“I’ve Got to Do Something”

If Colin Goddard MBA ’18 recounts being shot four times in the Virginia Tech mass shooting like he’s shared the story many times before, it’s because he has.

On April 16, 2007, an intruder stormed into Norris Hall and killed 32 people, including 10 in room 211, Goddard’s French class. He took one bullet in his shoulder and three more in his hip and knee.

“I never had the tunnel vision of a direct thought like, ‘I’m going to die,’” says Goddard. “I just remember I kept repeating to myself, ‘I cannot believe this is happening.’”

Goddard’s survival and recovery turned him into an outspoken advocate for gun safety reform, which has taken him on a path working for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety before becoming a Terp.

It’s a path he never imagined as the much-traveled son of parents with careers in international development. Born to a British father and American mother in Nairobi, he moved with his family to Somalia, Bangladesh and Indonesia—all before he was 7, when the family transferred to Atlanta, followed by high school in Cairo.

After high school, Goddard chose Virginia Tech for the combination of a science focus and the military college housed within the university (Goddard spent two years in Army ROTC).

His plans were derailed by the shooting and the months-long recovery, in which a titanium rod replaced his broken femur and surgeons were unable to remove three of the bullets. Goddard progressed from a wheelchair to a walker to crutches to a cane to, finally, walking on his own and even playing pickup soccer that fall. In 2008, he graduated with a degree in international relations.

“My physical recovery went well, which helped my mental recovery follow,” says Goddard. “The advocacy work that I ended up doing was another part of that mental and emotional recovery—trying to put my horrible negative experience toward something positive to make sense out of it and find some good from it.”

Initially he avoided all news of mass shootings. But nearly two years to the day after the Virginia Tech spree, on April 3, 2009, Goddard was at home when news broke of a shooting in Binghamton, N.Y. “I watched the whole story unfold,” Goddard says.

“I realized, this is how everyone saw what happened to me and what happened to us in Blacksburg, and I’m watching it happen to somebody else. That was the moment where I said, ‘This is insane, I’ve got to do something.’”

Soon, he was working for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence from 2010 to 2013, and after that the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety from 2013 to 2016.

Goddard gave media interviews, lobbied Congress and state legislatures, toured the country telling his story and pushed for “a network of smart laws and policies and cultural norms” that he believes can reduce gun deaths in the United States to the same level as those in other modern, industrialized countries with high rates of gun ownership.

“We have to deal with the easy supply and the unchecked gun sales that we allow in this country that allow guns to fall into dangerous hands and be trafficked on the black market—and that’s with better laws and policies that make gun sales safer but don’t prohibit them.”

At the end of a 2010 speech on Martha’s Vineyard, a member of the audience suggested making a five-minute video about his life. Goddard soon mentioned that he’d just completed a project in which he’d gone undercover at gun shows to demonstrate how easy it was to purchase guns without background checks. In one scene, Goddard attempts to buy an Egyptian Maadi AK-47. When the dealer asks to see his driver’s license, Goddard says he doesn’t have it and instead cites a street address. The dealer sells him the weapon.

The footage from that project became part of the documentary “Living for 32,” an entry in the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

Goddard’s work also played a role in his personal life. At the Brady Center, he met an intern named Gabriella Hoehn-Saric whose aunt, Dana, was fatally shot in the 1980s in Chicago. The two married in 2014 and now have a year-old daughter named Dana.

Today, Goddard is interested in a private-sector career focused on renewable energy. But gun safety reform remains close to his heart. “Granted, we have a long way to go, but I was on the front lines of that for so many years and I feel really proud about how we built this thing and how far it’s come.”