By Staff
Jason Cannon, Franklin County Times
Earlier this week and well into yesterday I've been following closely the developments at Virginia Tech University.
As of yesterday afternoon, 31 people plus the gunman were confirmed killed in the largest mass murder in U.S. history.
Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old South Korean student, unleashed a hail of gun fire early Monday morning, claiming 31 seemingly innocent classmates.
What was his motivation? No one seems to know.
Was this just a random act or was this a targeted act of terrorism designed to make some kind of statement?
Again, no one really knows.
As a parent, I can't even imagine what the parents of these students must be going through.
When I was in school I don't remember ever worrying about things like this. Sure, shootings and crime were always a community-wide concern but a school always seemed like a safe haven. Not even the most-vile criminal would attack someone in a school.
I graduated high school in 1998. The next year the Columbine shootings happened.
School no-longer seemed like the safe fortress that it once was.
As I went off to college, and after September 11, 2001, a different kind of reality began to set in.
The world was changing and it became obvious that there were people out there who just wanted to hurt or kill other people.
Why? Just because.
There was no safe haven anymore. To certain breeds of truly disturbed people, everyone is a potential target at all times.
Still, I don't remember ever imagining that anything on the scale of what happened at Virginia Tech this week could have happened while I was enrolled at UAB.
The Columbine shooting surprised me. I was totally floored by this week's massacre.
The scary part is that I don't have to deal with it anymore; my two-year-old daughter will.
For most of you reading this column, your children and grandchildren will have to deal with it.
We all are just bystanders.
You guys, along with Tiffany and myself, will just have to hope that our children are never in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It's sad that it's come to all this.
No longer can you just do your best to raise your children the best way you know how and hope they go off to become productive citizens.
My thoughts and prayers go out to the friends and family of the Virginia Tech students. Now more than ever you have to hope that God will keep our children safe when some random pistol wielding coward confronts them.