41 years later, another lone gunman terrorizes a university

The Clarion-Ledger Editorial, 4/18/7

So on August 1, 1966, the news from Austin, Texas, that University of Texas engineering student Charles Whitman had climbed to the top of the UT Tower armed with three rifles, two pistols and a sawed-off shotgun shocked a nation that knew nothing of school shootings.

The Virginia Tech tragedy is as real and painful for the people of that community as Luke Woodham’s 1997 rampage in Pearl that killed three and left seven wounded was for us. But the thread of cold, random acts of violent rage and insanity that connects Whitman to Woodham and now to the current lunatic – identified as Virginia Tech English major Cho Seung-Hui, 23 – is as difficult for me to fathom as a middle-aged father of a college student as it was when I was a child sitting on the floor watching my parents’ black-and-white TV.