Reruns

Virginia Tech has a very good football team. They offer seventy different undergraduate majors and minors. The campus is on a plateau that overlooks both the Blue Ridge and Allegheny mountains. In 2010, the Wall Street Journal report ranked Virginia Tech among the top 25 schools for "best-qualified" graduates. It was also the site of a mass murder.
Back in April of 2007, thirty-two people were killed and another twenty-five wounded when senior English major, Seung-Hui Cho, went on a killing spree. Murderous rampage. Massacre. He shot a bunch of people, and they died. It was horrible, and as an institution, they mourned. As a nation, we mourned with them and felt the page turn on another mass murder.
In the aftermath of the 2007 shooting, Virginia Tech examined the security of their campus and instituted more restrictions and controls, including sending alerts to students when something potentially heinous is about to go down. Like this past week when Ross Truett shot and killed campus police officer Deirek Crouse. The sirens went off, the texts went out, the alarm was sounded. The second body they found was the shooter, who turned the gun on himself.
The good news is that the system worked. Faculty and students got the message and avoided being additional numbers. This time the count stopped at just two, not counting shattered nerves. And so the echo went through Virginia Tech one more time, just like it will every time there is a shot fired in anger. Like the pipe bomb they found near Columbine High this past spring. The first question everyone asks: Are they related? In both cases, it turned out to be odd coincidence. Then again, maybe in a larger sense, they are all related. The fact that we can report "another mass shooting" makes every one of these tragedies part of one great big quilt of homicide. But this quilt won't keep us warm at night.