by Can Tran

Created on: April 18, 2007   Last Updated: April 26, 2007

In only a day's time, the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia that claimed the lives of 33 people including the gunman Cho Seung-hui had not only become a national incident but also an international incident as well. In various sorts of manners has the VT shooting affected numerous people if not anybody. Though I'm not a student at VT, I happen to still be a college student, a former substitute teacher, and an Asian-American.

For a moment, I didn't think that colleges were susceptible to mass shootings until I saw the news report on Monday April 16th, 2007. All the school shootings in the past with the exception of University of Texas took place on public schools. As a college student, it makes me think about the possibility of a shooting taking place just about on any college campus. It's a scary thing to fathom but it's a strong possibility. Sadly, it's been made into a grim reality by Cho Seung-hui. Recently I saw on the news that NBC had received a package that was probably from Cho and it's already been handed to the local authorities.

Perhaps we'll get a glimpse as to what was going through Cho's mind. There was a whole segment on the Oprah Winfrey show with Lisa Ling interviewing people at VT. There was a psychologist that Oprah interviewed that made a bunch of valid points. The colleges and universities need to take a good look at the budget and see how much they spend on security and psychological assistance. The psychologist said she bets that the colleges spend much more on athletics than they do on the more important stuff. That's a valid point. You can have a bunch of star players on a team, but they're not going to be able to protect you from a troubled individual going on a shooting spree.

The damage has been done, and now people are speaking up about Cho. If Cho has had a bunch of problems in the past, why didn't they do something about it. Shouldn't they have tracked his behavior. As a substitute teacher, I've taught in plenty of classes with problematic children that needed more help than Cho. The paraprofessionals that assist the teacher have ABCs which is a behavior chart that tracks down the behavior of such students. They should've done the same thing with Cho. No institute of higher learning is immune from having highly problematic students. Afterall, college is usually the next step after graduation from high school.

They recently received a picture of Cho with the tactical vest and two handguns. Question remains to

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