USA Today profiles Colin Goddard, a survivor of the April 16, 2007, mass shooting at Virginia Tech, now a lobbyist for the Brady Center to Prevent Violence, He also is featured in HBO’s “Gun Fight,” a documentary film on the gun-control debate. Filmmaker Kevin Breslin made a documentary featuring Goddard called Living for 32, named for the number of people shot dead by Virginia Tech gunman Seung Hui Cho before he fatally shot himself.
Goddard got involved in gun control after April 3, 2009, when he heard a television announcer describe the massacre in Binghamton, N.Y. Jiverly Wong, a Vietnamese immigrant, shot and killed 13 people at an immigration services center and wounded four more before killing himself. “I was so sucked into it because it seemed to me like the same montage of images of people crying and policemen running and yellow tape and flowers and candles,” he said. Goddard said the incident unnerved him so much that he contacted Paul Helmke, the president of the Brady Center, whom he had met through his father.