Virginia Tech reignites battle over gun laws
The guns were sold in Virginia, the lives taken violently just a few miles away. It is the guns bought there and used for crimes elsewhere that have long had mayors around the United States angry.
With a credit card and a lie, Cho Seung-Hui was able to walk out of a pawnshop and a gun store with the handguns he later used to slaughter 32, and then kill himself. The state's background check failed to turn up his history of mental illness in each of the two sales.
Sugiarti, stepmother of Partahi Mamora Halomoan Lumbantoruan, an Indonesian doctorate student who was among the 32 people gunned down in Virginia Tech University massacre, breaks down as she holds Mamora's bag in front of his coffin as his father Tohom Lumbantoruan shakes hands with an official (not in the photograph) in Jakarta yesterday. AFP |