Gunman opens fire on Ill. campus; up to 5 dead

DEKALB, Ill. - A man armed with two handguns and a shotgun opened fire Thursday in a packed lecture hall on the campus of Northern Illinois University, killing up to four people and wounding at least 17 others before killing himself, authorities said.

Police are saying that the gunman was not a student at NIU but may have been a student at another school.

Get a load of this:

Students warned early about rampaging gunman

Northern Illinois University officials acted quickly to alert students to the lethal threat of a gunman on campus, taking just 20 minutes to post warnings on the university’s internet site.

I guess updates on a web site 20 minutes after the shooting starts is considered progress.

Are we going to be seeing a bunch of copycat scenarios in colleges and universities across the nation?

UPDATE: Confirming what we all suspected: NIU is a gun free zone.

And Illinois has no concealed carry permits, either.

Lots of links here.

UPDATE 2: I haven’t seen any speculation on this, but is it a coincidence that this happened on Valentine’s Day? I’m sure that we’ll be learning much more about this than we want to know in the coming days.

Tags: IL

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Crime and Violence, Schools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.