La Voz

Painful memories resurfaced for many De Anza College students last Monday as they awoke to the news of a killing spree at Virginia Polytechnic Institute perpetrated by a 23-year old English major, Cho Seung Hui.

The tragedy evoked De Anza's own close encounter with school violence six years ago, when student Al DeGuzman was narrowly prevented from carrying out a similar attack by the vigilance of a drug store employee, who alerted police after developing suspicious photos of DeGuzman posing with weapons.

Reactions from De Anza students ranged from sadness and anger to disbelief that Cho had succeeded in killing 33 people, including himself, across the Virginia Tech campus in little less than three hours.

"I was horrified and angry when I first heard the news," said student Elena Litvinlva. "These things have almost become so common that people think nothing of them."

Others expressed shock at the scale of the massacre, which is now confirmed as the deadliest incident of gun violence in U.S. history.

"Honestly, I was amazed that he was able to kill so many people, because often in these shootings there are only a handful of casualties. I was amazed and scared," said sophomore Ohr Shottan.

The massacre was discussed in classrooms throughout last week, as students and faculty alike tried to understand what drove Cho to commit his act of violence.

"In most cases like these, there is a loose set of characteristics commonly present in the psyche of the killer. They are socially disaffected, disdainful, narcissistic, and sometimes paranoid. They dehumanize their victims before they kill them, using their own pain as a rationale," said psychology instructor Charles Ramskov.

"These massacres are often their last attempt at doing something they feel is significant with their lives before they end them."

In Cho's suicide note, videos and manifesto that he mailed to NBC during a short interval between the two main incidents of shooting, he railed against "rich kids" at Virginia Tech and "student debauchery," prompting many to wonder if the social and academic pressures of college life contributed to his homicidal outburst.

"There are definitely pressures, but this behavior is extreme. He was obviously unstable to begin with," said student Christina Maine.

Still others questioned the common linkage of media violence to events such as these.

"No one can say that there is a direct causal connection between the two, but there is an element here which brings up our culture's notion of fame, and media models of how we should act. The pictures Cho took of himself posing with his guns are almost iconic, like an imitation of a movie," said sociology department chair Jennifer Myhre.

A number of students at De Anza and at other colleges expressed an unforgiving sentiment, captured in a statement by a Virginia Tech student that appeared in last Thursday's San Jose Mercury News: "I personally don't care what he has to say. There is no possible explanation."

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