CHAPEL HILL -- With Hokie-colored maroon and orange ribbons looped around their necks, 32 adults dressed in black stood quietly on the lawn at Polk Place as the UNC-Chapel Hill belltower chimed 12 times Monday afternoon.

"It took the killer at Virginia Tech three minutes to buy his gun," said Connie Padgett, referring to the April tragedy that took 32 lives at Virginia Tech University.

For the next three minutes, Padgett led a silent protest. Sunlight spilling over the Wilson Library dome bathed the solemn faces as students hurried by toward the Pit, already noisy with a lunchtime crowd.

This brief protest against the ease with which the killer at Virginia Tech bought a gun was the 32nd such protest.

Padgett organized the protest after participating in similar ones in Durham and Raleigh. North Carolinians Against Gun Violence co-sponsored the event.

The first protest was organized by Abby Spangler, a Charlotte native and daughter of billionaire businessman and former UNC system President C.D. Spangler, who now lives in Virginia.

Padgett said she and Spangler both invited people to participate at Monday's protest, and Spangler had asked her to draw attention to the fact that it was the 32nd event.

Lisa Price, executive director of North Carolinians Against Gun Violence, said that like in Virginia, North Carolina does not enter data into the national database that gun dealers can check when someone is adjudicated as mentally ill and a danger to himself and society.

"We can change this law in North Carolina," Price said.

Padgett talked about this being homecoming week on campus and mentioned three UNC-Chapel Hill affiliated people who would not be able to be there because of gun violence:

• Travis Cooper, a UNC-CH student who had worked with her at the Carolina Population Center and was killed by gunfire in Lumberton in 1997.
• Shennel McKendall, who was fatally shot while walking into work at a UNC Hospitals building near the Friday Center in 2004, and
• Jamie Bishop, a German instructor who also applied computer technologies to language instruction while at UNC-CH, who was killed in the Virginia Tech shootings.

She chose not to mention the rampage of a former UNC-CH law student, Wendell Williamson, that left two people dead and a law enforcement officer seriously injured in 1995 near campus.

Vicky Wells, who works with UNC Press, said she thought of her own children, the ages of college students and slightly older, as she participated in the event.

"It's not that we're anti-gun," she said. "We just don't want someone with proven mental instability to get guns."

Staff writer Jane Stancill contributed to this report.