Another day, another college tragedy
It was less than a year ago when over thirty college students were killed at Virginia Tech. There was a suicide on Stetson’s campus last month, an attempted suicide last week, and an off-campus suicide yesterday. What is going ON?
Now it came to my attention that there was a shooting at Northern Illinois University on Thursday. Though the first article in USA Today did not give a lot of details about the shooter, an online article from USA Today’s website shed more light on the man who killed five students and then himself.
Steven Kazmierczak, 27, a relatively recent graduate from NIU, had purchased handgun accessories, oddly enough, from the same Internet dealer that the Virginia Tech shooter dealt with. I want to know, first of all, if the site is going to have to undergo any changes or regulations so that this doesn’t happen again. I don’t know for sure, but could a site like that do a background check before selling their weaponry?
Police are looking to talk to Kazmierczak’s girlfriend to see if they were having probelms or had recently broken up. I am anxious to follow the investigation to see if, in fact, that was a possible motive for his murder/suicide. Because of Kazmierczak’s suicide, it will be harder for police to determine his motive, but I am optimistic that they will get some good leads as to why he chose to come back to his alma mater and kill himself and others.
On a separate journalistic note, I have to add that the lead from the online article (Victims of Thursday’s shootings at Northern Illinois University were mourned Saturday as the search for explanations for the rampage continued and memories of last year’s massacre at Virginia Tech were revived) and the lead from the Friday/Saturday/Sunday print edition (DEKALB, Ill. — Students crawled, hid and ran in terror from a man dressed in black who appeared from behind a screen at a lecture hall Thursday at a university west of Chicago and blasted students with gunfire before killing himself in a melee that was over in less than two minutes, school officials said) were both very good.
