Photo galleryKEY POINTS:
The killings at Virginia Tech University overnight were the deadliest shooting rampage at a US university campus for more than 40 years.
On August 1, 1966 Charles Whitman went to the top of a tower at the University of Texas campus in Austin and opened fire. He killed
15 people, including his mother and wife the night before, and wounded 31 others.
Here is a chronology of some of the major shootings inside US schools and universities in more recent years:
* March 1998 - At Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, two boys aged 13 and 11 set off the fire alarm and killed four students and a teacher as they left the school.
* April 1999 - Two student gunmen killed 12 other students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, before killing themselves.
* January 2002 - A student who had been dismissed from the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia, killed the dean, a professor and a student, and wounded three others.
* March 2005 - A 16-year-old high school student gunned down five students, a teacher and a security guard at Red Lake High School in far northern Minnesota before killing himself. He also killed his grandfather and his grandfather's companion elsewhere on the Chippewa Indian reservation.
* September 27, 2006 - A drifter took six female high school students hostage in Bailey, Colorado, molested them and then shot one to death and killed himself as police closed in.
* September 29, 2006 - A 15-year-old student killed his school's principal in western Wisconsin after telling another student "you better run."
* October 2, 2006 - Charles Carl Roberts, a local milk truck driver, entered the West Nickel Mines School and shot 10 girls aged 6 to 14 before killing himself. Five girls died.
Shootings at schools around the world
* December 6, 1989 - CANADA - Marc Lepine, 25, stormed Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique, killing 14 women. Four men and eight other women were injured before Lepine turned the gun on himself.
* March 1996 - BRITAIN - A gunman burst into an elementary school in Dunblane in Scotland and shot dead 16 children and their teacher before killing himself.
* March 1997 - YEMEN - A man with an assault rifle attacked hundreds of pupils at two schools in Sanaa, killing six children and two other people. He was sentenced to death the next day.
* June 2001 - JAPAN - Mamoru Takuma, armed with a kitchen knife, entered the Ikeda Elementary School near Osaka and killed eight children. Takuma was executed in September 2004.
* February 2002 - GERMANY - In Freising, in Bavaria, a former student thrown out of trade school shot three people before killing himself. Another teacher was injured.
* April 26, 2002 - GERMANY - In Erfurt, eastern Germany, a former student opened fire at a high school in revenge for being expelled. A total of 18 people died, including the assailant.
* Sept 1, 2004 - RUSSIA - At least 326 hostages -- half of them children -- died in a chaotic storming of a school in Beslan after it was seized by rebels demanding Chechen independence.