This Monday, as students sat rooted in front of their television screens, watching the horrifying details of the 32-victim slaying at Virginia Tech unfold, the thoughts of many must have turned to our own campus. Between studying for upcoming exams and watching the latest updates on TV, it’s easy to imagine a gunman stalking through U of T’s hallways, unleashing indiscriminate violence against strangers who lived alongside him for months, or maybe years.
The tragedy of Virginia Tech will resonate for months in the minds of students. Yet, the question remains, why do shootings like this resonate throughout an entire country, an entire culture? President George W. Bush has ordered that every federal flag be flown at half-mast until sunset on Sunday. Speeches were made in Canadian Parliament condemning the massacre and offering condolences for the victims and their families. CBC Newsworld and CNN alike have been providing citizens with nearly round-the-clock coverage, proving that the massacre has struck the consciousness of both nations strongly.
The sheer magnitude of the violence is what weighs, in large part, upon hearts and minds nationwide. The fact so many members of a university community were injured, maimed, and killed in so short a time is staggering and commands our attention and empathy. But gun violence is a tragically common crime in America. Over 10,000 Americans-3,000 of them teens or children-are killed by guns every year, an average of 30 each day. This means that Virginia Tech’s death toll is matched on a daily basis across America. Yet these deaths pass unremarked by the North American media.
There have been numerous school shootings in the past few years, but most of them have failed to capture national attention for very long. In 2005, Jefferey Weise, a 16-year old student, killed seven people at his high school on a northern Minnesota Native reservation. In October 2006, 32-year old Charles Karl Roberts shot 10 young girls in an Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Alberta.
To the average Canadian or American, these shootings seem remote, occurring in societies separated from the mainstream. But when two teenagers attacked a high school in the suburban community of Littleton, Colorado, and when a lone gunman opened fire in a Dawson College building in Montreal, CBC radio gave minute-by-minute updates and national debate was sparked on the subjects of gun control and counterculture. But the death toll at Dawson was lower than in either Nickel Mines or Red Lake. So what is it about Dawson College and Virginia Tech that demands the attention of the nation, when other murders do not?
Campuses are communities. Students study together, eat together, work out together and even sleep together. And inside the borders of our classrooms and residence halls, we strive together for the same things- academic success, fulfilling social lives and the experience needed to achieve our dreams and desires. U of T is the place we find the path we will follow the rest of our lives, the place where students develop into this country’s teachers, experts, and leaders. In this way, schools like ours are microcosms of the national community.
The parallel between university communities and national ones was shown explicitly at the April 17 ceremonies to honour the memory of those slain. Nikki Giovanni, a poet and one of the gunman’s professors, made a speech invoking the school’s sense of unity, repeating the motto “We are Virginia Tech!” again and again. “People who have never met you are praying for you,” said President Bush, reminding students that the nation stands with them in their grief.
We are often able, all too easily, to think ourselves insulated from the dozens of gun deaths each week in North America. But in the community of Virginia Tech, and in the victims’ faces, which will occupy millions of minds and TV screens for days to come, we can recognize ourselves.
Make no mistake about it, in our faces, Cho Seung-Hui would have seen victims, too. He did not know the people he killed. The target upon which Cho unleashed his violence was a community like the one we inhabit at U of T. So, as students turn off the news and venture out to campus following this tragedy, it is not just the thought of the massacre that will continue to haunt us, but the feeling that that the violence was, without question, directed at us, too.
The Varsity Newspaper stands with the victims and families of Virginia Tech in this time of grief and sorrow.
