On April 16 , 2007 , Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho fatally shot 32 faculty members and students and wounded 17 others in two locations on campus before killing himself as police breached the doors of Norris Hall which Cho had chained closed before starting his killing spree . The massacre is the deadliest mass shooting on a college campus , surpassing Charles Whitman 's rampage at the University of Texas in 1966 . Although it was at the time the deadliest mass shooting committed by a lone gunman in U.S. history , it has since been surpassed by two shootings at an Orlando nightclub and an outdoor music festival in Las Vegas . It is the second deadliest school massacre in U.S. history surpassed only by the Bath School bombing in 1927 that killed 44
an Orlando nightclub
Orlando nightclub shooting
Virginia Tech