The Virginia Tech massacre was a school shooting comprised of two separate incidents about two hours apart on April 16, 2007, on the campus of Virginia Tech. The shooter killed thirty-two people and wounded twenty-three others before committing suicide, making it the deadliest shooting in U.S. history. The perpetrator had been court ordered to seek treatment at the university's Cook Counseling Center seventeen months earlier, but the order was neither obeyed nor enforced. Additionally, the university's administration had failed to heed warnings from the shooter's professors on numerous occasions. The incident sparked intense debate in the U.S. and globally about gun violence, gun laws, gaps in the U.S. system for treating mental health issues, the perpetrator's state of mind, the responsibility of college administrators, privacy laws, journalism ethics, and other issues. The incident prompted immediate changes in Virginia law that had allowed the shooter, an individual adjudicated as mentally unsound, to purchase handguns. It also led to passage of the first major federal gun control measure in more than thirteen years, a law that strengthened the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_massacre

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1853: Indian Railways, the state-owned railway company of India, launched its first passenger service between Bombay and Thane. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Railways)

1912: Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly across the English Channel. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Quimby)

1925: A group of Bulgarian Communist Party members assaulted the St Nedelya Church in Sofia, Bulgaria during the funeral service of General Konstantin Georgiev, killing 150 people and injuring about 500 others. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Nedelya_Church_assault)

1943: Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered the psychedelic effects of the semisynthetic drug LSD. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann)

1947: American financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch first described the post-World War II tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States as a "cold war". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cold_war)

2003: The Treaty of Accession was signed in Athens, admitting ten new member states into the European Union. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Accession_2003)

_____________________ Wiktionary's Word of the day:

hurdy-gurdy: A medieval stringed instrument which has a droning sound. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hurdy-gurdy)

_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. -- Anatole France (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France)