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20 People Shot Dead on Virginia Tech Campus

BPSCG said:
Hah! I spit on your "stealth mode." If you were truly a Doom player, you would have no need of such cheating devices.

Plus you could kill the giant mechanical spider with your fist.
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[derail]Your right. I like Halo, Battlefield, and the James Bond Series for shooting games. Don't get Lost Planet. Finished it in one night (too easy).[/derail]
 
BPSCG said:
RPG's, IIRC.
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"Rocket-Propelled Grenade" was only referred to that thanks to a translation from another language, if the article in Wikipedia is correct. And while Doom had a rocket launcher, it wasn't called an RPG.

Really, honestly, an RPG is just a rocket launcher; it fires rockets. Grenades (From what I understand, I can be wrong), as used and designated by the English language and formally by the military, refer to grenades that you pull the pin out of and throw; they are thrown objects, namely.

Also, RPG rounds are not designated "grenades", but are designated "rockets". Hence, "RPG rockets". :)

Pedantic, yes, I know.
 
Tailgater said:
[derail]Your right. I like Halo, Battlefield, and the James Bond Series for shooting games. Don't get Lost Planet. Finished it in one night (too easy).[/derail]
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(Overman discreetly adds Tailgater to FBI watch list...)
 
A little more about the shooter:

Fellow students in a playwriting class with Cho described his plays as dark and disturbing.

“His writing, the plays, were really morbid and grotesque,” Stephanie Derry, a senior English major, told the campus newspaper, The Collegiate Times.

“I remember one of them very well. It was about a son who hated his stepfather. In the play, the boy threw a chainsaw around and hammers at him. But the play ended with the boy violently suffocating the father with a Rice Krispy treat,” Derry said.

Derry said Cho’s classmates could only make jokes about Cho’s work because “it was just so fictional, so surreal.”

“I kept having to tell myself there is no way we could have known this was coming,” she told the newspaper. “I was just so frustrated that we saw all the signs but never thought this could happen.”
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Link

I wonder what the armchair psychologists will read into the fact that he chose a Rice Krispy treat with which to kill the father.
 
I don't think there is anything that should be done about this short of better communication across campus when something goes bad. Adding guards, packing heat, security checkpoints, etc, is not the answer. I would not want to live in a state of constant defense and fear for the .0000whatever01% chance I might get killed in a shooting spree. I don't want the rest of the country to be like getting on an airplane. (I am not making any points for your case Shanek:D)
 
Katana said:
A little more about the shooter:



Link

I wonder what the armchair psychologists will read into the fact that he chose a Rice Krispy treat with which to kill the father.
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The paper is on thesmokinggun.com already.
 
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Tricky said:
In my mind, the thing we need to do is to escape the gun culture, or at least handgun culture, that is so pervasive in this country.
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I would agree if such an escape were to start at the top. As long as cops and government has access to guns, so should the public. And frankly, this Bush administration, coupled with a few recent cases of police atrocities have only served to make me more supportive of gun rights.
 
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Rolfe said:
Nevertheless, I'm pretty damn sure that if you're a hard-core bad guy you will be able to acquire the weapon of your choice illegally. Recent events in the London area (murders of individuals by shooting) suggest that this happens a lot, despite the law and best efforts at enforcing.
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Are you in the UK? Last time I was there, I met a guy who carried a gun and who sold guns. All you really need to get guns in the UK is to know is a high school student who knows some drug dealers.
 
and more:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/17/vtech.shooting/

The student who killed 33 people Monday at Virginia Tech paid $571 for a 9 mm Glock 19 pistol just over a month ago, the owner of Roanoke Firearms told CNN Tuesday.
John Markell said Cho Seung-Hui was very low-key when he purchased the gun and 50 rounds of ammunition with a credit card in an "unremarkable" purchase.
Cho presented three forms of identification and state police conducted an instant background check that probably took about a minute, the store owner said.
Cho did not say why he wanted the gun, Markell said.
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Cho left a long and vitriolic note in his dorm room, law enforcement sources told ABC News. It contained an explanation of his actions and states, "You caused me to do this," ABC News reported.
It also railed against "rich kids," "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans" on campus, according to the Chicago Tribune.
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A fellow student said the 23-year-old English major had authored two plays so "twisted" that his classmates suspected he might become a school shooter.
Ian McFarland, who said he had class with Cho Seung-hui, called the plays "very graphic" and "extremely disturbing."
McFarland is an employee of America Online, which has provided the writings to CNN.
"It was like something out of a nightmare," McFarland wrote in a blog. "The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of.
"Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter."
A university official also said that Cho scribed writings so "disturbing" they were sent to administrators, a university official said Tuesday.
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Pardalis said:
The more I think about it, the less sense this post makes.

I don't know if this has been said in the thread already, but if everybody has a gun and starts shooting back at the lone guman, who is going to tell the crazy guy appart from the firing crowd? The more likely outcome is a much bigger blood bath in my opinion.

The police are trained for these situations, and know how to handle a chaos. Regular people are not.
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Funny, this post does not seem to make any sense at all. How about, shoot at the guy that everybody else is shooting at? Or ask someone when coming upon the scene who is the bad guy. Its not like it would turn into an old Western shootout. It is likely that the gunman could be neutralized within seconds saving countless lives if just one person had a gun and knew how to use it.
 
LawnOven said:
and more:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/17/vtech.shooting/
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That last part was unbelievable.

"Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter."
A university official also said that Cho scribed writings so "disturbing" they were sent to administrators, a university official said Tuesday.
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So this guy was setting off alarm bells left and right, but the fact that the students worried about him becoming a school shooter specifically is just chilling.

People in the media keep talking about how things like this might be prevented - how we need to be aware of people in our midst who might pose a threat. Well, that's all well and good, but what power did the "administrators" who received info about this guy have?

Had they gone to the police, what could they have done? I suppose they could have talked to him at least, but, even if they learned he had a gun (although I read that Virginia doesn't have a gun registry), what then? It's not like they could charge him with anything or follow him around 24 hours a day because folks worried that he might commit a crime. Not that their concerns aren't valid (obviously they were).

What I'm getting at is this: With whatever info the school's higher-ups received about this guy and all olf the concern, is there anything that they could have done to stop these murders from occurring?
 
richardm said:
Joel Myrick's actions at another school have been mentioned in this forum before. Basically he fetched a gun out of his car and "persuaded" the killer to stop. Does an assistant principal count as a private citizen?

Edited to add: I guess it may have stuck in my mind because there aren't that many examples. Whether that's down to problems of reporting or not, who knows?
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Yeah, that counts.
 
Katana said:
What I'm getting at is this: With whatever info the school's higher-ups received about this guy and all olf the concern, is there anything that they could have done to stop these murders from occurring?
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Not without trampling over the rights of every other "strange" kid that comes along.
 
BPSCG said:
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Getting back to the "rushing the shooter" discussion for a bit: Some people here (deliberately?) misunderstand me when I ask why nobody did it. I never made any special claims to personal bravery; for all I know, I would have ended up a quaking, pants-soiling mess on the floor, pleading for my life.

I was simply asking why the students didn't rush him as a group. That would have been the rational thing to do. Why did they not do the rational thing? Does sheer terror short-circuit the reasoning process that badly? Does the brain do some sort of mental calculus and figure that maybe there's a better chance that he'll run out of bullets or the cavalry will arrive or he'll sober up or he'll get hit by lightning, than the chance of my surviving if we rush him? Is there a denial process at work?

The people on United flight 93 on September 11, 2001 also faced certain death and fought back. Was it because they had enough time and information to dismiss their denial, and the VT students did not?....
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One student in a room where some were shot, the shooter left, and they were able to hold the door preventing him from returning said, there was no time to rush the guy. I also got the impression people were hiding around a room behind tables and other objects. If there was a large room full of people getting shot at I can see a group rushing the guy. You're going to get shot anyway. And on flight 91 they had time to plan and even vote on it. But in a few seconds to minutes when people are dispersed, I don't think rushing the guy would have been all that easy.

If you knew the guy was coming, and you couldn't bar the door, you could maybe plan something. When we hear the stories of the more seriously wounded, we may find out in the classes he went in first, he got most of the victims and in the classes he tried to enter later, they did get the doors blocked.

From the description by the hospital doctor that every victim seriously wounded had at least three shots in them, the guy may have spent half the time going back and shooting the same people after he couldn't get to any new ones. It would explain why so many were dead. If wounded, they'd be less able to barricade a door. One or two rooms could have had most of the casualties.
 
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