Remembering the lives lost at Virginia Tech

Tragedy in Blacksburg 14 years ago should have moved the nation to change

Fourteen years ago, a student at Virginia Tech killed 32 students and professors in what was then the deadliest mass shooting in American history. Seventeen others were injured. The gunman killed himself.

That should have been a defining moment for Virginia and the nation, the opportunity to take bold and brave action to end the scourge of gun violence.

If unmoved by previous mass shootings, most prominently the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, surely what happened in Blacksburg would move America to do better — to be better.

That was before a gunman at an Orlando nightclub shot 102 people, 49 fatally; before a gunman in Las Vegas shot 471 people, 60 fatally, at a country music festival; before a gunman killed 20 students and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut; and before so many other awful, nearly incomprehensible events that held, for a fleeting moment, the nation’s attention, fueled its outrage and should have been the tipping point for change.

What happened in Blacksburg also preceded the 2019 shooting at the Virginia Beach Municipal Center that landed the commonwealth back in the spotlight.

Days later, of course, another mass shooting turned attention to the next community mourning its dead and lamenting that more wasn’t done.

Recall the words of James Bentz from earlier this year, who escaped a gunman who opened fire at a Boulder, Colorado, supermarket in March: “It seemed like all of us had imagined we’d be in a situation like this at some point in our lives.”

The outsized focus on mass-casualty shootings obscures the large issue of gun violence in America, which claimed 43,536 lives in 2020, according to the Gun Violence Archive. That figure includes 24,156 suicides and 19,380 homicides or accidental gun deaths.

It does not include the multitudes wounded by firearms each year, which but for better aim or without the heroic work of first responders and trauma surgeons would drive the casualty figures much higher.

Virginia has, in the last two years, made progress in passing commonsense gun control legislation. Commonwealth lawmakers in 2020 instituted universal background checks, restored the one-handgun-a-month purchasing limit, enacted a red-flag law authorizing law enforcement to take guns away from those judged to be a danger, and empowered local government to limit where people can carry weapons.

Those measures would be bolstered through federal legislation that continues to languish in Congress. This, despite the certain knowledge that a patchwork of state laws cannot make the sort of difference that federal measures would.

When thinking about what happened at Virginia Tech, it’s essential to also consider what should be done about mental health care. The shooter in Blacksburg was diagnosed with severe mental illness and should not have been allowed to purchase the guns he used that day.

While addressing firearms through legislation has proved to be a slog over the years, on both the state and federal levels, there have been strides made in both mental health awareness and the need to limit guns purchased by those who might pose a threat to themselves and others.

But there is more work to be done on that front as well. As we erase the stigma associated with seeking help for mental illness, governments must work to make treatment more accessible and less costly to those who need it.

Even as the commonwealth pauses today to remember young lives senselessly cut short, to mark the bravery of the heroes who saved others — some of whom lost their lives as a result — we should not lose sight of the fact that we can and should do more to prevent future tragedies — that we have the power to effect change.

The Virginia Tech tragedy should have been the moment that Virginia and the nation had enough.

That we continue to mourn those lost to gun violence is a painful reminder of an opportunity squandered and the work left to do.