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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Anyone else nervous about VA Tech?  There has been so much violence on that campus.  Serious question:  Is the campus safe?  Do students there feel safe?[/quote]

If you take away the one mass shooting, which is practically a random even, the level of violence at Tech is not bad. There were 32 murders on one day.  And that is pretty much the Va Tech number of murders.  33 (one additional one) in the last 20 years.

In fact since then, Tech has been one of the safe campuses.  [url]https://wset.com/news/local/virginia-tech-makes-the-list-for-safest-college-campus-in-america-for-2018[/url].
[/quote]

Obviously, you haven't spent a significant amount of time in Blacksburg during the last 13 years.  Since 2006, not counting the big massacre, the following murders happened on or near the VT campus and were committed on or by VT students:

- 8/20/2006: William Morva kills officers Eric Sutphin and Derrick McFarland in close vicinity to campus. Campus is on lockdown.
- 1/21/2009: VT student Haiyang Zhu beheads fellow student Xin Yang in the Au Bon Pain cafe on campus.
- 8/26/2009: VT students Heidi Childs and David Metzler were murdered at Caldwell Fields, 15 miles from campus.
- 10/17/2009: VT student Morgan Harrington is abducted and killed by Jesse L. Matthew at a concert in Charlottesville.
- 12/8/2011: Ross Truett Ashley kills officer Deriek Crouse on VT's campus and then shoots himself.
- 2/7/2014: VT student Jessica Michelle Ewing kills fellow student Samanata Shrestha in an apartment next to campus.
- 1/27/2016: VT students David Eisenhauer and Natalie Keepers kill Nicole Lovell, a Blacksburg middle school student.
- 8/17/2016: VT student Zachary Toothman kills his brother and father in Great Bridge, VA to avoid having to acknowledge his academic suspension.

The constant barrage of murders is taking a tremendous toll on those who have lived longer in Blacksburg.

Note that this is not counting what happens in "rural Appalachia" like in neighboring Christiansburg, such as the April 12, 2013, shooting at New River Community College, the 2014 Charles Taylor murder or the 2015 courthouse suicide of Mark Ward Faville after being found guilty of murdering his wife in 2000 in Blacksburg.

[/quote]

Except of those, one occurred on campus.  One.  In 20 years.  This is a community of 30000 people, mostly young.  This is not a scary number.  (oh and one of the events occered at UVA).  Oh, and there are a number of murders at UVA.  Not a large number, but it happens.  This is not a Va Tech problem.

[/quote]

First, you're wrong. Even if you take the geographical definition of "on campus," it is 2. Two. (Not counting the massacre of 32, of course).
Second, you sound like a Tech administrator.  If it's (literally) in an apartment across the street from campus where Samanata was strangled to death, or at a nearby outdoor place like Caldwell Field where Heidi Childs and David Metzler were gunned down, or a few blocks away from campus where Nicole Lovell died, if it's not on campus it's not our business!  Nevermind that VT students were murderers or victims. If you followed these incidents, you'll also note that the moment a student is arrested, they're expelled from Tech so that Tech then can deny any affiliation with that person. It's too bad they can't posthumously expel the victims, too.

For those who live in Blacksburg and who have been through all this, a different picture emerges. When we read statistics like "safest campus" we throw up. We can't listen to the sirenes of emergency vehicles without counting them. Show me one other college town in America with a similar sequence of events that has affected, or was affected by its students during that time frame.

On a hopeful note, the last killings are now almost 3 years back. Perhaps the cycle is broken.[/quote]

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