Memories of 2007 Virginia Tech Shooting Renewed with New Scare

By Ray Downs, Christian Post Reporter Thursday, August 04, 2011

The current scare over the possibility of a crazed gunman roaming the campus of Virginia Tech is causing many to recall the horrible tragedies that have afflicted the school in the past few years.

The memories of Seung Hui-Cho, the troubled young man who brought a rifle onto the picturesque Blacksburg, VA campus and massacred 33 people in cold blood - the largest deadliest shooting rampage in American history – are still fresh in people’s memories.

All around the country and the internet, people wondered why such violence could occur yet again at a place where young adults should be concerned with books, not bullets.

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“Seems like another copycat,” said Erica Blau, a young woman taking a lunch break in downtown NYC.

“Probably another loner with issues of some kind,” she added.

Lindsey Cuvelier, a tourist from Iowa, was more blunt. “He’s a psychotic idiot,” she said.

“But I have sympathy for the students there and empathy for the parents because I’m a mom,” she added.

On Twitter, the possibility of a rehashing of the 2007 bloodbath worried many.

“again?” tweeted @OfficialBabyGrl. “This is starting to be like a scary movie thing, just sequel after sequel.”

@chantelMmccabe tweeted, “33 people were killed by a gunman at #VirginiaTech in 2007, let's hope to God there won't be a repeat today!”

With the conversation centering on a possible repeat of the 2007 shooting, another event was brought back to the public consciousness. @__Keezer tweeted, “It's like each year you hear about an incident at Virginia Tech. First the Massacre. Then the decapitation. Now this?”

The tweet was in reference to the murder of Xin Yang, a young graduate student at Virginia Tech who had only been at the school for two weeks. Yang turned down romantic advances of Haiyang Zhu, a Chinese doctoral student, who snapped and used a kitchen knife to decapitate her.

Zhu was sentenced to life in prison without parole last year.