After the slaughter
Print. April 22nd, 2007It is three days after the worst gun massacre in American history and, about 30 miles down the road, Roanoke Firearms is doing steady business.
The shop is beside a busy junction on the outskirts of town. It is housed in a single-storey building, painted beige, and has seen better days.
Inside, handmade signs point customers left to a pawnshop or right to the gun store. The two enterprises occupy opposite sides of the same large room, divided only by a storage rack running down the middle.
On the left, jewellery can be seen in cabinets and TVs are lined up by a wall. On the right is an immense collection of weaponry. Hunting guns are crammed into a rack. A terrifying-looking sniper rifle lies on the floor with a sign warning that it is not to be touched.
A cabinet filled with Armalites faces the shop’s entrance. An M15-A3, which fires .223 bullets - a military combat rifle, in layman’s terms - is priced at $1,075. Handguns are cheaper. A Taurus 9mm pistol will set you back $450.
A couple are appraising the pistols carefully, and a cheery, moustachioed man behind the counter is happy to guide them. ‘‘My wife likes this one,” he tells them, “’cos of the light recoil.”
He is not so keen to talk to the media. ‘‘Sorry, fellas,” he says with a polite smile to myself and to a TV crew from Japan who have arrived almost simultaneously. ‘‘The owner’s not here. He’s been doing interviews in the parking lot for three days straight. And we’ve said all we’re going to say.”
He cannot be blamed for being defensive. Some accuse Roanoke Firearms of being the starting point for the massacre at nearby Virginia Tech. That’s unfair. The store is a landmark en route to that atrocity rather than its source.
It was here, in March, that Cho Seung-Hui bought a Glock 9mm pistol and a box of 50 bullets for $571.The store did nothing wrong from a legal standpoint. Cho completed the proper background checks, though he lied in saying he had never been diagnosed as having mental problems. The Glock was not Cho’s first gun. He had already bought a Walther .22 the previous month at a pawnshop in Blacksburg.
Early on Monday morning, he took the two guns with him as he left his dorm room in Harper Hall. From there, he went to another dormitory hall where he shot two people dead: Emily Hilscher, a 19-year-old from Woodville, Virginia and Ryan Clark, a 22-year-old from Columbia County, Georgia.
He seems to have taken a break after that to post NBC News the package of video clips and still photos that would later chill everyone who saw them. Then he walked into Norris Hall. The horrors that ensued, though they have been recounted again and again this past week, remain beyond the scope of most people’s imagination.
Survivors have spoken about Cho calmly moving from person to person, shooting each one. Some heard him reloading his weapons or laughing demonically.
Terrified students jumped out of windows.
Others played dead and prayed he would not turn his attentions upon them. Some saved lives by using tables or the strength of their own legs to keep the doors of their classrooms closed against him. Cho killed 30 people at Norris Hall before he killed himself.
As the days pass, the sequence of events becomes clearer, the victims’ lives become better known, and the airwaves are filled with speculation about Cho’s motives. But the full horror of what happened at Virginia Tech - the awful reality of it - sometimes hits home harder through small, everyday details than through the most dramatic stories.
Wednesday afternoon, two days after the shooting, is sunny in Blacksburg and Ashjan Baokbah, a 25-year-old student of accounting, is walking alone through a quiet part of campus. ‘‘Me and Reema and Waleed would meet together,” she says smiling at the memory. ‘‘Waleed had never seen Reema dance, and he was going to come with me to see her this Thursday.”
Waleed Shaalan, an Egyptian, never did get to see Reema Samaha perform the Lebanese folk dances that her friends, including Ashjan, loved. Waleed, aged 32, and Reema, aged 18, were both killed in Norris Hall.
It seems like almost every one of Virginia Tech’s 25,000 students has a similar story. Some talk about people they knew. Others recount how they learned of what had happened. Josh Burnheimer, aged 21, was speaking by phone to his father as the first details broke. While doing so, he was keeping one ear on an emergency services’ radio scanner owned by a friend. At the time, the news media were reluctant to confirm any casualties.
Then, suddenly, Burnheimer heard the true scale of the suffering from a voice over the scanner.
‘‘I just stopped speaking. I couldn’t speak,” he recalls.
The message boards erected on the grass field in the centre of the campus bear thousands of heartbreaking notes, carefully written in black marker: ‘‘Nicole - May you rest in the peace and comfort of your loving Father’s arms. We love you!”
‘‘Brian - I love you for being my brother. I am lost without you but know you will guide me. You are in heaven with God. I am so proud of the life you lived. You are my brother and best friend. I love you. Love, Angela, your sister’’.
‘‘Reema - This is so hard to take in. You choreographed part of our belly dance. I’m glad I hugged you at our last practice. Slusher Hall won’t be the same. You are a beautiful, talented dancer. I’ll miss your smile. Love you and will forever miss you. Always, Kristina.”
In the immediate aftermath, most students desperately sought assurance that their closest friends had survived. Often, they found that they had, only to have to deal with the loss of a more casual acquaintance - the guy they used to see in the gym, or the girl who was a housemate of a friend - further down the line.
As a huge candlelit vigil winds down on Tuesday night, 26-year-old Porter Zedalis and his friend, 25year-old Lea Bowman, are trying to come to terms with the tragedy, but are thankful that, they think, no one they know has been killed.
That confidence is misplaced - one person just outside their closest circle of friends, Brian Bluhm, is in fact among the dead.
‘‘I am definitely starting to fall apart a little,” Zedalis says on Thursday evening. ‘‘When all this happened, it seemed almost surreal. Now it’s really starting to sink in.”
There is also the media to contend with. The car park of the university’s alumni centre at one point contains so many satellite trucks it bears a stronger resemblance to the space agency Nasa than to a college campus.
One of the effects of such saturation coverage, some students say, is that individual elements of the tragedy seem to be either pumped out of proportion or allowed to fall by the wayside.
In the immediate aftermath of the atrocity, harsh questions are being asked about the two hours it took for university authorities to e-mail students with an alert about the first shooting. By midweek, that issue had slipped down the list of priorities. In its place come discussions about whether more action could have been taken when Cho’s weird behaviour first attracted attention.
Then, the release of Cho’s video and photos puts a whole new twist in the tale - and in the process divides student opinion over whether or not the footage should have been aired in the first place.
‘‘I was upset [the television networks] were actually showing it,” Amanda Lickey, a 22-year-old agriculture and applied economics student, says on Thursday evening. ‘‘I just felt: here is this person who has done horrible things. He did those things, it seems like, to draw attention to himself. And it felt like they were giving him the attention he wanted.”
‘‘It’s hard to say what the right thing to do would have been,” Tom Tsou, 27, a graduate student of electrical engineering, says. ‘‘It happened. It’s important not to try to deny or avoid what happened. At the same time, some of the media, I think, have tried to turn all of this into almost a murder mystery with him at the centre - why did he do it, how did he do it? What about focusing on the lives of the people who died?”
Beyond the campus, the focus soon broadens from the tragedy itself to bigger political issues. Gun control, of course, is again on the agenda, just as it was following the Columbine High School shootings in 1999.
The most recent figures available, for 2004, state there were over 11,500 gun-related killings in the United States that year. No one knows how many guns there are in the United States, but many estimates posit a figure of around 200 million. The fact that two of them ended up in the hands of Cho Seung-Hui is proof enough, in the minds of some activists, of the need for tighter controls.
‘‘We think that in the coming weeks, our political leaders should have to explain why it is so easy for dangerous people to get guns,’’ Daniel Vice, a senior attorney at the Brady Centre to Prevent Gun Violence, says.
Vice also complains about what he contends are blatant loopholes in the rules governing the purchase of firearms. ‘‘It is far too easy to get a gun,” he says. ‘‘You don’t have to go through a background check and buy it through a licensed store. You can get one at a gun show without any background checks.”
To Irish eyes, the ease with which firearms can be purchased in the US is bewildering. But the strength with which many Americans passionately believe in their right to bear arms is also rarely understood by Europeans. John Lott, the Virginia author of The Bias Against Guns, argues that more guns may actually help to increase security.
Lott contends that citizens who hold guns legally have repeatedly intervened to protect others when a violent criminal is on the loose.
Declaring places like college campuses ‘gun-free zones’, Lott asserts, may only give more leeway to those with malevolent intent.
‘‘I do understand the urge to get rid of guns because they are simply seen as a bad thing,’’ Lott says. ‘‘But people who advocate that don’t see the possible unintended consequences.”
David Adams, president of the Virginia Shooting Sports Association, agrees, arguing that tighter laws restrict the rights of law-abiding citizens while failing to deter those with violent intent:
‘‘I am not sure anything could be done to prevent what happened on Monday,” Adams says. ‘‘A blanket ban on guns doesn’t mean people are anything but sitting ducks.”
Adams insists that America’s relatively high murder rates are the consequence of broader societal factors, not the widespread availability of weapons.
The Brady’s Centre’s Daniel Vice vehemently disagrees: ‘‘Every country has those sorts of [unstable] people, but America has had a rash of school shootings that the rest of the world has not,” he says. ‘‘Now some people are saying that the way to make people safer is to send our kids to school with guns. That’s just incredibly reckless . . . the more guns there are, the more shootings there are.”
A Zogby poll conducted in the two days immediately after the Virginia Tech massacre indicated that only 36 per cent of Americans believe stricter gun control could have averted the killings.
Some Virginia Tech students are among those unconvinced by the case for gun control.
At the end of Tuesday’s candlelit vigil, Porter Zedaris points out that he had run to get his own gun when he first heard news of shootings on campus. His friend Lea recalls her grandfather’s enthusiasm for guns, together with his advice to never shoot at anything that is alive. ‘‘Stricter gun laws aren’t going to help,” she says. ‘‘If someone wants to get a gun for the wrong purpose, they can still get it.” The events at Virginia Tech spur discussion of other topics too, including campus security.
Michael Dorn, a school safety expert who is executive director of Safe Havens International, asserts that many secondary schools in the US have more effective safety procedures than universities.
He notes, for example, that at least some of the rooms at Virginia Tech, where the killings took place, apparently could not be locked - whereas schools in troubled districts have long put in place rapid ‘lockdown’ procedures.
The issue of post-traumatic stress disorder has also come into the spotlight. Dr Kenneth Ruggiero of the Medical University of South Carolina cautions against overly invasive interventions by well-meaning counsellors.
‘‘Social, family and community support can be very effective, and interventions can disrupt that,” he says.
Ruggiero adds that counselling given right after a trauma, as opposed to a few weeks later, is often ‘‘not very effective’’.
Dr Edna Foa, the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Centre for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety, notes that most people do recover even from the most horrendous traumas. However, she says that the possibility of recovery from trauma declines rapidly after a certain point.
Someone is regarded as suffering from a chronic form of the condition if symptoms persist for longer than three months. If those symptoms are still present after one year, the patient ‘‘is unlikely to recover,” she says. ‘‘It is a minority, but for them it is really a disabling condition.”
Such issues will become vital in the weeks ahead. But no clinical description, however accurate, can do justice to the raw grief being felt in Blackburg at the moment. The campus feels as if it has been swallowed whole by sadness.
Almost all the students speak of the university, pre-shootings, as a kind of oasis of peace and friendliness. Now the institution, and their memories of it, will be forever tainted by murder. The big debates begun last week will go on in their contentious way. But the individual stories feel more visceral and more real.
Amanda Lickey on Wednesday looks at Norris Hall from behind yellow police tape. She has lost a neighbour in the atrocity. ‘‘I feel sad and I feel angry at someone who could have such disregard for human life,” she says and her eyes, which are blue, well up.
Lea Bowman says on Thursday: ‘‘I’ve found myself crying a lot today. I think it’s the realisation that this really did happen. It is a fact, not something that maybe could be a nightmare.”
On the same day, a heavy rain blows in to the Virginia Tech campus. It soaks a white t-shirt on which the friends of Caitlin Hammaren, a 19year-old from Westtown, New York, have scrawled their love and their loss in indelible ink. It soaks the 32 stones, one for each life taken away, that the students have arranged on the grass drill field. It soaks the flowers that criss-cross each stone, and the messages and the cards and the toy bear that have been placed at a makeshift memorial.
Towards the centre of the field, the message boards stand, protected by canopies. A young woman crouches by one board, her orange marker poised. Her friends, who have already written their messages, hover nearby.
The woman keeps shaking the marker as if it has run out. It hasn’t. But every time she seems ready to write something, she pulls back.
She stares for awhile at the board. ‘‘I don’t know what to say,” she says softly. She bows her head then, and begins to weep.