Of the little Amish girls:
A lone gunman walked into a one- room schoolhouse in the largely Amish community of Nickel Mines in southeastern Pennsylvania on Monday and shot as many as 10 girls, killing three immediately before shooting himself and dying at the scene, the state police said.
The man, identified as Charles Carl Roberts, 32, lived in the area, and was evidently nursing a long-held grievance expressed in notes left for his wife and children, said Jeffrey Miller, commissioner of the Pennsylvania state police.
He said the gunman lined the girls up against the blackboard, bound their feet and shot them execution-style in the head. Three of the girls died at the scene and seven others were rushed to nearby hospitals, some of them severely wounded.
An earlier Associated Press report quoted a local coroner as saying there were six people dead, but the coroner later said he was unsure, The AP said. At a news conference, Miller said that several victims had been taken to hospitals and that he did not know what their conditions were.
"There was some issue in the past" that had left the gunman with a desire to harm female students, Miller said. He said that the murders were premeditated and that the gunman had called his wife, without telling her he was holding hostages in a school, to say that he would not be coming home.
And in memoriam of Emily Keyes:
The gunman responsible for a deadly standoff at a Colorado High School methodically picked his hostages.
Investigators say 53 year old Duane Morrison set off Wednesday's deadly chain of events, when he walked into Platte Canyon high school outside Denver armed with a gun.
Witnesses say he selected six hostages in a classroom, all girls, and released the other students.
Five of the girls survived, but Morrison killed 16 year old Emily Keyes, then shot himself.
Investigators don't know what triggered the attack.
And in memoriam of the victims of the 1989 Quebec massacre:
The École Polytechnique massacre occurred on December 6, 1989, at the École Polytechnique de Montréal in Montreal, Quebec. Marc Lépine entered the campus and carried out a shooting rampage that killed 14 women as well as wounding 13 other people, before committing suicide shortly after. All of the victims targeted were women; other random individuals shot included women and men.
Shortly after 5 p.m., Lépine entered the École Polytechnique, an engineering school affiliated with the Université de Montréal. He had applied for admission into the engineering school but was rejected. He blamed it on affirmative action, which he believed kept him out in place of a woman (although the majority of students at the engineering school, and almost all the faculty members, were male). However, Lepine had not completed the prerequisite coursework at the junior college level required for admission. He first went into a mechanical engineering class, forced the men out at gunpoint, began to scream about how he hated feminists, and then opened fire. Lépine continued his rampage in other parts of the building, opening fire on other women he encountered. He killed 14 women (12 engineering students, one nursing student and one employee of the university) and injured 13 others (including at least 4 men) before committing suicide.
Born Gamil Gharibi, Lépine had a very troubled childhood, including an abusive father. During his parents' divorce, his mother told the court at their divorce hearing that her husband, an Algerian immigrant, "had a total disdain for women and believed they were intended only to serve men." After the divorce, Gharibi legally changed his name to Marc Lépine. He developed a lasting hatred toward women and had left a note blaming feminism for all the failures in his life, including his aforementioned rejection from the engineering school.