Well, what a sad day we've had here in Virginia. I found out around noon what had happened, and immediately called my brother, who lives in Blacksburg and attends some engineering classes at VTech. I can't even begin to describe the relief I felt hearing the sound of his voice. He said that he was on campus, but heard the loudspeaker warnings to get away and stay down, and he just turned around and walked right back to his car.
In my graduating class, I would estimate that 40 people are at Tech this year, and as far as I know, everyone is fine- I feel like I would have heard by now if anyone were seriously hurt, or worse. It was a somber day at JMU today, though. We're only an hour and 45 minutes from Tech, and almost everyone has friends who attend. A few friends of mine had friends who were supposed to have been in the class that was murdered, but missed alarms or decided to skip today. A few friends of mine were in a classroom in the same hallway that everything happened in, and they're obviously shaken, and in need of a lot of help, but thank GOD they're lucky enough to be alive.
Most of the day was spent on the phone, frantically trying to get a hold of people we knew- there were so many calls going and coming from Blacksburg that most cell providers weren't functioning correctly.
I just...I can't even begin to fathom how something like this can happen to people who are so close and so much like me. And I also can't EVEN believe why (a) Dr. Phil is being called upon as an "expert" on CNN, and (b), why the media is SO QUICK to point fingers, and blame video games, and movies, and all of this crap. Why they can't just let these families deal with this in peace, without all of the speculation?
And why the HELL wasn't VTech put under security? If this happened at JMU, I can GUARANTEE there would be security EVERYWHERE, and classes would be cancelled until it was guaranteed that we were safe. I mean, I don't know everything, so I'm not going to make judgement calls, but it just doesn't seem right to me.
I think I'm going to bed. This has been a ridiculously long day.