A survivor of a 2007 shooting voiced horror Friday after an elementary school massacre in Connecticut, urging policymakers to take action to stop such violence from being “normal” in the United States.
Colin Goddard, who became an advocate for gun control after the 2007 shooting at the Virginia Tech campus, said “I sunk in my chair” after seeing news of the bloodshed in Newtown, Connecticut.
“You really can’t do justice to what these kids and what these teachers have just experienced — the violence, the intensity, the sadness,” Goddard told MSNBC television.
“This is not something that should be normal in our country. This is not something that other countries experience like we do,” he said.
Goddard said that while Friday’s focus should be on sympathy, the United States needs to look at “what we’re going to do between now and the next major shooting that happens in our country.”
“Our decision-makers somehow think that this is something they cannot influence, this is something that they can’t do anything about, when the vast majority of us don’t want to live in a country like this. We don’t want to see these things continue to happen,” he said.
Goddard is part of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which has tried with little success to encourage gun control in a nation where firearms are readily available and passionately supported by many conservatives.
Virginia Tech was the scene of the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in US history in April 2007 when an English major, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people before taking his own life. Twenty-five others were wounded.
The Sandy Hook Elementary School comes close to the tragic designation of deadliest rampage, with reports that the gunman slaughtered at least 27 people, many of them young children.
Survivor: Shootings 'should not be normal' in US
