If there is anyone who can feel the pain of students and staff of Virginia Tech University and the citizens of Blacksburg, Va., he is right here in Austin. If you haven’t heard the news yet, a now-dead gunman went on a rampage this morning on the Virginia Tech campus and killed somewhere between 22 and 32 people (reports are still conflicting as of this writing). If the latter number is correct, that would be double the number that Charles Whitman killed on the University of Texas campus in 1966 – at the time, the worst mass killing in U.S. history. Today’s shootings appear to have set a new record. The Whitman shootings were well before my time at UT, and after reading Gary Lavergne’s A Sniper in the Tower, I’m glad of that. My sympathies to the folks in Virginia.
This article appears in April 13 • 2007.