every generation creates its own traditions

Well, it’s happened again:

A gunman opened fire in a Virginia Tech dorm and then, two hours later, shot up a classroom building across campus Monday, killing 32 people in the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history. The gunman committed suicide, bringing the death toll to 33.

“Students bitterly complained that there were no public-address announcements on campus after the first burst of gunfire. Many said the first word they received from the university was an e-mail more than two hours into the rampage – around the time the gunman struck again.

Investigators offered no motive for the attack. The gunman’s name was not immediately released, and it was not known if he was a student.

The shootings spread panic and confusion on campus. Witnesses reporting students jumping out the windows of a classroom building to escape the gunfire. SWAT team members with helmets, flak jackets and assault rifles swarmed over the campus. Students and faculty members carried out some of the wounded themselves, without waiting for ambulances to arrive. A student used his cell-phone camera to record the sound of shots echoing through the stone classroom building.”

A list of some fatal shootings that took place at U.S. and Canadian schools, colleges or universities in recent years:

• On Oct. 20, 2006:
Charles Carl Roberts walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa., taking hostages before eventually killing five girls, aged 6 to 14, and himself

• On Sept. 27, 2006:
Duane Morrison took six female students hostage at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colo., molesting them and shooting one to death before killing himself.

• On Sept. 13, 2006:
Kimveer Gill opened fire at Dawson College in Montreal, killing one student and injuring 19 others, eight of them critically, before fatally shooting himself.

• Sept. 2, 2006:
Douglas W. Pennington, 49, killed himself and his two sons, Logan P. Pennington, 26, and Benjamin M. Pennington, 24, during a visit to the campus of Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, W.Va.

• On March 21, 2005:
Jeffrey Weise, a student at Red Lake High School in Red Lake, Minn., killed seven people at the school, including a teacher and a security guard. He also previously killed his grandfather and his grandfather’s partner.

• Oct. 28, 2002:
Failing University of Arizona Nursing College student and Gulf War veteran Robert Flores, 40, walked into an instructor’s office and fatally shot her. A few minutes later, armed with five guns, he entered one of his nursing classrooms and killed two more of his instructors before fatally shooting himself.

• Jan. 16, 2002:
Graduate student Peter Odighizuwa, 42, recently dismissed from Virginia’s Appalachian School of Law, returned to campus and killed the dean, a professor and a student before being tackled by students. The attack also wounds three female students.

• Aug. 28, 2000:
James Easton Kelly, 36, a University of Arkansas graduate student recently dropped from a doctoral program after a decade of study and John Locke, 67, the English professor overseeing his coursework, were shot to death in an apparent murder-suicide.

• On April 20, 1999:
Students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and went on a shooting spree at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. The pair killed 12 fellow students and a teacher and wounded 24 others before committing suicide.

• On May 20, 1998:
Kipland Kinkel, a student at Thurston High School in Springfield, Ore., brought threee guns to a classroom and began shooting. Two students were killed and 25 injured before his classmates subdued him.

• On March 24, 1998:
Two boys, Mitchell Johnson, then 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, shot and killed four students and a teacher at Westside Middle School near Jonesboro, Ark. Nine other students and a teacher were wounded.

• On Dec. 1, 1997:
Michael Carneal, a 14-year-old student at Heath High School in West Paducah, Ky., targeted a youth prayer group at the school, shooting eight people, three of them fatally.

• On Aug. 15, 1996:
Frederick Martin Davidson, 36, a graduate engineering student at San Diego State, was defending his thesis before a faculty committee when he pulled out a handgun and killed three professors.

• On Nov. 1, 1991:
Gang Lu, 28, a graduate student in physics from China, reportedly upset because he was passed over for an academic honor, opened fire in two buildings on the University of Iowa campus. Five University of Iowa employees were killed, including four members of the physics department, and two other people were wounded. The student fatally shot himself.

• On Dec. 6, 1989:
Marc Lépine entered a classroom at Montreal’s l’École Polytechnique engineering school, separated the men from the women and told the men to leave. Lépine then opened fire, killing 13 female students and a college employee, and injuring 13 others before committing suicide.

• On May 4, 1970:
Four students were killed and nine wounded by National Guard troops called in to quell anti-war protests on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio.

• On Aug. 1, 1966:
Charles Whitman points a rifle from the observation deck of the University of Texas at Austin’s Tower and begins shooting in a homicidal rampage that goes on for 96 minutes. Sixteen people are killed, 31 wounded.

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