Media Coverage of The Virginia Tech Massacre - Outside The U.S.

Outside The U.S.

There was extensive coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings and their aftermath in countries throughout the world, with many stations and papers sending journalists to Blacksburg to cover the massacre. Dozens of newspapers around the world placed the story on the front page.

The shootings sparked the usual commentary and editorials that are customarily critical of U.S. gun laws and gun culture in the rest of the developed world.

In the UK, an editorial in The Times asked, "Why ... do Americans continue to tolerate gun laws and a culture that seems to condemn thousands of innocents to death every year, when presumably, tougher restrictions, such as those in force in European countries, could at least reduce the number?" An article on the front-page of the Ottawa Citizen, advocating tougher gun control laws, similarly asked why America tolerated laws which "allowed thousands of innocents to be killed each year." The Swedish paper Göteborgs-Posten commented that "without access to weapons, the killings at Virginia Tech might have been prevented" because "the fundamental reason is often the perpetrator's psychological problems in combination with access to weapons." In Japan, the Asahi Shimbun commented that "the mass shooting.... reminded us once again how disturbingly common gun fatalities are in the United States," and went on to note, "Humans become enraged and desperate, and a gun in the hands of an enraged or desperate individual could be a sure recipe of disaster or tragedy." Australian Prime Minister John Howard said tough Australian legislation introduced after a 1996 mass shooting in Tasmania had prevented a problematic gun culture in Australia by showing "a national resolve that the gun culture that is such a negative in the United States would never become a negative in our country."

Other international commentators predicted little chance of tougher gun laws or changes to the U.S. gun culture. BBC's Washington correspondent Matt Frei wrote "America is at its most impressive when it grieves and remembers. But will the soul-searching ever produce legislation and will it make schools safer?". He further predicted that "espite this week's bloodbath there will be no overwhelming demand for gun control in this country." Similarly, The Economist said: "The Columbine killings of 1999 failed to provoke any shift in Americans' attitudes to guns. There is no reason to believe that this massacre, or the next one, will do so either."

The first book published about the massacre was La masacre de Virginia Tech: Anatomía de una mente torturada (The Virginia Tech Massacre: Anatomy of a tortured mind, ISBN 978-84-935789-4-7) by the Spanish journalist and author Juan Gómez-Jurado.