A massacre in Virginia | Murder at school | Economist.com

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ON MONDAY April 16th, a gunman killed perhaps as many as 32 people at Virginia Tech university, in Blacksburg, Virginia. In the way of the modern world, somebody with a mobile-phone camera was nearby to capture it. The shaky, grainy recording shows little, but the audio is telling. One high pitched shot after another rings out, erratically but quickly. Witnesses initially described an Asian-looking gunman of university age, who carried at least one, perhaps two, semi-automatic pistols, with lots of ammunition. At the end of the rampage he was dead, perhaps by his own hand.

This is the deadliest university shooting in American history. In 1999 two outcast high-school students killed 13 others and themselves at their school in Columbine, Colorado, setting off an anguished national debate about bullying in school, violence on television and other such topics. In the hitherto most famous university-based murder spree, Charles Whitman killed 16 people, mostly shot sniper-style from the top of a tower at the University of Texas, in 1966. He had a brain tumour that may have affected his behaviour.

No one knows yet what led the young man to slaughter so many at the quiet university in this sleepy western Virginian city this week. But there are sure to be recriminations about how the day was handled. At around 7.15 in the morning, someone entered a student dormitory and shot several people, killing at least one. Police rushed to the scene, and other students woke to the sounds of gunshots, sirens and police milling around.

Most of the carnage came two hours later, in a different building filled with classrooms. The police will want to know where the killer went in the intervening two hours. Parents and students will want to know why, with the gunman still at large, the university did not cancel classes. The university was only “locked down”—with students forced to stay in their classrooms and dormitories—after the second round of killings. Students sat, some reading the news wirelessly on their laptop computers and instant-messaging with loved ones, until shortly after noon.

And as is always the case after such a tragedy in America, many will point their fingers at the country’s lax gun laws. The laws vary from state to state, and in southern states like Virginia, they tend to be the least strict of all. In that state, no license or training is required to buy a handgun, and buyers can avoid background checks by shopping at gun-shows. An investigation of course will follow. But, at the least, some will question Americans’ comfort with the easy availability of deadly weapons.

Similar atrocities have happened in countries with much stricter laws—at Dunblane in Scotland in 1996 and in Erfurt, in Germany, in 2002. But such events, elsewhere, lead to the laws being tightened even further. Inevitably individuals set on committing violence find some way to act, but with such effective tools as automatic pistols available to do so quickly and efficiently, the toll may be higher. In a country already jumpy about terrorism, it is a sobering reminder of the nearness of death.

A massacre in Virginia | Murder at school | Economist.com