As dawn broke and sunbeams shone through the cherry blossom trees littering Virginia Tech’s campus, it was the picture of spring perfection. Senior Colin Goddard pulled himself out of bed for another 9 a.m. French class, running late to pick up his classmate.
It was April 16, 2007, which meant motivation was running low for Goddard, who was reaching the end of his first, senior year, still having his victory lap as a fifth year to look forward to.
Having already skipped a few times before, Goddard and his classmate Kristina reluctantly decided that they needed to go to class today.
As they scurried into Room 211 of Norris Hall, their teacher Ms. Couture-Nowak rolled her eyes and proceeded to engage the class in a thick French accent. Half way through the class period, Rachael, the star-student of the class, came bursting through the door and found a seat as her classmates interrogated her about her unusual tardiness.
Rachael regained composure and explained that her dormitory was on lockdown because there had been a shooting there that morning. Everyone’s eyes widened as they realized they hadn’t received the usual campus alert text or email.
Only minutes later, the sounds “bang, bang, bang,” echoed throughout the hall outside the classroom. However, due to the construction being done on the building next door, no one thought anything of it.
But as the noises grew louder and closer, Ms. Couture-Nowak’s face turned pale. She hesitantly opened the door and peaked out into the hallway to see where the banging was coming from.
She jolted back, slammed the door in a panic and yelled, “Get under your desks! Someone call 911!”
Goddard reached into his pocket and dialed 911 for the first time in his life.
“Hello, what’s your emergency?” the operator said.
“Look, I think there’s someone shooting a gun here in Norris Hall,” Goddard said.
“I don’t know exactly what’s going on.”
“Norris Hall?” she replied. “Where is that?”
“Blacksburg, Virginia, America!” Goddard responded in a panic.
His Nextel phone had called the Nextel Emergency Center in Ohio. Just as he was being transferred to the Blacksburg police, bullets began flying through the wooden door of the classroom.
"I vividly remember seeing someone at the front of the classroom wearing brown boots, khaki pants, a white shirt and two holsters over both of his shoulders.”
– Colin Goddard, Virginia Tech senior
“I vividly remember seeing someone at the front of the classroom wearing brown boots, khaki pants, a white shirt and two holsters over both of his shoulders,” Goddard says. “My first thought was that this was a cop because it looked like this person was about to leave our room to get help. But instead of leaving our room, he turned down my row of desks and that’s when I realized it was not who I thought it was.”
Moments later, Goddard says he felt like he had just been kicked in the leg harder than he had ever been kicked before in his life. The pain quickly turned into a sharp, burning sensation that faded into warm wetness and numbness.
“In that moment, those feelings coupled with the smell of gun powder all around me, that’s when I realized, like, ‘Oh shit, I’ve been shot, this is real,’” Goddard says.
Goddard flung the phone out of his hand in fear that the gunman, who was moving toward him, would know that he had called the police. It landed in front of a girl next to him named Emily, who tucked the phone under her long hair to hide it from the gunman. Quietly, she whispered that the shooter was in Room 211.
The shooting seemed to last for hours as Goddard lay in a pool of his own blood, hearing nothing but screams and panicked cries. The whole time the gunman never said a word as he killed nine students and Ms. Couture-Nowak. Goddard was among the seven people in the class who survived, although he was shot four times: once above his knee, once in both hips and once through his right shoulder.
The police busted into the room minutes after Emily got off the phone and Goddard recalls the first thing the police said was, “shooter down, shooter down.”
“I’ll never forget that moment,” Goddard says. “That’s when I realized that the last gunshot I heard was the one he shot himself with.”
Ultimately, Cho Seung-Hui, a senior English major, shot and killed 33 people, including himself. Goddard was just one of the many injured students who endured months of physical therapy and treatment during the summer, while also beginning to heal emotionally. No one thought he would return to campus in the fall after his recovery.
However, Goddard, along with every other student who was injured during the shooting, went back and graduated. During his final year, Goddard says he kept quiet, unable to talk about the shooting or watch anything on the news that might bring back the haunting memories. Instead, he used his time of silence to take in all the information he could about gun control measures, and what he learned was startling.
After researching the topic, Goddard says it seemed as if getting a gun was just as easy as his shooter had made it look to massacre 32 people. He learned that the process consisted of filling out paper work, paying a fee, and sometimes not undergoing a background check. The facts overwhelmed Goddard as he wrestled with whether he wanted to speak out about this issue or not.
Then the moment came. Goddard calls it his “internal tipping point.” He randomly flipped on the news on April 3, 2009, and saw live coverage of the shooting at the Binghamton Immigration Center in New York.
All of his memories from two years ago came flooding back as he watched the shooting unfold. Later that day, Goddard picked up the phone and got involved with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. He couldn’t keep his story silent anymore.
While Goddard fully supports the constitutional rights for responsible individuals to own guns, he doesn’t think more guns are the solution, especially not on college campuses.
“Considering the fact that I didn’t even know what was going on until I got shot, like, I didn’t really think that was the way to go about it,” he says. “People kept using Virginia Tech as an example for why we need to allow students to carry their own guns to class … but, there’s a better way to handle this than just trying to stop something at the last second. We can do better by keeping guns out of these people’s hands in the first place.”
“A school that receives federal funding should not be able to ban firearms on campus.”
– Damon Cox, president of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus at Ball State University
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting, Tucson shooting, Aurora shooting, and Newtown shooting, Ball State students and faculty are also beginning to break their silence on the issue.
In December, a group called Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCC) at Ball State University was started to raise awareness of the restrictions college students face when it comes to their second amendment rights.
“A school that receives federal funding should not be able to ban firearms on campus,” says Damon Cox, president of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus at Ball State University.
SCC’s main goal is to support Indiana Senate Bill 97, which was introduced by Sen. Jim Banks (R-Columbia City). The bill would make it illegal for public universities to restrict firearms and would make it legal to carry a licensed, concealed firearm on state-sponsored college campuses.
Currently, Indiana is one of 23 states that allow the college or university to decide whether or not concealed carry weapons are allowed on university property. According to Ball State’s current policy, those caught with any type of weapon on campus could face criminal charges.
“People think that gun owners are paranoid, scared to death, or that guns are for cowards,” Cox says. “But, I would have to disagree with all of that. It’s most certainly a personal protection thing. If somebody walks into my classroom or walks into a building with a gun am I supposed to wait and hope that the police get there before they come to my classroom? Am I supposed to throw my textbook up and say ‘Oh this will stop the round of bullets?’”
Ball State’s Chief of Police, Gene Burton, says that allowing guns on campus will do more harm than good, due to the places those guns could be introduced such as residence halls, fraternities and sororities, where alcohol is traditionally consumed.
However, Cox disagrees that this is a sufficient reason to keep guns off campus.
“The biggest argument is that college students are just drunken fools,” Cox says. “But the students who take part in those activities aren’t the ones that are going to go out and do the necessary steps to be able to carry a firearm.”
But, according to senior Chris Silva, the process to get his concealed carry permit wasn’t all that extensive. He had to fill out an application, get fingerprinted and go through a brief background check that only looked at criminal history, not at mental health history. Finally, he paid a $125 fee for a lifetime license, and within four weeks he could legally carry a gun. There was no required training on gun safety or how to shoot the weapon.
While Silva is a military policeman who already had extensive gun training when he got his licence, others who carry guns in public often have no training at all. Goddard says his father has a concealed carry permit, yet he’s never shot a gun in his life.
Silva and Cox agree that if students carry guns on campus, they should receive proper training. Therefore, they think that it would be helpful to partner with the University Police Department so that students can be educated before they are allowed to carry on campus.
But, Goddard says that even if students went through a training course, he doesn’t know of any existing courses that make you shoot your gun under stress. And if the whole point is to prevent these mass shootings, they still won’t know how to properly react.
Overall, Goddard says last minute efforts to stop a shooter shouldn’t be our primary focus. Instead, our efforts should be focused on keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill.
“People will say, if someone wants to get a gun, they’ll always be able to get a gun,” Goddard says. “Well then my response is ‘Damn it, make it harder for them to get one then.’”
Goddard has been on staff with the Brady Campaign during the Tuscan and Aurora shootings, and he says though there was public outrage after these events, it only lasted for about two weeks before fading away. However, with Newtown, something has changed; as if the United States has reached its very own “internal tipping point.”
“In my opinion, that’s been the missing piece,” he says. “We needed a movement of people engaged in the issue … We don’t have millions of dollars to be a big, bad lobby group, but what we can do is put a bunch of angry, pissed off people in front of their congressman and say, ‘Damn it you do something for our public safety.’”
Goddard says that his passionate disposition overtakes him when talking about these issues. However, he begins to grow more solemn when he reflects on the once blood-stained classrooms of Norris Hall. It makes the healing process easier for Goddard to see that Virginia Tech has made those rooms into the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention. He says that they are trying to turn something horrific into something hopeful.
And while he admits that his memories will never completely fade, Goddard will continue to try to move on in the only way he knows how: by speaking out about the spring day on which his life completely changed.
The gun debate may be far from over, but Goddard says it’s on the brink of change — it might not happen overnight, but reform is near.
For more stories from Ball Bearings, go to ballbearingsonline.com.
