Virginia Tech Hokie Hope Day

[Annie]

Today is a day for all the schools in VA to pay tribute to VA Tech and the kids and teachers shot on Monday. Everyone is wearing the school colors and there will be candlelight vigils. You can't find a thing maroon or orange in town, they're all bought up.

It was such a tragedy. I know people who knew some of the victims. A guy my brother works with is a close friend of the girl from Richmond, VA. (Rachael) She was a very sweet person and was the only child her parents had after trying for 15 years to have a baby. It's worse than devastating. I can't believe it. How could he shoot such a precious thing in the face?

My nephew went to high school with the guy from Chester, VA (Matt). My son's friend from school, a girl who adopted one of our kittens, is best friends through her church with the red haired girl from Smithfield, VA (Nicole) It seems like everyone I know has some kind of connection. Both my kids know people who go there, and two of my cousins have kids who go there. It's like a big family tragedy, and it seems so much more personal than 9-11. It's really shaken everyone up.

If anyone wants to discuss this in a thread let's do it, it helps.

[DarthAnakin]

its a great loss! it happened also @ DAWSON university earlier this year, its very sad to what our world is coming to!

i had the same thing hapen @ my school. 2 emails and 1 phone call arrived @ my school and said that friday apirl 20th that he was going to gun people in my school, so we had police coming to my school so everyone was freaked cos' it happened @ Virginia Tech and DAWSON.

In the end one grd 7 and grd 8 were arrested for coming to school with semi automatics.
thank god they were just toys! they painted them black to make them look real! i mean c'mon who would do something like that?

i pray for the lost souls of Virginia Tech...

[crystalcat]

If anyone is reading this without being logged in, the smilies are messing up. What DarthAnakin really has posted are crying smilies. Not logged in they were ROTFL smilies.

So ya'll might not want to use the smilies; it could cause some real misunderstandings!

That said, even though I don't live anywhere near Virginia, I work with quite a few people who went to VT. Today we had a moment of silence at work for the victims, and they had a poster on an easel by the front door that had photos of all the victims with their names on it.

The goddaughter of the guy who sits in the next cube from me was in Norris Hall when the shooting took place. He called her mother when we heard about it - she had already called in to say she was okay. The class had upended the teacher's metal desk and braced it against the door, then piled all the other furniture in the room against it - and then they all laid down flat on the floor. She said the gunman tried to get in their room but gave up when he couldn't budge the door open.

A guy I saw at the gas station wasn't as lucky. He was crying and talking to the cashier, and when he left, she told me he'd lost someone in the shooting and had just found out.

I think (not sure) my brother's stepson went to VT, but he graduated several years ago. They live in a town near Blacksburg, and in fact, my brother used to own a computer store IN Blacksburg, but not anymore. I haven't talked to him about it.


Darthanakin, that is really sick that there are people who want to emulate that, even if it's only fake guns. Sorry you had that experience.

[Annie]

Thanks for the alert crystalcat. The smiles ARE messing up, they show one thing on one skin, and now logged out, and another if you use another or are logged in. We have got to change them. I can't do it, I'll have to wait until Saphira gets back.

DarthAnakin, I didn't know about Dawson. That's sad too. Sorry.

Crystalcat, that just shows how far reaching the VT community is. I'm sorry for all you know who experienced bad news too.

I'd never heard that door barring story, that's very exciting and I'm glad they were able to hold him off. I guess it's like 9-11, the first 2 planes didn't know what hit them but the last one knew and tried to stop it. I wonder if people had charged the guy all at once they could have disarmed him? But of course you don't know what to do at the time, you don't have time to plan an attack. It's such a tragic waste and always will be a scar on VT.

[DarthAnakin]

i havent seen the smileys being messed up...

but they everything happening in the universties and such it you wonder if your going to be next huh?

[crystalcat]

darthanakin said:

but they everything happening in the universties and such it you wonder if your going to be next huh?

It is sad, but also important to remember that as shocking as this is, and as much as we hear about it in nauseous detail in the news, we are all still way, way, way more likely to die in a car accident than by having a madman shoot us. I would wager that a lot more than 32 people died in the country in car accidents (maybe even in the state of Virginia) on April 16. And that is something that is not any more under a victim's control than this. As long as this kind of thing is "news," it's rare. They never report about people being killed in car accidents unless it's something spectacular (a big explosion or lots of people killed at once) or someone famous. More like "fatal accident at 6th and Locust street, might want to avoid that area until it clears."

I'm not trying to belittle the lives that were lost at VT or car accidents for that matter. Just trying to keep everything in perspective. The media squeeze it until it's a dry husk and then they keep squeezing; the consequence is that everything gets so overhyped that it's separated from context and people get unnecessarily worried about their own safety. The world as a whole is a dangerous place. It always has been.

Incidentally, someone at work said they'd read a study that said contrary to present opinion, school shootings were not on the rise. The study said that they had always occured, and that by percentage of population the incidents have always been fairly steady. What is different is the media coverage, so that they are much more likely to get reported world-wide instead of simply at a local level.

[Annie]

crystalcat said:

It is sad, but also important to remember that as shocking as this is, and as much as we hear about it in nauseous detail in the news, we are all still way, way, way more likely to die in a car accident than by having a madman shoot us. I would wager that a lot more than 32 people died in the country in car accidents (maybe even in the state of Virginia) on April 16. And that is something that is not any more under a victim's control than this. As long as this kind of thing is "news," it's rare. They never report about people being killed in car accidents unless it's something spectacular (a big explosion or lots of people killed at once) or someone famous. More like "fatal accident at 6th and Locust street, might want to avoid that area until it clears."

I have been meaning to answer this for awhile. Yes, you're right, people die in other horrible ways every day and the news seems to make something different out of it. The guy's dead, take another road. I was upset when the newspaper used my Dad's wreck to advertise using seatbelts! The story mentioned his name, and added, 'who was not wearing a seatbelt, died at the scene.' As hurt as I already was, that was more painful than I can say. I've seen the same thing happen in other stories of accident victims. It's wrong.

I'm not trying to belittle the lives that were lost at VT or car accidents for that matter. Just trying to keep everything in perspective. The media squeeze it until it's a dry husk and then they keep squeezing; the consequence is that everything gets so overhyped that it's separated from context and people get unnecessarily worried about their own safety. The world as a whole is a dangerous place. It always has been.

You can get so scared to even leave the house. My Aunt is always so afraid of getting murdered, or crashing, or washed away in a flood, that there's hardly anywhere she'll go because it's 'too dangerous.' I remember my Dad used to always tell her, 'if you get like that you'll be so afraid to leave the house and then you could be lying in your bed and a plane could hit your house like that preacher in West Point.' And he was right. Everything we do is a chance, and it's a terrible thing that sometimes people die in places and situations you'd never guess. Millions of people are in school or work every day, you don't know when a madman is going to go on a rampage, or when a truck will hit them, or a plane will crash into their house, or their house will explode. And it will drive us all nuts to sit around and think about it. All we can do is use common sense and stay out of obviously dangerous situtations and hope chance will keep us safe otherwise.

Incidentally, someone at work said they'd read a study that said contrary to present opinion, school shootings were not on the rise. The study said that they had always occured, and that by percentage of population the incidents have always been fairly steady. What is different is the media coverage, so that they are much more likely to get reported world-wide instead of simply at a local level.

That may be true of all crimes, they seem to be on the rise but maybe they weren't as reported on the news in the past.