"AT first everyone thought it was a joke," said one student. It wasn't. Within minutes, five people were dead and many more seriously injured.
On Thursday, Stephen Kazmierczak, a 27-year-old former student at Northern Illinois University, went on suicidal gun rampage. It was just the latest in a series of such attacks on the premises of US educational institutions.
Allyse Jerom
e, 19, a second-year student, said the gunman burst through a stage door in a lecture theatre and pulled out a gun. "Honestly, at first everyone thought it was a joke," Ms Jerome said. Everyone hit the floor, she added. Then she got up and ran, but tripped. She said she felt like "an open target". "He could've decided to get me," Ms Jerome said. "I thought for sure he was going to get me."
Authorities said yesterday that Kazmierczak had been on medication. "He had stopped taking medication and become somewhat erratic in the last couple of weeks," said Police Chief Donald Grady.
Kazmierczak used a shotgun and three handguns during the attack on a class of geology students. Two of the weapons, a pump-action Remington shotgun and a Glock 9mm handgun, were bought legally less than a week ago, authorities said.
The two others were also bought legally, but it was unclear when Kazmierczak picked them up. He had a valid permit required for all Illinois residents who buy or possess firearms.
Investigators recovered 48 shell casings and six shotgun shells following the attack.
The gunman, dressed in the black clothing that has become the trademark of such killers, even paused to reload his shotgun after opening fire.
The shooting was the latest in a spate of attacks in US schools and universities.
On 8 February, a woman shot and fatally injured two fellow students before committing suicide at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge.
In Memphis, Tennessee, a 17-year-old is accused of shooting and critically wounding a fellow student on Monday during a high school gym class, and the 15-year-old victim of a shooting at an Oxnard, California, junior high school has been declared brain-dead.
Mr Grady said Kazmierczak was an "outstanding" student while at the university and authorities were still trying to determine why he would kill. There was no known suicide note.
Kazmierczak had been a graduate student in sociology at the university as recently as spring 2007, the school's president, John Peters, said.
No-one yet knows why he embarked on his massacre. But it is a fact that many of those who blast their way around the college and high-school campuses of the United States were inspired by previous killers.
The words of killers pepper message boards and their images are cut and pasted on to YouTube and blog sites.
Cho Seung-Hui, killer of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Technology College last April, announced he was heir to students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who murdered 12 at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. On a videotape he made announcing the killings and posted that morning to a TV station, he announced he was part of a cult, saying: "We martyrs, like Eric and Dylan."
Last December disgruntled student Matthew Murray took time off between two rampages at Christian universities in Virginia to announce, via the internet, that he too was part of the cult: "Christian America. This is your Columbine."
The Columbine High School killers had their own role models, in particular Charles Manson, perpetrator of bloody cult killings in California in 1969.
The Columbine killers, who, like most campus shooters, took their own lives, made hours of tapes promising killings on a grand scale. Judges, worried that the tapes would inspire copycat killings, have kept them locked in a safe in a court's basement.
But these so-called "basement tapes" retain a cult following on the internet. "There is this kind of romantic youth-cult violence that is out there," Denver university professor Carl Rasche said.
Mr Rasche, who made a study of the Columbine shootings, said: "If you are down, out and disaffected, and you can't create an identity for yourself, you feel like nobody in society – including your parents – understands you, you're going to identify with somebody who is considered wicked."
But while many Americans wring their hands over the inability of anyone to halt the violence, the gun-control lobby says the solution is simple – choke off the supply of guns.
There is no evidence that the US has any more teenage angst than other western countries. The only difference is that its teenagers have access to weapons. And with 270 million guns in the US, almost one per person, it is not hard to get access to the hardware.
Despite suffering from mental illness, Kazmierczak found no bar to his owning a shotgun and three pistols, which he used to kill five students then himself. "Last year there were 30,000 people killed by guns in America. Easy accessibility is the problem," says Douglas Pennington, deputy director of the leading gun-control organisation in the US, the Brady Campaign. "There isn't some magic formula. It's a question of gun laws."
He is campaigning for mandatory gun licences. Ranged against him are two million National Rifle Association members, who say gun ownership is protected by the constitution.
In fact, it is protected by a single line in the Second Amendment, staging "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be not be infringed". The NRA's hard line is echoed by its champion, actor Charlton Heston, and his oft-repeated cry that if the authorities want his gun, they can take it from his "cold dead hands".
But it is the cold dead hands of all those college students that motivate the gun-control lobby.
The full article contains 986 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
