April 16, 2008, marks the one year anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre as Korean student Cho Seung-hui in a fit of madness and depression went on a shooting rampage as he took the lives of thirty-two students and teachers on the Virginia Tech campus, before turning the gun on himself. This day would forever be engraved as a moment of darkness in the history of twenty-first century American let alone for Virginia Tech.
While a year has pasted with many working hard to move away from the dark incident, there are those that are still coping. Many have lost friends and family members in the Virginia Tech shooting.
Bryan Cloyd lost his daughter Austin, in the VT shooting. “I won’t be able to walk my daughter down the aisle at her wedding. I won’t be able to bounce her children on my knee,” Bryan Cloyd said. He added: “And I don’t think it’s helpful to dwell on that, because where that leads is just more sadness. I think what’s helpful to do is to dwell on what can be. What can we do with what we have?”
In the case of Cho, the one responsible for the shooting; there are no public memorials planned.
In related news, eight months after the Virginia Tech shooting, 21-year-old Korean student Daniel Kim had taken his own life. His father, William Kim, said that the school was not taking the warning signs of suicide that serious. In the case of Daniel Kim, he fell into state of depression out of fear that he could be mistaken for Cho Seung-hui.
The scars of the Virginia Tech shooting could extend towards South Korea, whose government had issued an apology for Cho’s actions.
On an interesting note, the one year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shooting comes on the same day as the Democratic debate in Pennsylvania between Democratic frontrunners Senator Hillary Clinton of New York and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. On that note, the hot button topic could be gun ownership rights.
In Pennsylvania, there are almost one-million licensed hunters. There are at least 250,000 registered members of the NRA living in the state of Pennsylvania, making it the one state with the largest number of members. However, there is at least one gun-related death a day in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For that reason, Philadelphia is known as “Killadelphia.”
However, the issue of guns could possibly be overshadowed by “green jobs.” The day of the April 22 Democratic primaries is the same day as Earth Day.