Word: virginia
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...Virginia Tech administrators sent several e-mails to Virginia Tech students in the wake of the shootings, but the first arrived at least two hours after the initial attack had occurred. At a news conference yesterday, Virginia Tech President Charles Steger defended his administration’s handling of the incident, saying officials thought the first shooting stemmed from a domestic dispute and mistakenly believed the gunman had fled the area. And, like students here and around the country, he struggled to grasp the gravity of the day’s events...
Evil, at its worst, is ineffable. In the weeks and months to come, yesterday’s cold-blooded shooting rampage at Virginia Tech will be analyzed ad nauseam by every credentialed authority from every conceivable angle. A procession of talking heads will use this tragedy as a heuristic springboard for their pet theories about videogames, adolescent disaffection, race, gun-control, mental illness, religious faith, the endemic violence of the American psyche, you name...
There will be time for discourse later. For now, a visibly shaken Charles Steger, president of Virginia Tech, can only say that he is “at a loss for words.” Senator John Warner (R-VA), exuding his usual gravitas, calls these crimes “senseless” and “incomprehensible.” Bush, always the ineffective orator, talks about the importance of keeping faith in “a loving God.” But in the face of such a pointless and cruel squandering of human life, his theodicy...
Soon, other, more pertinent questions will have to be answered, too. For instance, how was it that the state police and Virginia Tech authorities allowed two hours to pass between the initial shootings (of the suspect’s ex-girlfriend and a resident advisor) and the mass slaughter that occurred in Norris Hall? Why was the university so slow in notifying students to stay inside and away from windows? Do we need better emergency alert systems on university campuses? And why was no one able to stop the shooter before the causalities mounted? Did the state police respond adequately...
...these logistical questions will never satisfy our insatiable desire to know why. Why would someone do something so terrible? Like Shakespeare’s Iago, the literary embodiment of evil, the Virginia Tech murderer has frustrated our demand for a motive by taking his own life: “Demand me nothing; what you know, you know; from this time forth I will never speak a word.” What we know from yesterday’s massacre is nothing, except the brute, inscrutable fact that evil exists in the world...