DEKALB, Ill. (Feb. 14) - A gunman opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University on Thursday, injuring as many as 15 people, authorities said. "Campus police report that the immediate danger has passed. The gunman is no longer a threat," the school reported on its Web site at 4:14 p.m.

 

Kishwaukee Community Hospital said on its Web site up to 15 victims were arriving, including three to four with head wounds.

 

The shooting took place around 3 p.m. in Cole Hall near the King Commons, a central gathering place on the 25,000-student campus, according to the Web site.

 

All classes were canceled Thursday night and the campus was closed on Friday. Students were urged to call their parents "as soon as possible" and were offered counseling at any residence hall, according to the school Web site.

 

The Associated Press left messages for university police and police in DeKalb, located about 65 miles west of Chicago.

You're right. Not much is known at all. I'm sure later on they'll discover some kind of note/tape/pictures from someone who is obviously mentally unstable, like VT last year.

 

Man, this is truly sad...I don't know what the world has come to

I think the fact that it's Valentines Day may have something to do with it.

 

Maybe it was some kid who never got attention from girls and figure'd he would get some attention from them on the most notable day for love

 

That's just my guess. We'll see what unfolds.

Pathetic, sick POS. I don't care what your problems are, deal with them, or get help. It makes me sick to my stomach the inconsideration and selfishness exhibited by these school shooters.

Also, per CNN, I didn't see reports of any dead besides the gunman, but 4 are critically wounded.

Now according to CNN.com, the gunman killed 4 and then killed himself.

I know about 4 baseball kids who go there. They were in the field house practicing when it happened. It is a sick world.....

I go to NIU myself and a friend of mine was in the classroom when this happened... he is ok because he was sitting at the back of the lecture hall and when he saw the first shot he took off running... he is pretty shook up and we had a buddy drive him back home to chicago to be with his family... this is all so crazy.

I go to NIU myself and a friend of mine was in the classroom when this happened... he is ok because he was sitting at the back of the lecture hall and when he saw the first shot he took off running... he is pretty shook up and we had a buddy drive him back home to chicago to be with his family... this is all so crazy.

 

I can't even imagine what's going through your mind right now. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families, and the rest of the students and faculty who were effected by this awful act

its sick how any moron in this country can get a gun

its sick how any moron in this country can get a gun

Assault rifles for everyone!

 

Seriously, did the gun-control laws in Virginia even pass? I haven't heard anything about that in some time.

 

Hopefully those who were injured will recover quickly. RIP to those who died.

I don't see how this justifies attacking the Constitution.

I don't see how this justifies attacking the Constitution.

If a murderer wants to kill, he'll kill, gun or not.

 

He might kill more or kill easier with a gun, but the problem is the character of the person, not the gun.

It just irks me that we're barely 12 hours removed from getting this news that six college students are dead, and the more extreme liberals on the board find it appropriate to spew their anti-gun rhetoric. I won't even touch how unfounded their opinions are on the subject - in lieu of what took place.

im not pushing an agenda...guns are wayyyyyyyyyy to easy for anyone to get their hands on...there has to be more control over them or this is just going to happen more and more often...and personally...next time im out and about, i dont want some douchebag walking up and shooting me...at least if he has a knife, i have a chance to defend myself...any clown can get a gun legally and that is just wrong

I think they're reporting 6 dead now, plus shooting himself makes 7. He could've saved himself the trouble and just killed himself.

 

Not that any of it should make sense, but I sure wish once these people reach a point where they've decided to throw their lives away, that they wouldn't take innocent people with them.

 

This guy actually seemed to be pretty normal from early accounts. University noted he had a good record there, he even won awards there and led a campus criminal justice group.

im not pushing an agenda...

 

 

 

guns are wayyyyyyyyyy to easy for anyone to get their hands on...there has to be more control over them or this is just going to happen more and more often...and personally...next time im out and about, i dont want some douchebag walking up and shooting me...at least if he has a knife, i have a chance to defend myself...any clown can get a gun legally and that is just wrong

 

 

 

 

 

Is that right?

im not pushing an agenda...

 

 

 

guns are wayyyyyyyyyy to easy for anyone to get their hands on...there has to be more control over them or this is just going to happen more and more often...and personally...next time im out and about, i dont want some douchebag walking up and shooting me...at least if he has a knife, i have a chance to defend myself...any clown can get a gun legally and that is just wrong

 

 

 

 

 

Is that right?

when senseless violence happens...are we just supposed to sit idly by and say oh god, RIP, i hope nothing like this ever happens again blah blah blah...or maybe...just maybe...we could actually try doing some things to help prevent the situation from happening again...and sure...there are crazy people who will do it again...but why make it so freakin easy for them to do so?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/niu_shooting

 

 

NIU gunman stopped taking medication

By CARYN ROUSSEAU and DEANNA BELLANDI, Associated Press Writers 22 minutes ago

 

The man who gunned down five people at Northern Illinois University in a suicidal rampage became erratic after halting his medication and carried a shotgun to campus inside a guitar case, police said Friday.

 

The man, 27-year-old former student Stephen Kazmierczak, was also wielding three handguns during Thursday's ambush inside a lecture hall.

 

Two of the weapons — the pump-action Remington shotgun and a Glock 9mm handgun — were purchased legally less than a week ago, on Feb. 9, authorities said. They were purchased in Champaign, where Kazmierczak was enrolled at the University of Illinois.

 

The other weapons were still being traced.

 

The gunman's father, Robert Kazmierczak, briefly came out of his single-story house in Lakeland, Fla., to talk to reporters.

 

"Please leave me alone. ... This is a very hard time for me," he said as he threw his arms up and wept.

 

He declined further comment, saying he was diabetic. Robert Kazmierczak then went back inside his house, which has a sign on the front door that says "Illini fans live here."

 

Bush talked by telephone with NIU President John Peters and said people will be praying for the families of the victims and for the Northern Illinois University community.

 

Campus Police Chief Donald Grady said investigators recovered 48 shell casings and six shotgun shells following the attack in Cole Hall. The gunman paused to reload his shotgun after opening fire on a crowd of terrified students in a geology class, sending them running and crawling toward the exits. He shot himself to death on the stage of the hall.

 

Kazmierczak, whose first name was earlier listed as Steven, was taking some kind of medication, Grady said.

 

"He had stopped taking medication and become somewhat erratic in the last couple of weeks," Grady said, declining to name the drug or provide other details.

 

Correcting information his office released earlier Friday, DeKalb County Coroner Dennis J. Miller said five students, not six, were killed in the rampage, in addition to the gunman. Miller said the higher victim total was the result of confusion over the fate of a patient taken to another county for treatment.

 

"There was a miscommunication," Miller said.

 

The motive of the killer, who graduated from NIU in 2006 but was a student there as recently as last year, was still not known. Grady said Kazmierczak was an "outstanding" student while at NIU and authorities were still trying to determine why he would kill. There was no known suicide note.

 

"We were dealing with a disturbed individual who intended to do harm on this campus," Peters said.

 

Witnesses said the gunman, dressed in black and wearing a stocking cap, emerged from behind a screen on the stage of 200-seat Cole Hall and opened fire just as the class was about to end around 3 p.m. Officials said 162 students were registered for the class but it was unknown how many were there Thursday.

 

John Giovanni, 20, of Des Plaines said the gunman calmly fired at the greatest concentration of students.

 

"He was shooting from the hip. He was just shooting," said Giovanni, who turned and ran so fast that he lost a shoe. "I was running but I was hurtling over people in the fetal position."

 

Peters said four people died at the scene, including three students and the gunman. The other died at a hospital. The teacher, a graduate student, was wounded but was expected to recover.

 

Miller released the identities of four victims: Daniel Parmenter, 20, of Westchester; Catalina Garcia, 20, of Cicero; Ryanne Mace, 19, of Carpentersville; and Julianna Gehant, 32, of Meridan.

 

Another victim, Gayle Dubowski, a 20-year-old sophomore from Carol Stream, died at a Rockford hospital, Winnebago County Coroner Sue Fiduccia said.

 

The killer had been a graduate student in sociology at Northern Illinois as recently as spring 2007, Peters said. He also said the suspect had no record of police contact or an arrest record while attending Northern Illinois, a campus with 25,000 students about 65 miles west of Chicago.

 

The gunman was a student at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Chancellor Richard Herman said. The university is about 140 miles south of Chicago.

 

Lauren Carr said she was sitting in the third row when she saw the shooter walk through a door on the right-hand side of the stage, pointing a gun straight ahead.

 

"I personally Army-crawled halfway up the aisle," said Carr, a 20-year-old sophomore. "I said I could get up and run or I could die here."

 

She said a student in front of her was bleeding, "but he just kept running."

 

"I heard this girl scream, 'Run, he's reloading the gun!'"

 

More than a hundred students cried and hugged as they gathered outside the Phi Kappa Alpha house early Friday to remember Parmenter. Flowers, candles and small notes were left in the snow near Cole Hall.

 

The campus was closed on Friday. Students were urged to call their parents and were offered counseling at any residence hall, according to the school Web site.

 

The school was closed for one day during final exam week in December after campus police found threats, including racial slurs and references to shootings earlier in the year at Virginia Tech, scrawled on a bathroom wall in a dormitory. Police determined after an investigation that there was no imminent threat and the campus was reopened. Peters said he knew of no connection between that incident and Thursday's attack.

im not pushing an agenda...

 

 

 

guns are wayyyyyyyyyy to easy for anyone to get their hands on...there has to be more control over them or this is just going to happen more and more often...and personally...next time im out and about, i dont want some douchebag walking up and shooting me...at least if he has a knife, i have a chance to defend myself...any clown can get a gun legally and that is just wrong

 

 

 

 

 

Is that right?

when senseless violence happens...are we just supposed to sit idly by and say oh god, RIP, i hope nothing like this ever happens again blah blah blah...or maybe...just maybe...we could actually try doing some things to help prevent the situation from happening again...and sure...there are crazy people who will do it again...but why make it so freakin easy for them to do so?

 

 

And what qualifies you to say how easy it is to get guns? Have you ever bought one? Unless you have, I'd rather you not make baseless claims. It is not easy to buy a gun. And the fact that several times a year, a shooting spree occurs on a school campus -- that is not justification for defacing the US Constitution. We make sacrifices for basic freedoms, always have, always will.

They should at least lock the doors on campus...

 

Or perhaps even have a thing where in order to enter the school you need to go through a security system like they do at airports?

 

I don't know.

 

All I know is something needs to be done, because I'm kinda nervous about going to college next year...I need to know that I and the rest of my classmates and faculty will be safe

I was thinking about it today... if they want to keep this kind of thing from happening, outlawing guns is not the answer. Marijuana is illegal too, but it seems to have no problem finding its way on college campuses. If someone wants a gun on a campus, they'll get it there.

 

Here is my "proposal"

1. College counseling should be free on every campus, and should be advertised (e.g. flyers on campus, occasional bulk e-mails, etc)

2. Campus police need to be greater in number, and they need to have a presence inside academic halls, not just in their cruisers. It will be a lot of money to pay them, and they will not find their jobs very engaging, but increased presence of campus police would discourage this kind of thing.

3. An armed security guard should be in every academic and residence hall. I don't see why they couldn't have an office up near the front door like many RA's do.

4. Faculty and staff should not be disallowed to carry licensed sidearms, although I am not suggesting having every professor carry a gun.

 

 

I do not think that security checks are feasible in any way. Not on a college campus.

Why couldn't this loser just end himself and leave everyone else alone? Few things anger and sadden me more than the life of people so young with so much to live for and so much to look forward being taken away needlessly.

 

Also, I hope there isn't effort to make college campuses less open and more "secure" because that's not the way to go about preventing this.

I was thinking about it today... if they want to keep this kind of thing from happening, outlawing guns is not the answer. Marijuana is illegal too, but it seems to have no problem finding its way on college campuses. If someone wants a gun on a campus, they'll get it there.

 

Here is my "proposal"

1. College counseling should be free on every campus, and should be advertised (e.g. flyers on campus, occasional bulk e-mails, etc)

2. Campus police need to be greater in number, and they need to have a presence inside academic halls, not just in their cruisers. It will be a lot of money to pay them, and they will not find their jobs very engaging, but increased presence of campus police would discourage this kind of thing.

3. An armed security guard should be in every academic and residence hall. I don't see why they couldn't have an office up near the front door like many RA's do.

4. Faculty and staff should not be disallowed to carry licensed sidearms, although I am not suggesting having every professor carry a gun.

 

 

I do not think that security checks are feasible in any way. Not on a college campus.

 

 

Firstly, we had this same discussion after the VT shootings and after all was said and done, we solved nothing. Please let's not let this thread deteriorate into grandstanding, agenda pushing (on either side) or name calling.

 

Dodge- as for your proposal. It sounds good but what is sadly lacking in each proposal you make is more funding.

 

1. Public Universities are strapped for money as it is now. I don't believe they can come up with the additional $$ to pay for free counseling.

2. Campus police are allocated based on the number of students enrolled on campus. Public University Police (in Florida) are under the auspices of the Florida Highway Patrol and fall under their jurisdiction. I know, at a certain International University here is South Florida, there have been job postings for officers which have gone unfilled for months. Why? You tell me. I don't know. I've got my theories but I don't know.

3. It's hard enough gaining enough police officers on a campus, much less adding the cost of armed security guards. There's conflicting territory there that is not easily worked out.

4. Faculty and staff being allowed to carry firearms..... Who is to say they are any more stable than the students??? heck- we had an astronaut go beserk over a domestic issue. Everyone is human and can suffer from human fallacies. Who is to say a teacher or secretary isn't as nuts as the rest of the word? I would like to think not, but the longer I live, the more my point is proven correct. Plus, for a faculty/staff member to be allowed to carry a firearm opens up a whole 'nother can of worms with regards to liability. Who is responsible? The University? The individual? And if a teacher stands up and kills the shooter, isn't that bordering on being a vigilante??

 

All great ideas, to be sure but I think it comes down to the almighty dollar. And, pardon me for asking this but, where is the University that has put more security measures in place without spending a ton more money? I watched Good Morning, America the day after and they said that NIU had the text messaging and e-mails in place and used them but the truth of the matter is, when this stuff is going down, are you really going to check your text messages???

 

Thank God this wasn't the case as was with VT where the nutcase went all over campus. He remained in one place.

 

I agree with heightened security but it comes with a price that most are just not willing to bear.

Well the idea is that the e-mails and text messages would reach those were NOT near the incident and thus they would stay away.

 

As for the other stuff, fair points all around.