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Deadliest U.S. Campus Shootings

POSTED: 12:57 pm EDT April 16, 2007
UPDATED: 3:45 pm EDT April 16, 2007

Monday's shooting rampage was the deadliest campus shooting in United States history. Before he was killed, the gunman shot and killed at least 21 people.

Other recent campus shootings include:

  • Aug. 1, 1966: Charles Whitman points a rifle from the observation deck of the University of Texas at Austin's Tower and begins shooting in a homicidal rampage that goes on for 96 minutes. Sixteen people are killed, 31 wounded.
  • Nov. 1, 1991: Gang Lu, 28, a graduate student in physics from China, reportedly upset because he was passed over for an academic honor, opens fire in two buildings on the University of Iowa campus. Five University of Iowa employees killed, including four members of the physics department, two other people are wounded. The student fatally shoots himself.
  • May 4, 1970: Four students were killed and nine wounded by National Guard troops called in to quell anti-war protests on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio.
  • Oct. 28, 2002: Failing University of Arizona Nursing College student and Gulf War veteran Robert Flores, 40, walks into an instructor's office and fatally shoots her. A few minutes later, armed with five guns, he enters one of his nursing classrooms and kills two more of his instructors before fatally shooting himself.
  • Sept. 2, 2006: Douglas W. Pennington, 49, kills himself and his two sons, Logan P. Pennington, 26, and Benjamin M. Pennington, 24, during a visit to the campus of Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, W.Va.
  • Jan. 16, 2002: Graduate student Peter Odighizuwa, 42, recently dismissed from Virginia's Appalachian School of Law, returns to campus and kills the dean, a professor and a student before being tackled by students. The attack also wounds three female students.
  • Aug. 15, 1996: Frederick Martin Davidson, 36, a graduate engineering student at San Diego State, is defending his thesis before a faculty committee when he pulls out a handgun and kills three professors.
  • Aug. 28, 2000: James Easton Kelly, 36, a University of Arkansas graduate student recently dropped from a doctoral program after a decade of study and John Locke, 67, the English professor overseeing his coursework, are shot to death in an apparent murder-suicide.

There have been some other massacres of this magnitude in the United States:

  • On April 20, 1999, two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before taking their own lives at Columbine High School near Littleton, Colo.
  • On August 20, 1986, 14 employees were shot dead and six wounded at the Edmond, Oklahoma, post office by a postman, Patrick Sherrill, who then committed suicide.
  • James Oliver Huberty opened fired at a McDonald's restaurant in San Ysidro, Calif., on July 18, 1984.

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