy confirmed was Cho's.

 

Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said investigators are "aware of the eBay activity that mirrors" the Hotmail account.

 

The eBay account demonstrates the prime role computer forensics and other digital information have played in the investigation. Authorities are examining the personal computers found in Cho's dorm room and seeking his cell-phone records.

 

One question they hope to answer is whether Cho had any e-mail contact with Emily Hilscher, one of the first two victims. Investigators plan to search her Virginia Tech e-mail account.

 

Experts say that when the subject of an investigation is a loner like Cho, his computers and cell phone can be a rich source of information. Authorities say Cho had a history of sending menacing text messages and other communications â written and electronic.

 

In late March, Cho bought two 10-round magazines for the Walther P22, one of the weapons used in the massacre.

 

Cho sold tickets to Virginia Tech sporting events, including last year's Peach Bowl. He sold a Texas Instruments graphics calculator that contained several games, most of them with mild themes.

 

"The calculator was used for less than one semester then I dropped the class," Cho wrote on the site.

 

He also sold many books about violence, death and mayhem. Several of those books were used in his English classes, meaning Cho simply could have been selling used books at the end of the semester.

 

His eBay rating was superb â 98.5 percent. That means he received one negative rating from people he dealt with on eBay, compared with 65 positive.

 

"great ebayer. very flexible. AAAAAA+++++" the buyer said of his Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl tickets, which went for $182.50.

 

Andy Koch, Cho's roommate from 2005-06, said he never saw Cho receive or send a package, although he didn't have much interaction with the shooter. Students can sign up for a free lottery on a game-by-game basis, and the tickets are free.

 

"We took him to one football game," he said. "We told him to sign up for the lottery, and he went and he left like in the third quarter, and that was it. He never went again. He never went to another game."

 

Durzy, the eBay spokesman, said the company has been assisting investigators since the start of the case.

 

"Within 24 hours, after Cho's identity was made public, we had reached out to law enforcement to offer our assistance in any investigation," Durzy said. "In looking at his activity on the site, we can confirm that at no point that he used eBay to purchase any guns and ammunition. It is strongly against eBay policy to try to sell guns and ammunition."

 

Attempts to reach the Idaho dealer were unsuccessful.

 

Cho sold the books on the eBay-affiliated site half.com. They include Men, Women, and Chainsaws by Carol J. Clover, a book that explores gender in the modern horror film. Others include The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre; and The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense by Joyce Carol Oates â a book in which the publisher writes: "In these and other gripping and disturbing tales, women are confronted by the evil around them and surprised by the evil they find within themselves."

 

Books by those three authors were taught in his Contemporary Horror class.

 

Experts say things like eBay transactions can be hugely valuable in trying to figure out the motivation behind crimes.

 

An examination of a computer is "very revealing, particularly for a person like this," said Mark Rasch of FTI Consulting, a computer and electronic investigation firm. "What we find ... particularly with people who are very uncommunicative in person, is that they may be much more communicative and free to express themselves with the anonymity that computers and the Internet give you."

 

Cho's computer could hold a record of just about anything he has done, even of activities or communications he may have tried to erase. But Rasch said that likely will not be a problem, noting the way the gunman created a record of his thinking in videos, photos and documents.

 

"This guy wanted to leave a trail. He wasn't trying to conceal what he did," Rasch said.

 

Associated Press writers Kristen Gelineau and Allen G. Breed contributed to this report.

Source

 

xboxrulz

[SilverFox1405241541 0]

As far as being picked on in school, lots of us are. But we don't go kill people. I was picked on a lot in 2nd Grade...but I don't/didn't go kill 32 people.

"What we find ... particularly with people who are very uncommunicative in person, is that they may be much more communicative and free to express themselves"

Lol are they just now figuring that out? I've known that for ages
Edited April 22, 2007 by SilverFox (see edit history)

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Well, I was understand where he is coming from, I too had difficult with English during my early grades (having studying in Hong Kong during my kindergarten years). However, even other people had picked on me in the past, but none of these actions led me to snap or be quiet about it.
I understand how he feels, but I definitely don't agree with him to come to the point of snapping and ranting to the NBC.

xboxrulz

As far as being picked on in school, lots of us are. But we don't go kill people. I was picked on a lot in 2nd Grade...but I don't/didn't go kill 32 people.Lol are they just now figuring that out? I've known that for ages

No, I totally agree with both of you there. I'm just bringing up the other side, where hypothetically speaking, if we could go back and change the past, that treating him differently could have changed things. He needed psychiatric care, that's obvious, but perhaps it was a combination of little things like those that pushed him a little further each time until he went off the edge. Then again, there's no way to know what could have happened, and maybe it wouldn't have made a difference to him. I think it would have been worth a shot.

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

that's true, anything could've happened and we can't do anything about itxboxrulz

[patronus4000 0]

I agree with Killer008r on how these tragedies happen all over the world; I believe that, should we know about them, we would mourn for them too, but not just as much perhaps because they are so far away and in such different conditions that we can't relate to them. We can easily relate to school shootings though because a lot of us, like me, are students in North America where this form of violence seems to be increasing.

This reaffirms my fear of Asians.

Then, dost thou fear me? XD This brings me to another point. Cho, in addition to obliterating the lives and ambitions of 32 people, also disgraces Asians (specifically Koreans) by doing such a deed. There's always a small group of people in every race that participates in such horrid violence. But then there's also the majority who are Good Samaritans or at least non-violent citizens. These people shouldn't have to bear the weight of stereotypes caused by irresponsible citizens.

March 12, 2007: Cho uses credit card to legally buy a 9-mm Glock 19 pistol and 50 rounds of ammunition from Roanoke Firearms costing $571. A background check is completed in about a minute.

A background check was done in ONE minute?! What kind of a background check is that? It's the same as having no background check at all! This shows how lax the USA is on gun control. Do citizens really need firearms to defend themselves? If all firearms were off the streets and banned from citizens, I'm pretty sure violence would drastically decrease. There will always be those who sell illegal firearms, but I believe that if firearms are illegal, there will be some fear in that business. In Canada, we have strict gun control; school shootings still occur, but it's a much lower percentage than those that occur south of our border.

As much as I hope that this kind of a thing will never happen again, I know it will. There are warped minds out there, and combined with guns and enough pressure, another tragedy will shock the world again.

Serena

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

Yup, definitely I support putting tougher controls.xboxrulz

[Arbitrary 0]

This reaffirms my fear of Asians.

Ugh. Tolerance, tolerance is the key. Don't generalize all Asians to be anything like Cho Seung. They're not. That would be utterly pointless--I don't want to see one madman ruin it for a whole group of people. It's already enough of a tragedy, so don't turn it into more of one by bringing prejudice into play. And I'm not really directing this toward you--I'm more directing this toward the general population who like to generalize.

I know this is a bad tradigy and everything but. When you think about it, this kind of thing happens every day in some countries. And yet we don't mourn for them, infact we don't really even bother to care. Even though they're human, we should care.
I feel sorry fro the losses but I really don't understand why when over 100 troops of ours die along with 100+ civilians die from a suecide bomber.

Yeah, I've seen this brought of before, and I agree that it is sad. But I think your point about the troops doesn't work: we know that there will be casualties in war. That cannot be avoided and it is something we knew even before we sent our soldiers out to battle. If we hadn't wanted those tragedies, we wouldn't have sent them. This incident, on the other hand, is very different. When I go to college somewhere, I don't expect to walk into a classroom and get shot. Of course, my point doesn't outweigh the importance of the lives of either people, it's just the way things go.

Wasn't that the cause of American isolationism during the 1930s? To isolate oneself to protect the people within it?

Mmmm...but how does that help? I could use our school's code red analogy: When news of a shooter on campus come, we block the door and "isolate" ourselves from the rest of the campus. We don't let anyone in or out, in case we accidentally let the killer in. Yet, what if this killer is in our classroom? What exactly do we do then? Same in this case: if the killer is within, they're pretty much screwed.

A background check was done in ONE minute?! What kind of a background check is that? It's the same as having no background check at all! This shows how lax the USA is on gun control. Do citizens really need firearms to defend themselves? If all firearms were off the streets and banned from citizens, I'm pretty sure violence would drastically decrease. There will always be those who sell illegal firearms, but I believe that if firearms are illegal, there will be some fear in that business. In Canada, we have strict gun control; school shootings still occur, but it's a much lower percentage than those that occur south of our border.

Ahhh gun control. You have a very good point there, as all the countries in Europe pointed out over and over in their newspapers. Though I'd like to say that I think both sides of this gun control issue have good points. If you don't have guns, such violence will never occur. On the other hand, if you do have guns and someone manages to procure a gun and starts a school shooting, you'd have a much harder time stopping it. (Yes, there are incidents where bystanders with guns were able to stop the shooter) So both sides work, making it a difficult issue.

But I do agree that background checks should be more thorough--I mean, can it be that hard to just dig deeper in a background check? At the same time though, I'm not sure a deeper background check would've helped in this case: Cho Seung didn't have a record with the police or even a mental illness record (the psychologist didn't put anything down in his permanent records since he didn't think there was anything wrong).

Then, dost thou fear me? XD This brings me to another point. Cho, in addition to obliterating the lives and ambitions of 32 people, also disgraces Asians (specifically Koreans) by doing such a deed. There's always a small group of people in every race that participates in such horrid violence. But then there's also the majority who are Good Samaritans or at least non-violent citizens. These people shouldn't have to bear the weight of stereotypes caused by irresponsible citizens.

Agreed. And it's very much unfair for the rest of the population. As much as we'd like to think that the world is all fair and wouldn't condemn other races just because of one thing that one person did, the world doesn't work like that. [sigh]