Virginia Tech Hero

April 16th 2007 was Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day and a national holiday in Israel.

On that day, Liviu Librescu was one of 32 people murdered at Virginia Tech by Cho Seung-Hui. He was shot through the door of his classroom, holding it shut while Cho was attempting to get in. However, Librescu managed to block the door long enough for his students to escape through the classroom windows

The irony is that Librescu was himself a Holocaust survivor, a Romanian jew, born in 1930, who had been interned in a labour camp and later deported to a ghetto.

You’d think he’d already been through enough shit to last anyone more than one lifetime, without finding himself having to make the ultimate sacrifice in his 77th year. RIP.

Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association has come up with the perfect answer to the lobby calling for greater gun control in the wake of this massacre. They cite the ban on carrying weapons on the Virginia Tech campus as the being real problem. If only the teachers and their students had been carrying weapons they could have stopped Cho earlier in his killing spree.

That answer displays the twisted logic of the NRA, an organisation that has a lot to answer for.