A Face And A Name
The Virginia Tech shooter has been identified as Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old Virginia Tech student. Cho was a South Korean citizen legally in the United States. So we have a face and a name, which tells us nothing about why he committed this monstrous crime.
Sources tell ABC News that Cho killed two people in a dorm room, returned to his own dorm room where he re-armed and left a "disturbing note" before entering a classroom building on the other side of campus to continue his rampage.
Cho's identity has been confirmed with a positive fingerprint match on the guns used in the rampage and with immigration materials.
"Lab results confirm that one of the two weapons seized in Norris Hall was used in both shootings," Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said at a press conference Tuesday morning.
At this time, police are not looking for a second shooter. But they did not rule out the possibility that a second person may have been involved. Sources say Cho was carrying a backpack that contained receipts for a Glock 9 mm pistol, purchased in March. Witnesses had told authorities that the shooter was carrying a backpack. Police also said this morning that Cho had a .22 caliber pistol. Sections of chain similar to those used to lock the main doors at Norris Hall, the site of the second shooting that left 31 dead, were also found inside a Virginia Tech dormitory, sources confirmed to ABC News.
ABC News continues its completely speculative and grossly ignorant agenda reporting, however:
It is unknown at this time if the guns had standard or extended clips, which can fire as many as 30 shots before the gun has to be reloaded.
It literally takes about a second to switch magazines on a semi-automatic pistol. They do not use "clips". And no matter what magazines Cho used, the changing of them would not have slowed down the killing one iota.
Doug Ross has two examples where the media generally failed to report that armed citizens stopped shooting incidents at schools and held the gunman for police. How many lives did they save? That will never be known. But how many lives were saved by the designation of Virginia Tech as a "gun-free zone." Tragically, we can answer that.
UPDATE: Bob Owens calls this "media malpractice." He's right.
By Quilly Mammoth, April 17, 2007 @ 10:16 am
As I state at my place the only thing that would have slowed down Cho would have been an armed citizen. Period.
Current school policies across the nation is to herd all the potential victims into one place with no means of defending that place. That place has a name…abattoir.
By crosspatch, April 17, 2007 @ 5:22 pm
The magazine size only matters when you are in a gunfight. It doesn’t matter one iota when you are shooting “targets” as was the case here.
Also, while an armed citizen certainly would have made a difference, so would have a different response from the victims. If they had charged the shooter en masse, they most probably would have overwhelmed him and put an end to it. Having 10 people stomping your arms, ribs, face, fingers … standing on the weapon, etc. prevents you from doing a lot of shooting. I would hope that we begin to teach our kids to resist and not be like lambs to the slaughter in the future.