Gun Crazy - Where does the Virginia Tech massacre leave America's weapons policy
America was united in mourning after its worst-ever school massacre when Cho Seung-Hui shot dead 32 in two incidents two hours apart. But it refuses to face the folly of its weapons policy. By David Usborne
Published: 22 April 2007

The scene he found inside Norris Hall was too much for the state trooper who had retreated back into the cold, snow-flecked air outside to catch his breath. Suddenly, he doubled up and vomited on the grass. In the back of a nearby van another police officer crouched, covered his face and quietly sobbed.

It was the middle of Monday morning on the campus of Virginia Tech, and these men knew what the rest of America had yet to learn. A gunman had gone berserk, fatally shooting 30 people inside. Some of the dead were still in their chairs where they had been attending French and German lessons; others were slumped, bloodied in the hallways and stairwells. Most were students but two were teachers, including a Holocaust survivor who had died trying to shield his pupils. Almost all had been shot three times.

This was the dénouement of the deadliest rampage in modern American history. The killer, a 23-year-old English student originally from South Korea, Cho Seung-Hui, had started his day's satanic work more than two hours earlier, when he walked up to the fourth floor of a huge co-ed dormitory hall, West Ambler Johnston, on the other side of campus, and killed two other young and innocent adults. In between, he had found time to pay a visit to the post office in Blacksburg, Virginia Tech's college town.

The faux-Gothic Norris Hall, clad in the grey Hokie stone that gives students at Virginia Tech their nickname - Hokies - is sealed off today, and will remain so for months. Indeed, what to do with a building now so infamously defiled is just one of many difficult dilemmas facing the university authorities.

Others, however, are probably more pressing, including how to answer critics who ask why the campus was not locked down when the first two murders were discovered at 7.15am, and why the many early warning signs of Cho's defective circuitry went virtually unaddressed until it was too late.

In truth, those of us not directly touched by the tragedy should be patient in demanding answers. That goes for the media in particular - we exhausted our welcome very quickly in Blacksburg last week. "VT Stay Strong," declared a handwritten poster on a stone wall close to Norris Hall yesterday. "Media Stay Away."

Danny Axsom, a professor of social psychology on campus, was among those pleading for us to hold back a while. "There is a disconnect between those on the outside who want to get those questions answered soon, and people more on the inside, who have other priorities right now," he said. What he means, of course, is mourning. The police officers and rescue workers who went inside Norris Hall may never erase what they saw.

Fortunately, Americans are extremely good at the exercise of collective grief. That is not meant disrespectfully: it comes naturally to them to gather, hold hands and ease their pain through public tears and prayer. At Virginia Tech they began the process on Tuesday with a memorial assembly in its main sports hall, where President George Bush strived to soothe so many torn hearts. The same night, 10,000 flooded the drill field, the green heart of campus, to light candles for the dead. On Friday, the field once again was the place for hundreds to mark a minute of silence.

Healing will come. Even today, you see the first signs of Hokies grasping that most fundamental of human responses to terrible loss, the one that says that for those that remain life does go on. That's why a baseball game was played on Friday night on campus, and why the student association last night held a "Hokie Barbeque" on the drill field. Tomorrow classes will start again. And it is not too soon to speculate, at least, over what this country's response over the longer term will be.

A panel of experts has already been appointed to investigate how the campus authorities might have better handled the crisis and better identified the threat that Cho represented. It will recommend new technologies to enhance campus security, and tougher standards for ejecting students who are on the brink of going haywire.

This sounds like tinkering, and it probably will be. Indeed, it is curious that a country that will deploy billions of dollars and its entire military to counter the threat of terrorists coming from the outside seems so unable to tackle home-grown dysfunctions. Jonesboro, Columbine, the Amish schoolhouse ... the list is long. And as for guns - still America cannot stand to confront its affection for them. Yet it is willing to sacrifice all the norms of civil rights to protect itself from supposed members of al-Qa'ida.

Who knows exactly when Cho began to jump the rails of normal social behaviour? Family members from South Korea have attested to his curious, catatonic demeanour even as a youngster, before his parents brought him to America at the age of eight. Former school peers said his strangeness led to bullying and taunts that he should "Go back to China".

Then he arrived at Virginia Tech, and by the autumn of 2005 two female students complained that he had made "annoying" advances by phone and email. Teachers caught him taking pictures of girls' knees under the desks with his cell phone. He frightened fellow students with his mean looks, to the extent that Lucinda Roy, the head of the English department born in Battersea, south London, took him out of one class to tutor him individually. Talking to him, she said, was "like talking to a hole".

One of the female student's complaints started a process that might have prevented Monday's massacre. Campus police issued a temporary detention order and took him to a local mental health facility, where he spent one night before being brought before a special justice, who determined that Cho was an "imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness".

He recommended outpatient treatment at the clinic. This was crucial. If he had committed him as an in-patient, it would have gone on his record. But he did not, which meant that nothing showed up in background checks when Cho decided the time had come to take revenge on the society he had grown to loathe.

In February this year, Cho obtained a Walther 22mm handgun from a pawnshop near the campus. He apparently decided he needed still more firepower - we can therefore assume he was meticulously plotting his deadly assaults weeks ago - and last month he travelled 30 miles to Roanoke Firearms, where he purchased a Glock 19 for a little over $500 (£250). With no red flag appearing on his background check regarding his brush with mental professionals, the sale of those weapons appeared to be legal. Federal officials said yesterday, however, that if the system had worked properly his purchases should have been blocked.

Why Monday? Why the first two victims in West Ambler Johnston, Emily Hilscher - "Pixie" on her MySpace page - and Ryan Clark, a resident adviser in the hall? We still don't know. And what about that trip tothe post office between the two rounds of killings, the most startling of the details to emerge all week? For at 9.01am, he posted to NBC News what its anchorman Brian Williams unfortunately referred to as his "multimedia manifesto", featuring pages of ranting, still photographs of himself and video footage of him brandishing the guns that he used to kill his victims.

Many on campus remain furious at NBC for broadcasting its contents. "This is what he wanted," said Daniel Aguilera, a fifth-year student from Peru. "He wanted us to see him by keeping on playing that video."

Disbelief remains at Virginia Tech. Gaze beyond campus to the Blue Ridge Mountains, and two things come to mind. This was once frontier America, where the original instinct to allow citizens to bear arms made eminent sense. In this age, however, students and their parents are drawn to Blacksburg for a clear reason: it is not, as Professor Axsom says, "plopped in a big city" with all the urban distractions and dangers that that might imply. Blacksburg is a peaceful place, a place of community - of Hokie spirit. Now that spirit has almost too much to overcome.