#7. The Virginia Tech Tragedy
At around 7 a.m. on April 16, Cho Seung-Hui shot two students in a dorm at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. While police searched for a suspect, Cho went calmly to a post office and mailed his multimedia manifesto to NBC News. By 9:45 a.m., Cho was back on campus and had begun shooting his way through Norris Hall, a classroom building. In the end, 33 were dead: 27 students, five professors and the gunman. Cho embodied the perfect deranged-loner cliché: He wrote disturbingly violent plays, dated imaginary girlfriends, had been accused of stalking and been pronounced by a judge to be mentally ill and in need of hospitalization. Cho had nonetheless purchased his arsenal of weapons legally — sparking debate over gun control, mental illness and campus security.