A Resister In Gun Country

When Catherine Koebel, a scientist and Virginia mother of two, became a gun-control activist, she was met with harassment, intimidation, even a knock on her front door.

- Catherine Koebel

I grew up in Blacksburg, Virginia, a town of winding mountain roads, beautiful national forests, the cold New River for lazy tubing on warm summer days. My dad was a professor at the university there, Virginia Tech, and every summer when the students left and the town emptied out, the quiet streets filled with ghostly echoes and I loved it. I felt like I owned the place.

When the call came about gunshots at Virginia Tech, I was a graduate student in St. Louis, grinding away at my Ph.D. in immunology. My housemate was on the line, his voice shaking, telling me to turn on the news and was my dad OK? I dialed my father’s cell phone, and he answered immediately and cheerfully, perplexed by my call. He was on a work trip, unaware of what had just happened. At that point the body count was only two confirmed dead. By nightfall the number rose to an unfathomable 32, all killed by a heavily armed student. One of the deadliest locations was the classroom my father taught in, where a young German professor and several students had been gunned down. “Life is very fragile,” my father wrote me that night in an email I’ll never forget. “Live it; enjoy it; savor it. Sometimes it is ripped from us when we are not looking.

How do you grieve a mass murder? How does a small town like Blacksburg survive it? I became obsessed with these questions and with the details of that awful day and the concentrated pain of so many deaths. I wanted every detail investigated, every mistake fixed.