virginia tech

djbrigidope

anyone hear about the shooting. at least 21 dead. anyone know what happened

mordecai

no more than the wire reports. sad news for sure though...
my thoughts & prayers go to the students, faculty, and families.
1 of my co-worker's is still trying to reach his son

DrJoel

Yeah it is absolutely crazy. I read a headline this morning when they said one dead, now its 21 dead and 20 some injured?

I can't even start to wrap my head around what would push someone to do this.

Cosmo

They say it's 22 dead now. Really a sad situation.

spelunk

This is really scary.

bubor0ck

I see 25 now at various outlets. I feel ill. Girls little bro goes there, but happens to be abroad. Has many friends in the engineering school. The way they are wording it "some of them students"... means most are faculty/staff? Awful.

CousinLarry

Awful.

djbrigidope

Awful.

yeah i didnt mean to start off the monday with such news but this is intense.

Tabasko

31 people dead.

really really sad.

CNN calls it the deadliest shooting incident in US history.

Jimster

Shocking.

DJBombjack

I'm a little disturbed at the way CNN are presenting the 'worst shooting in US history' as something which should be in the Guiness Book Of Records. Almost as if the anchors are thinking 'This is my big break, this is gonna make me...'

Sick.

jaymack

I'm a little disturbed at the way CNN are presenting the 'worst shooting in US history' as something which should be in the Guiness Book Of Records. Almost as if the anchors are thinking 'This is my big break, this is gonna make me...'

Sick.

thats the media for ya. pathetic.

edulus

everyone round here is pretty down. its one of those things, where you ask, blacksburg? really? sounded like he had a pretty serious gun as well.

CousinLarry

Not on this scale, but it seems like there have been a lot of these in the past couple of weeks.

CousinLarry

I'm a little disturbed at the way CNN are presenting the 'worst shooting in US history' as something which should be in the Guiness Book Of Records. Almost as if the anchors are thinking 'This is my big break, this is gonna make me...'

Sick.

Right now they are playing the sounds of the gunshots for some expert. Fucking sick.

day

I need to turn the tv off because CNN keeps playing that video over and over again and hearing the shooting and screams is really starting to fuck me up.

The_Non

This press conference is bad dawgs. I'm shocked at the ineptitude displayed by VT authorities and local police.

volumen

I'm a little disturbed at the way CNN are presenting the 'worst shooting in US history' as something which should be in the Guiness Book Of Records. Almost as if the anchors are thinking 'This is my big break, this is gonna make me...'

Sick.

Right now they are playing the sounds of the gunshots for some expert. Fucking sick.

Wolf Blitzer was playing the video with a counter next to it adding up the gun shots as they rang out. Wolf instructed us to "count along". What a piece of shit!

jlee

This press conference is bad dawgs. I'm shocked at the ineptitude displayed by VT authorities and local police.

dude...i am shocked at that media's expectation that all the answers should already be figured out and the case closed.

jesus, some crazy/last-thing-in-the-world-you'd-expect shit happened and folks want to act all shocked that people don't really know whats going on yet. shit just happend 8hrs ago on a 2600 acre campus with thousands of students.

i swear, fucking CSI cop dramas have the entire nation thinking all crimes should be solved in 30min.

doughboy

Wolf instructed us to "count along". What a piece of shit!

Totally agree - them anchors live for this sort of stuff. Used to work with a web-based news agency and this would be 'A Great News Day'. Not pretty - especially when the qualify it with the whole "we just want to get the story out to the people" sctick.

The really sick thing is that despite scale of the tragedy, Mr NRA or some such will cough up some crap like "it weren't the gun that killed 'em, it was this pinko/lefty/gamer/freak/ (fill in the blank)... it's the god given right of every American blah blah blah."

There was a guy from John Hopkins Centre on radio here in NZ explaining how there are now 200 Million guns in the US, and that incidents like this have lead to serious gun law changes in UK / Aust etc. Food for thought... but not now... this is horrible.

Thoughts go out from the Sth Hemisphere

LaserWolf

Saw this here and went to the cnn web site. Not to be out done by the TV side they have link for students to send their photos and vids to.

Very sad day.

There was just a school shooting here in Portland. There was a story about how the police here have trained for school shootings and they now handle things totally different from the old surround and call in the SWAT team method that was used at Columbine. The new police method is for first responders to go directly to the shooting. Not sure what the Blacksburg police did or could have done. We can all agree that the school should have been on lock down until the dorm shooter was caught. Just second guessing here. Sorry if it is too soon.

batmon

Not to be out done by the TV side they have link for students to send their photos and vids to.

Gotta keep up w/ the bloggers.

Cosmo

Not to be out done by the TV side they have link for students to send their photos and vids to.

Gotta keep up w/ the bloggers.

In my opinion there's nothing wrong with asking people to send in their photos and videos. While the sensationalism of this example in particular and the media's philosophy in general is not something that I agree with, documentation is extremely important. In school we learn that "if it bleeds, it leads" and of course this caters to our morbid natural curiosity as humans, but at the same time the collection and dissemination of the facts should be able to help us understand, and ultimately perhaps, deal with the horror that are events such as the Virginia Tech shooting.

Also, considering the chaos of the events it's quite possible that any evidence would help the investigators try to piece together the fragmented madness of this afternoon.

izm707

It's been like 4 hours im following the coverage on both CNN and BBC (i like the English phlegm when they report events). I cant understand WHY the school had not been shutdown when the first shooting occurs. It was 2 bodies. A man and woman. Why was the other students allowed to naviguate freely, no matter how big the campus is. I mean, in my book, killing two persons is a reason important enough to shut everything down...Im feeling lik there was some politics where the Dean or whoever else may have tought about hiding the first shooting and wished it was an isolated incident. But wishing is one thing. It wasnt isolated. I know i'm just making assumptions and hypothesis. But if i was a parent of one of the dead student, i wouldnt care about apologies and such...just tell me why a guy can shot more than 50 bullets. Im thinking, cops usually shoot you by mistake for being too rude and too quick to pull the trigger. Now we got a case where they was not aggressive enough and not fast enough to kill an obvious murderer. It's kinda of buggin. On the other hand, it's way too early to ask for answers...

LaserWolf

Not to be out done by the TV side they have link for students to send their photos and vids to.

Gotta keep up w/ the bloggers.

In my opinion there's nothing wrong with asking people to send in their photos and videos. While the sensationalism of this example in particular and the media's philosophy in general is not something that I agree with, documentation is extremely important. In school we learn that "if it bleeds, it leads" and of course this caters to our morbid natural curiosity as humans, but at the same time the collection and dissemination of the facts should be able to help us understand, and ultimately perhaps, deal with the horror that are events such as the Virginia Tech shooting.

Also, considering the chaos of the events it's quite possible that any evidence would help the investigators try to piece together the fragmented madness of this afternoon.

I thought the prominent link was over the top. While I agree documenting this tragedy is work that needs to be done, and will help the investigators, CNN are not the investigators.

I'm old enough to remember Walter Cronkite and the flat telling of the facts accompanied by his clear emotional concern for the fallen. Very different from the "let's all count along with the biggest shooting ever! We have footage no one else does" that I gather is going on right now on every channel.

I turned off the TV on 9/11 after a fire fighter yelled at news camera operator to get out of his way so he could save lives.

mannybolone

This will obviously be one of the main "second-guessing" points made in the days to come. As someone who lived through some crazy ass shit at UC Berkeley (another very big public school), if someone gets killed on one part of campus, that's not automatically presumed to be a campus-wide incident, especially if the crime is presumed to be a domestic issue.

I'm not saying VT folks did the right/wrong thing, but given the size of the campus, it's not an unreasonable course of action to keep the campus operating as normal. What makes this csae so strange is that it sounds like (and hell, who knows at this point, for certain?) it may have begun as a domestic dispute (some guy hunting down his ex) but then turned into something else entirely given that this shooter supposedly walked half a mile to an entirely different part of campus, two hours later, and started shooting folks again.

What you can expect to see in the future are policies where any shooting in/around campus could be cause to close/lockdown campus immediately, at least until a shooter is caught. That, to be, would err on the side of caution but it'd also be, in my opinion, a gross overreaction. These kinds of shootings are horrific but they are, by far, by far, by far, isolated events rather than the norm in American society. They do, however, make people feel extremely vulnerable because we don't expect violence like this to pop off in places like college campuses.

It's been like 4 hours im following the coverage on both CNN and BBC (i like the English phlegm when they report events). I cant understand WHY the school had not been shutdown when the first shooting occurs. It was 2 bodies. A man and woman. Why was the other students allowed to naviguate freely, no matter how big the campus is. I mean, in my book, killing two persons is a reason important enough to shut everything down...Im feeling lik there was some politics where the Dean or whoever else may have tought about hiding the first shooting and wished it was an isolated incident. But wishing is one thing. It wasnt isolated. I know i'm just making assumptions and hypothesis. But if i was a parent of one of the dead student, i wouldnt care about apologies and such...just tell me why a guy can shot more than 50 bullets. Im thinking, cops usually shoot you by mistake for being too rude and too quick to pull the trigger. Now we got a case where they was not aggressive enough and not fast enough to kill an obvious murderer. It's kinda of buggin. On the other hand, it's way too early to ask for answers...

thrope

as you said, very very very isolated incidents.......so why not always lock down the whole campus after a shooting? i see NO REASON not to err on the side of caution. who cares if you 'grossly overreact' to some thing like this once every few years? *shrug*

Mike_Bell

I was listening to a radio show after this incident happened and a caller called in from the school. Allegedly, the killer was a stalker and shot the person he stalked.
Also, instead of the shooting just the girl's boyfriend, he decided to kill all of the men in the room.

This isn't official, it's just something I heard on the radio show.

mannybolone

as you said, very very very isolated incidents.......so why not always lock down the whole campus after a shooting? i see NO REASON not to err on the side of caution. who cares if you 'grossly overreact' to some thing like this once every few years? *shrug*

Do you fly? Planes crash you know.

kitchenknight

as you said, very very very isolated incidents.......so why not always lock down the whole campus after a shooting? i see NO REASON not to err on the side of caution. who cares if you 'grossly overreact' to some thing like this once every few years? *shrug*

I agree NOW...but, this is how we will deal with things going forward. unfortunately, this was a lesson that is going to be learned the hard way.

as someone who has lived around college campuses most of his life, and whose parents have worked in universities since I was born, i've been around suicides, violence, rape, and murder at the universities where my parents worked. and, this has NEVER been the reaction- to close down the campus, etc.

Will that change now? absolutely. unfortunately, it took this event to make that change...but, i feel like it will never be the same from here on out.

izm707

thx for your income...very appreciated.