Unimaginable horror struck a bucolic college campus in southern Virginia on Monday as youth and innocents were senselessly slaughtered.
Echoes of the gunshots fired at Virginia Tech could be heard here in Colorado, where nearly eight years ago two Columbine students killed 12 high school classmates and a teacher before turning guns on themselves.
The Virginia Tech atrocity was this country’s worst shooting rampage ever. We know the story all too well. Our hearts ache for the families who lost loved ones, and for the community that must eventually pick up the pieces and mend shattered lives.
On Monday, the questions were the same as in Jefferson County on April 20, 1999: Why? Who could do this? How could it happen? Couldn’t somebody have stopped it?
University police received a 911 call about a shooting at a dormitory at 7:15 a.m. where at least two people were killed. About two hours later, horror was unleashed upon a classroom in Norris Hall, an engineering building across campus. University president Charles Steger called it a “tragic and a sorrowful crime scene.”
Questions quickly arose Monday about why the whole campus wasn’t locked down after the first shooting. The university’s police chief said police received information that “it was an isolated event to that building [the dorm] and the decision was made not to cancel classes at that time.”
Similar questions arose after Columbine: Why were police so passive? Why didn’t they charge into the school?
“We had some reason to believe the shooter had left campus,” Chief Wendell Flinchum said in Virginia.
With the investigation into the Virginia Tech massacre just beginning, it may take days or weeks to truly know how events unfolded. It will take much longer to heal and recover.
We may never understand the why.
As the Virginia Tech community copes with this tragedy, the rest of us must confront our culture of violence. After Columbine, we, as a society, went looking for scapegoats: guns, violent video games, heavy metal music, absentee parents.
We accept a culture where guns are almost as accessible as those violent video games we detest. We allow ourselves to become desensitized as fictional violence plays out nightly in prime time. Images of war and bloodshed, 24 hours a day, add to the mayhem. Violence to solve a problem, to settle a score, to silence demons.
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.
