University of Iowa shooting

The University of Iowa shooting took place in Iowa City, Iowa, on November 1, 1991. The gunman was Gang Lu, a 28-year-old former graduate student at the University. He killed four members of the university's faculty and a student; he left another student seriously injured, before committing suicide.

The perpetrator of the shooting was 28-year-old Gang Lu (born 1962) (Chinese: 卢刚; pinyin: Lú Gāng), a recent conferred graduate student at the University of Iowa. Lu was a physics and astronomy student who had received his doctoral degree from the university in May 1991. (His dissertation was titled Study of the "Critical Ionization Velocity" Effect by Particle-in-Cell Simulation.) He was still living in Iowa City after he had graduated.

As a graduate student Gang Lu was primarily a loner who was perceived by at least one other graduate student to have a psychological problem if challenged and was reported to have had abusive tantrums. In the months prior to the shooting, Lu wrote five letters explaining the reasons for his planned actions. According to university officials, four of the letters were in English and were intended to be mailed to news organizations. One letter was written in Chinese. The letters have never been released to the public.

Lu was infuriated because his dissertation did not receive the prestigious D.C. Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize, which included a monetary award of $2,500. In the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, many Chinese students were eager to stay in the United States. Lu believed that winning the prize would have made it easier for him to get a job in the United States. Normally Lu would have gotten a postdoctoral researcher position, but there was not enough money to support him.

On Friday, November 1, 1991, Gang Lu attended a meeting for the theoretical space plasma physics research group in a conference room on the third floor of Van Allen Hall. A few minutes after the meeting began, Lu shot three attendees of the meeting with a .38-caliber revolver, then proceeded to the second floor to shoot the chairman of the department in his office. Those who were shot in Van Allen Hall were: