Nation in shock as a campus mourns

4/18/07
There’s nothing to be done except offer our deepest condolences. There’s no explanation; nothing that can make things right; nothing, even, to prevent it from happening again.
The massacre at Virginia Tech on Monday goes beyond anything we are prepared to handle. Not just the number of deaths, which is itself astonishing, but the calculated manner in which they were carried out, and the helplessness of anyone involved to stop the insanity leave nothing but unanswered questions. How could this have happened?
It’s tempting to extrapolate larger points from a tragedy like this. We need more security, random bag checks, better gun control, more people with guns — there are any number of positions that can be furthered by cherry-picking facts from this horrifying event. The greater lesson may be that there is no lesson.
It’s a sad fact of life that a person who has no regard for his own life is capable of almost anything. If someone wants to kill large numbers of people and doesn’t care whether he lives or dies, there’s very little to stop him. Not every building can have metal detectors, not every entrance can be guarded, not every potential harm can be prevented.
A local politician on Monday said the shooting underscores the need to re-examine gun control laws. Maybe it does, but all kinds of potential weapons can bring mass death, from a car to a plane to a homemade bomb. We can’t legislate our way to perfect safety.
Some things will surely change. Colleges around the country will work harder on the ability to get word out on events as they happen. Even hours after Monday’s rampage began, many people at Virginia Tech didn’t know what was happening. Communities need to do more to keep everyone informed.
Similarly, for a long time to come, no college president will hesitate to enact a campuswide lockdown at the first sign of trouble — better to have innumerable false alarms than repeat this horror.
But there’s a limit to what can be done. Almost a decade after the Columbine High School killings in Colorado, that school’s name is synonymous to most of the country with violence and mass death. For the thousands of the school’s students and alumni, it’s just something they have to live with. Virginia Tech already has a nationally known name, but students and faculty rightly fear that their school will also forever bring to mind senseless killing. To the dozens of victims and family members, and everyone who lived through the worst day of their lives, a nation grieves with you.