Focus on Domestic Violence in Virginia Tech Shooting

Students, journalists and others are asking why more warning wasn't given after the first shooting at the Virginia Tech campus took place Monday morning. A few hours later, more than 30 people were dead. The response by university officials tells us a lot about how domestic violence is perceived across the U.S.

Here's how Sue Lindsey of the Associated Press put it:

Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said authorities believed that the shooting at the dorm was a domestic dispute and mistakenly thought the gunman had fled the campus. "We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur," he said.

Now it's true that domestic violence is limited to intimate partners and family members most of the time. In addition, murder-suicides typically do not involve strangers. So there's a certain brutal, if tragically flawed, logic to believing that the rest of campus was not in danger.

But this is not a 100% hard-and-fast rule, as the Virginia Tech and other killings so horribly prove. The night before Charles Whitman shot and killed a dozen people in 1966 from the tower at the University of Texas in Austin, he murdered his wife and mother.

It took me a long time to realize domestic violence is a health issue--and not just something that happens to "other people." It is still covered as an isolated "crime of passion" much of the time. And yet, one study estimates that between 1,000 and 1,500 people are killed in murder-suicides across the U.S. each year.

My thoughts and prayers are with the friends and families who lost loved ones on April 16, 2007 in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Source on estimated deaths due to murder-suicide: Yekeen A. Aderibigbe, “Violence in America: A Survey of Suicide Linked to Homicides,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 42, no. 4 (1997): 662-665; cited by the Violence Policy Center in "American Roulette"