"It was almost impossible to believe, and too much to bear."

January 1979:
Brenda Spencer, 17, is given a rifle as a present for christmas, goes to school and starts shooting around. 15 injured, 2 dead.
Why? She said she didn't like Mondays...

March 1987:
Nathan Ferris, 12, kills a boy who was making fun of him and kills himself after that. He told a friend of his not to go to school that day, which shows that he planned to shoot somebody, but nobody tried to prevent it from happening.
Why? He was getting sick of being teased all the time...

November 1995:
Jamie Rouse, 17, goes to school and shoots two teachers in the head. He tries to kill his football coach as well, but a female student crossed his path and was shot instead. Really shocking: He smiled when he was aiming at the coach. Even more shocking: He told his friends about each detail of his cruel plan, but again, nobody acted.

February 1996:
Barry Loukaitis, 14, dresses up like a gunslinger from the Wild West, goes to school, and shoots three people. He even took hostages, and he was one of the few who didn't kill himself, he didn't have the chance to because a teacher rushed in and put an end to the whole, terrible scenario.
Why? Mood swings... And a classmates of his claimed that Barry Loukaitis thought it would be FUN...

February 1997:
Evan Ramsey, 16, kills a student and the headmaster. He also talked to his friends about the plans, but did they care? No.
Why? He couldn't stand being teased any longer...

October 1997:
Luke Woodham, who admired Adolf Hitler, first stabbed his mother, then went to school where he shot his former girlfriend and another girl, wounded seven other stundents. When he wanted to get his second gun, he could be disarmed.
Why? "I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I did this to show society: Push us and we will push back."

March 1998:
Two boys, aged 11 and 13, gun down 15 people; five die. One of the boys set off the firealarm, and when the people left the school and were outside, the boys began to shoot.

These are just a few examples of violence in American schools, because people tend to only talk about the Columbine shooting, but this proves that this by far wasn't the only shooting and for sure won't be the last when things don't start to change immediately.
Today I had a look at various American newspapers, looked at the headlines, read a few articles about Mondays shooting at the Virginia tech. The sad outcome: 33 dead, 15 injured. The most terrible shooting in the history of the USA.
One can't even imagine what it must have been like to hear the shots, not to know whether he will get you as well, not to know what he will do next, not to know why the shooter does such a terrible thing.

I did a little research on shootings in American schools, and I realised that many, many of these murders happened because kids or teenagers were teased and bullied in school and couldn't stand it any longer.
A year ago, I also read a book on this topic, "Give a boy a gun" by Todd Strasser. It was shocking to read, because you realise that things like this just happen. They could actually happen any time.

A question comes to my mind: Why doesn't this happen in Austria? What is so different here? In my opinion it's the gun policies, but as we all know, Americans love their guns, even when things like this happen. But would could you expect? Even president Bush defends the gun policies. Guns don't kill people, people do. True, definitely true. But if all those kids had no guns, there wouldn't be so many dead, and that's a fact.

I would like to finish with two quotes from people who were at the Virginia Tech when the shooting took place, or who had friends there.

"It's one of those senseless things that yoz can't explain, why someone would do that."

"It was clear when we were leaving that there were a lot of people hurt or killed."