Another massacre in the US

Americans woke up early Monday morning with the shock of another campus killing spree, this time at the Virginia Tech University in Southwestern Vir-ginia. A lone gunman (a psychologically disturbed 23-year-old South Korean who arrived in the US in 1992) stormed the campus at around 7:15 a.m. and opened fire at a coed dormitory, killing two people. The gunman then headed for a classroom building and killed 30 more before he finally put a bullet in his head, bringing the total number of fatalities to 33.

The Virginia Tech shooting is the deadliest ever recorded in modern United States history, surpassing the August 1966 carnage at the University of Texas in Austin where Charles Whitman started shooting people atop a clock tower, killing 15 including his wife and mother whom he killed the night before his rampage. Whitman was shot to death by the police.

The Virginia Tech massacre also happened almost eight years to the day of the April 1999 bloodbath at Columbine High School in Colorado when teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on a shooting spree, killing 12 students and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves.

Virginia police authorities admitted they initially thought the dorm killings were domestic in nature and that the gunman had fled the campus. School officials also came under fire for their slow action, taking more than two hours before they issued any warning – in the form of an email at 9:26 a.m. saying a shooting incident had occurred at a dorm and that police were investigating. The second email was issued 20 minutes later, this time warning students about a gunman on the loose. Students also complained about the lack of a public address system and other means that would have warned them about the situation faster.

When informed about the shooting, US president George Bush was totally shocked and horrified, for a moment thinking that another terrorist attack had been launched against the United States. In a memorial service at the Virginia Tech campus, Bush was very emotional. Being a Texan, he has been a longtime advocate of gun ownership, but it seems he is having second thoughts, perhaps heeding the call of Australian Prime Minister John Howard about the need for tougher gun ownership laws.

Australia also had its worst shooting massacre in 1996 when a gunman armed with a semi-automatic rifle massacred 35 people in Port Arthur. This prompted the imposition of laws banning all types of semi-automatic weapons, with the Australian government spending about $250 million to buy back 600,000 weapons before the laws took effect.

Compared to other industrialized nations, America still has one of the highest levels of gun violence and homicide. According to the US Disaster Center, approximately 13 million people or some five percent of the US population are crime victims every year, with about 1.5 million victims of violent crimes. Statistics from the FBI 2005 Uniform Crime Reporting Program showed that an estimated 1,390,695 violent crimes were reported by 17,000 participating law enforcement agencies.

The figures reflected a 2.3-increase in the volume of violent crimes (murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault) across the US compared to 2004. Robbery increased by 3.9 percent, or 140.7 offenses for every 100,000. Murder, manslaughter also went up by 3.4 percent, and the same goes for aggravated assault with a 1.8-percent increase. More than 10 million property crimes (burglary, arson, larceny and vehicle theft) were also reported, with victims losing approximately $16.5 billion, broken down as $7.6- billion lost in motor vehicle thefts, $3.7 billion in burglaries and $5.2 billion in larceny-thefts.

The United States, being a superpower, has always been the object of attacks for more than six decades now, since 1941 with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But 9/11 made Americans acutely conscious of their vulnerability to terrorist attacks. Despite pouring millions of dollars for sophisticated equipment and training to strengthen the capabilities of law enforcement agencies to respond to emergencies and terrorist attacks, the national threat level in the US still stands at Yellow, or Elevated.

With the complexity of the war in Iraq and the heated debate concerning illegal immigrants, times are indeed changing in America. Human nature being the way it is, the Virginia Tech massacre has awakened deep overtures of hatred against Korean immigrants. But what this really all boils down to is the glaring reality that today, America is under attack even within its own internal boundaries – perhaps a price to pay for being a superpower. We deeply feel for the victims of this tragedy.

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