"The template for Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho (and Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Texas tower sniper Charles Whitman and countless other suicide bombers) had been set as far back as May 18, 1927, when a Bath, Michigan farmer named Andrew Kehoe killed his wife and set fire to his farm, then drove a truck, in which he'd planted a bomb, into a crowd that had gathered outside the local elementary school, killing 45 and injuring 58. The suicide-bomb seed had likely been planted well before that: in 1884, the wife of Albert Parsons, one of the seven men found guilty of and hanged for the deaths of at least seven policemen and four civilians in the May 4, 1886 uprising at Chicago's Haymarket square, stated that tramps intent on drowning themselves (due to their dire conditions) should instead take as many others as possible with them by becoming suicide bombers; a suggestion spurred in part, no doubt, by her husband's declaration at trial: "Dynamite is the diffusion of power. It is democratic; it makes everybody equal." This is what guns do, too: they level the playing field." (thanks Laila)