Not the world’s clearest picture, but probably a better representation of the experience than any other you’ll see. This is Jamal Albarghouti‘s cellcam footage of the Virginia Tech shooting event of earlier today, just a few seconds, taken at 3:15pm. It depicts the police shooting the gunman, and don’t watch it if you don’t care to see violence. Don’t watch it if you LIKE to see violence; go get your head examined instead.
At first you can’t figure out what’s going on, and then suddenly you realize that’s exactly what it was like for Jamal in that moment…he probably wasn’t sure exactly what was going on either.
I got this video from JoshintheCity here, and Disembedded has the definitive roundup of news coverage and images on his blog here. Police say they’ve made a tentative ID, but aren’t saying who. Rumour has it that it’s a 24-year-old Chinese man apparently from Shanghai who had broken up with his girlfriend: he went first to her dorm and the rumors differ on whether he shot her and a student advisor who tried to intervene, or whether he didn’t find her at all and shot people who tried to calm him, then he went to Norris Hall the engineering building (where he may have expected her to be). Some are saying he got frustrated at not finding her because he didn’t know what rooms she’d be in, and that’s when he began lining people up to execute them.
UPDATE: and thanks to the comments section and FFE, we now know:
It is now confirmed the shooter was a 23-year old South Korean National name Cho Seung-Hui who resided in Centreville, VA.
Hui was a senior English major at VT
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raincoaster 
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The suspect is now officially identified as a 23-year old Korean legal resident and a VT dorm resident
Actor Donald Sutherland once pointed out it is almost as easy to buy a gun in Canada, where he comes from, as in the US, yet the incidence of gun-related deaths there is dramatically lower.
He argued that both countries have a frontier spirit, but the iconic figure of the Canadian West is the Mountie – a law officer – while the iconic figure of the American West is the outlaw.
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The kid wil the cell phone is lucky he didn’t get shot by the cops
The problem is that they`re trying to Islamize the whole incident.
http://ahmedismailibrahim.wordpress.com/2007/04/17/theyre-trying-to-islamize-virginia-school-shootings/
perhaps the assailant was a “peaceful” buddhist…
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Islamicize the incident? That’s just patently ridiculous. Al Quaeda must be laughing itself stupid at that one. Thanks for the update, FFE.
Timethief, do you think it IS as easy to buy a gun in Canada as the US? I don’t own one, but I do know that when I was canvassing for Greenpeace I talked to a lot of hunters who complained about American laxity, and when I was doing crime reporting I knew of a bunch of teenagers who’d go on weekend runs down to Seattle to buy guns, bringing them back across the border under their girlfriend’s dresses; they’d hardly do that if it was just as easy to buy them up here.
Mind you, at some of the bars around here you could probably get a Midnight Special for fifty bucks.
From Stratfor.com
After reading two posts and taking a quick browse from one of them, I’ve got an observation.
Why in fuck do people start tossing the race and/or religion card when someone goes off the deep end and does something like Monday’s tragedy? Has it ever occurred to some folks that there are some people who are just wound so damned tight – emotionally, psychologically or physiologically – that they snap and become destructive and ultimately self-destructive? After seeing innuendo about Buddhists and accusations that the whole world is trying to “Islamicize’ the incident, then I end up stumbling across the intellectually delightful Debbie Schussel and her Crayola coloring of the incident.
Let’s face it – Virginia Tech was not some evil terrorist plot, nor was it a case study in the evils of letting furriners into the U.S. to wreak havoc and undermine the foundations of our God-fearing democracy.
It was a horrible confluence of bureaucratic inertia, a culture where an organization screams that it’s the right and duty for all Americans to be better armed than most third-world armies, and a kid who went over the edge.
And people are dead and parents have lost children.
Exactly. What better argument for gun control: when you go apeshit, you can only bean so many people with a rock. Two automatic pistols can do a lot more damage. You never hear about “campus hockey stick mauling” sprees.
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