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One of the UVA shooting victims was shot in his sleep

As you may have heard, there was a shooting on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville last month. 22-year-old Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. is accused of shooting and killing D’Sean Perry, Lavel Davis Jr. and Devin Chandler, who were all members of the UVA football team.

Unfortunately, the Commonwealth of Virginia is no stranger to college campus shootings. In 2007, the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg was the site of the deadliest school shooting in US history, when a cowardly and selfish incel took the lives of 32 people with a pair of handguns. I remember that day clearly because I was flying back to North Carolina after visiting my mother in New Jersey. When I arrived at the Philly airport, I didn’t have much time to board and only caught a glimpse of the news. At that time, it was believed to have possibly been a domestic violence shooting at one of the school’s dorms. By the time I landed in Detroit for my layover, it had become clearer that this was a school shooting. When I finally reached my destination in Charlotte, the sheer scope of the violence committed that day had sunk in. You can read my posts from that time here.

While the shooting at UVA was nowhere near as deadly, it doesn’t make it any less tragic. The shooter and his victims all belonged to the same class. Jones was even a former member of the football team, even though he never played a snap. The class had just returned from seeing a play in Washington, DC. One witness said that Jones pushed Lavel Davis Jr. and said, “You guys are always messing with me.”

It was then that Jones was said to have produced the gun and started shooting. I was unable to find the order in which the victims were shot, but Devin Chandler was shot while sleeping. Investigators have called this a targeted attack.

Jones fled the scene and was able to avoid capture until the next day, when he was apprehended without incident near Richmond, which is 75 miles from the UVA campus.

At Jones’ arraignment, he did not enter a plea to three counts of second-degree murder and five counts of firearm use in commission of felony. Two other students were wounded in the attack.

I was unable to find out what type of gun was used in the murders or how Jones obtained the gun. However, knowing Virginia, it probably wasn’t that difficult.

Now, some people will probably say that Jones was bullied because of his alleged statement before firing. Well, that and the fact that the bullied school shooter trope refuses to die. To those people, I will say what I always say. Even if he was, mass murder is not the proper response to being bullied. Secondly, Jones wasn’t exactly an angel.

Jones was said to be known to the school’s threat assessment team. These are teams that each Virginia university has that were instituted in the wake of Virginia Tech. UVA’s team once investigated Jones after there was a report from a witness who claimed Jones said he had a gun on campus. No threat was said to be made with the claim. The team spoke with the witness and Jones’ roommate. The roommate said they had no knowledge of any gun, and Jones refused to cooperate with the team. It’s unclear why the threat assessment team never completed their investigation into Jones.

That wasn’t all. In 2021, Jones had been convicted of a misdemeanor charge of carrying a concealed weapon. Jones was required to tell the school about the conviction, which he never did.

Jones was also said to have been involved in a hazing incident, which was never fully investigated because no witness would cooperate.

Are you starting to detect a pattern?

Republican Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin offered his thoughts and prayers, literally.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said in a statement Monday that he and his wife are “praying for the UVA community.”

“While there are still many details to uncover, let us lift up the entire community in prayer,” Youngkin added.

That’s all well and good Governor, but no matter how much faith you claim to have, praying doesn’t make someone bulletproof.

Don’t expect any kind of change in Virginia’s gun laws anytime soon, as Youngkin is on the side of ‘responsible gun owners™’.

But getting back to the shooting, it seems like it could have been prevented if just one person spoke up about the gun. Among young people, and athletes especially, there has always been a weird code of silence. Snitches get stitches and all that. When it comes to gun violence, there can’t be that attitude anymore. Until we get rid of guns, which won’t happen in my lifetime, young people need to start taking guns in schools seriously.

That shit was fine when I was a kid, but the worst thing that happened back then was getting caught with candy in grade school, or cigarettes in high school.

Granted, this doesn’t apply in every case, but how many school shootings could have been prevented if one student from each school spoke up? How many people would be alive today and pursuing fulfilling lives if one student came forward?

(Sources)

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