Monday, April 16, 2007

Pardon the Interruption

Anyone who's ever read this blog knows I concentrate my writings on soccer, specifically the Wizards. I don't claim to be up to date on current world events, I don't know what's going on with whoever's presidential campaign and the immigration debate, I'm not a social commentator. If you want more of that, check out Tony's Kansas City. I write about what I know, and that's soccer and the Kansas City Wizards. That said, there are certain events that when they happen cause everything else around you to seem so small and insignificant. Today unfortunately one of those events occurred.

As almost all of you probably know by now, this morning, a gunman at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University opened fire at two locations on the the schools campus, the first at West Ambler Johnston Hall, one of Tech's larger dorms on campus. The second was in Norris Hall, one of the campus' engineering buildings. As of the posting of this blog message, deaths are currently numbered at 33 and as many as 28 injured. Making it one of the largest mass shootings in American history. Details are still so sketchy at this time that it'd be almost a waste to post the details as they are right now.

You can't put into words what the people on Tech's campus must be going through right now, and I can't even begin to think about what they could be going through. All I know is that I have that sickening, depressed feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you read and hear about things like this.

As a person who has recently graduated from college, it's a scary thing to think about, you start to look at your college life in a different way, you hear about what is happening and you begin to put those events in play on your campus, and it makes you even sicker. This isn't suppose to happen in college, in college you have the rest of your life ahead of you, you're shaping your life for the future, and to have so many young lives ended is such an immense tragedy. It just brings up so many questions about this incident and what happened here. The biggest being the question WHY? Why would someone do this sort of thing to other human beings? What could drive a person to do this? Was it a girlfriend problem, as some would suggest the dorm shooting was? Was it a grade issue, as people think the shooting in the classrooms were? Why was the school put off of lockdown after the first shooting occurred in the dorms? Were there signs that this was going to happen and could anyone have stopped this? There are so many questions right now, and no where near enough answers. Hopefully in the next few days, some answers will start to come out. But right now it's time to morn the losses that have occurred today.

It's senseless when things like this happen, you can't even begin to think about it. All you can do is to pray for everyone involved in any way in this incident and to morn those that have died.

My prayers and thoughts go out to those families, friends, and anyone else whose life has been altered by the events today.

1 comment:

Charlie said...

The highlights of the 7:30pm ET press briefing are:

* Virginia Tech Campus Police Chief Wendell Flinchum has preliminary ID of gunman, but are not releasing the name.
* Recovered two weapons, but won't release the details
* ATF is comparing ballistics from West AJ and Norris Hall
* Person of interest ID'd after shooting at West Ambler Johnston. That person is not in custody. He is not known to police, according to Chief Flinchum.
* The first "person of interest" is still a person of interest -- "because he knows one of the victims" found dead in the dorm room.
* The "person of interest" is NOT a VT student
* The gunman found dead in Norris Hall is NOT the "person of interest" questioned in the West AJ dorm shooting.
* Murder /suicide has been ruled out at the incident in the dorm
* Chief Flinchum states that the Blacksburg Police Dept. located the "person of interest" in the dorm shooting -- and conducted an interview with him about the same time as the shootings were taking place in Norris Hall
* From the above statements, we can conclude that the police think that the shootings in West AJ are NOT related to the shootings in Norris Hall