Solemn ceremonies scheduled for Tuesday will mark the 17th anniversary of the tragic shooting at Virginia Tech that claimed the lives of 32 students and faculty members. As time passes and memory fades, it’s important to remember those lives, young and old, cruelly stolen from the commonwealth by a troubled young man with access to firearms and a determination to use them.
Gun violence remains a crisis in Virginia and the nation, one that demands every tool available and the courage to use them. We should not accept that the thousands of gun deaths each year are required for the preservation of liberty, recognizing that inaction allows the bloodshed to continue.
Americans experienced mass-casualty shootings before what happened in Blacksburg — at the University of Texas in 1966 and at Columbine High School in 1999, among others — but those experiences did nothing to temper the shock and horror of that awful morning at Virginia Tech.
A 23-year-old undergraduate student with a history of mental illness fatally shot two people at a residence hall, went to the post office to mail a package of writings and video to NBC News, and then went to an academic building where he opened fire in several classrooms. There he killed 25 students and five instructors, and wounded 17 others, before killing himself.
It was America’s deadliest mass shooting prior to gunmen in Orlando in 2016 and Las Vegas in 2017 inflicted horrors on those communities. Of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history, seven occurred after Virginia Tech.
As with those before and those subsequent, the Blacksburg tragedy sparked a national debate about access to firearms and the inadequacy of mental health services for people in crisis. In its aftermath, Virginia officials found motivation to address the commonwealth’s notoriously lax gun laws by closing gaps between federal and state statutes about information that should be collected for background checks.
Yet, like mass shootings both before and after, the urgency was fleeting. The Tech gunman had skirted Virginia’s one-gun-a-month purchase limit by waiting 32 days between buying the two firearms; rather than tighten it, state lawmakers instead repealed that rule in 2013. And promises to improve mental health services were never fully realized, a problem that persists to this day.
The General Assembly has had ample opportunity in the last 17 years to impose stricter rules regarding firearm purchases, to ask more of gun owners to store their weapons safely, and to prevent what happened in Blacksburg as well as the more commonplace gun violence that has cost Virginia too many lives and harmed too many communities.
Sometimes, it has done so. In 2020, following a mass shooting at the Virginia Beach Municipal Center in May 2019 that killed 12 people, lawmakers approved bills that imposed universal background checks on purchases, strengthen the requirement to report stolen weapons, restored the one-gun-a-month law and allowed for Emergency Substantial Risk Orders, also known as a “red flag” law, for those considered a threat to themselves or others.
This year, lawmakers advanced several sensible gun control measures that would have served the commonwealth. These included the imposition of a waiting period for purchases, tougher requirements for gun storage in homes with children, closing the so-called “boyfriend loophole” to limit firearm access to intimate partners convicted of domestic abuse, and a prohibition of guns at public colleges and universities, including Virginia Tech.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed those and others, including an assault weapons ban, siding with gun advocates and the firearms lobby instead of Virginians who want safer homes, safer communities and safer campuses. The fact that polling shows the public wants tougher gun control laws apparently carried no weight with the governor.
We can only imagine what those talented, promising young adults killed at Tech 17 years ago would be doing now and the many ways they would be changing the world. As we remember them today, we should honor those who act with courage, rather than cowardice, to protect future generations from a similar fate.
