After Tech, empty promises
16 years since shooting, Virginia hasn’t done enough to prevent another tragedy
Students, instructors, administrators, alumni and the larger campus community will converge on Blacksburg this weekend for events honoring the 16th anniversary of the deadly shooting at Virginia Tech.
There will be hugs and tears, as there are every year, and solemn remembrances of the 32 students and educators who were killed by a gunman at a residence hall and an academic building that awful April day.
And this year, as in recent years, there will be a pervading sense that the promises of “never again” that followed the Virginia Tech tragedy were hollow as community after community, here in Virginia and elsewhere, wrestle with the grief and outrage of their own mass casualty shootings.
So numerous are these events, so horrific and awful, that what happened in Blacksburg 16 years ago has, for many, faded into memory.
The 2012 murder of 26 people, including 20 first graders, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, evokes a more visceral reaction; the 2016 attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which killed 49 people, and the 2017 shooting in Las Vegas, which killed 60 people and injured hundreds, were deadlier.
Yet, for Virginia, the events of April 16 continue to haunt us because of the mistakes made that might have averted the violence. And they challenge us to take the steps necessary to keep deadly weapons away from those who should not have them and make mental health services more accessible, affordable and effective to anyone who needs them.
Sadly, however, after an initial rush to close legal loopholes exposed by the gunman’s actions, the commonwealth has failed to honor the promises it made after
Virginia Tech, and the horrors of that day have done little to provoke action on the national level, where progress has been fleeting even as the bodies pile up in places such as Uvadle, Texas; Parkland, Florida; El Paso, Texas; and, more recently, Louisville, Kentucky, and Nashville, Tennessee.
The simple fact is that there are things we can do, here in Virginia and across the nation, that enjoy widespread public support and, frankly, are long overdue.
The commonwealth’s system of mental health services has steadily improved since the General Assembly made it a point of emphasis following the death of Gus Deeds, son of state Sen. Creigh Deeds. The System Transformation Excellence and Performance (STEP-VA) reforms were an important step, and Virginia has done better to ensure accessibility of services regardless of location.
But better is still not good enough.
The legislature has yet to fully fund the STEP-VA expansion of services, and there are still profound problems both in ensuring people in crisis can receive care and treatment and in how the justice and mental health systems communicate about the most problematic and at-risk people.
Likewise, on gun safety, Virginia lawmakers passed a package of measures that included a red-flag law to remove firearms from people deemed a risk to themselves or others and other needed reforms (universal background checks; mandatory reporting for lost or stolen weapons; resumption of the one-gun-a-month policy).
Virginia State Police report the red-flag law was used hundreds of times in its first two years to temporarily seize a weapon when an individual was placed under a temporary detention or emergency order.
But legislators failed to enact a bill this year that would have required safe storage of a firearm in a home where a child is present, a particularly relevant fix thanks to recent events. And even that hard-won progress is at risk from those who apparently believe people in crisis should have unfettered access to deadly weapons and would repeal even those modest public safety measures.
In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shooting, the commonwealth said it would not let such a tragedy happen here again. Those words are meaningless without the actions to support them, which so far Virginia has been unable, or unwilling, to muster.