Virginia Tech Tragedy

As long as I am fortunate to keep breathing on this planet, I'll never understand what can lead or compel someone to go on a rampage that kills innocent people.

The latest baffling event took place today at Virginia Tech College where 33 people were killed including the gunman who took his own life. Faculty and students appeared to be the target of this mentally unstable individual. Only he knows why he did it, unless he left a yet to be found note that reveals some kind of explanation.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend to be an expert on this. I'm more like the rest of you who sit in front of the television watching the news reports in disbelief with my mouth open, trying to speculate or surmise our own reasons.

Along with the dead, at least 15 others were injured. It was the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history and came nearly eight years to the day after 13 people died in the Columbine shootings in Colorado. Sadly we know this won't be the last time we see a tragedy of this nature. It has happened many times before and will happen again.

Here in Canada, we are not immune to similar acts of cowardice and terror. Just last September there were the shootings at Dawson College in Montreal. The worst shooting in Canadian history I believe happened on December 6, 1989 at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique when Marc Lepine entered a classroom of engineering students and separated the men from the women, told the men to leave and then proceeded to kill 14 women before turning the gun on himself.

Many questions have already been asked and there will be many more surrounding this latest incident. As I watched the press conferences earlier today I was almost ashamed to admit that I used to be a journalist. The questions some of the press were asking were asinine at times and quite pointless. It almost appeared as though they were on a "witch hunt" trying to lay blame on the administration at Virginia Tech and the VT Police. I'm not saying that these people made all the right decisions but it's easy to lay blame and accuse people after the fact.

Based on their initial information from the first pair of shootings, I'd say they were right in assuming it was an isolated incident and the possibility of what eventually happened was unpredictable. Just think about it...if a couple is killed in your neighbourhood, would the police ask everyone in town to stay in doors? Not likely or at least they never have in the past. They'd probably put the word out that there's a killer on the loose but there was no evidence to lead them to believe a rampage would take place two hours later in another part of town.

Nothing exactly like this has ever happened before, just as nothing like 9/11 had happened before, but since then new security measures have been put in place. It's sad to say but it always takes a tragedy to happen before new and proper policy is established. One thing appears certain, even with the reports of chains on the doors, the police still took too long to get inside. They should have stormed the place right away and perhaps more lives would have been saved...but we'll never know.