The deadliest

The deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.

And it happened on a college campus.

When confronted with words and statistics like the ones that emanated from Virginia Tech yesterday, I think back to other events that had an enormous impact on our world and what I was doing at the time. Flashbulb memories, they're called. Our parents can recall what they were doing when they found our John F. Kennedy had been shot. Many of our grandparents could probably say where they were when they heard about the attacks on Pearl Harbor.

Almost everyone I know remembers not just the events of September 11, 2001, but what they were preoccupied with that day and how one news event dramatically changed their plans. I was a senior in high school that day. I vividly remember walking into a zero-period health class not long after six in the morning to find the 20-inch TV in the corner of the room near the ceiling emitting an image of smoke coming from a column that further inspection revealed as one of the twin towers.

The name Virginia Tech will become synonymous with Columbine, perhaps with Kent State. This tragedy will resonate and will sting college students the way Columbine affected those in high school and Kent State made the nation aware of how war can cause casualties at home. Whether or not the gunman was a student (although that's not been made clear, it will become so in the following days) witnesses have told media publications enough about him: that he was old enough to be a student, that he was Asian, that he "had a very serious but very calm look on his face."

Basically, they're saying that he could have been anyone.

What's so horrifying about what happened at Virginia Tech, besides the fact that it happened at all, is that the school's administration seemed so ill-prepared to deal with the crisis that began in one of its own dormitories and stop it from spreading to a classroom building half a mile away. As one student put it, "the university has blood on their hands."

The UW was privy to a similar horror last week, when staff employee Rebecca Griego was shot to death in Gould Hall by her ex-boyfriend-turned-stalker, a disturbed 41-year-old named Jonathan Rowan, who then took his own life. UW Police were criticized for not doing enough to protect the young woman, who had filed formal complaints about her ex-boyfriend's irrational behavior and had asked friends to look out for him lest he come near her.

The Associated Press reported that the last massacre on a university campus took place in 1966, when a man climbed onto the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin and opened fire, killing 16 people. Twelve were killed at Columbine.

From each of these incidents spring forth questions, questions that cannot be answered by one statement from an administrative official, even from numerous articles in newspapers, journals and magazines. Do we put too much pressure on our students? Could this tragedy have been prevented? And the truly unanswerable: Will it happen again? When? Where?

Do we put too much pressure on students to succeed? What can universities do to make sure these events don't occur again?

One action, so many questions. Thirty three lives, and still no answers.

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