(Evan Vucci/Associated Press)

I woke up this morning to the heart-wrenching news of the Virginia Tech shootings. Our hearts go out to the victims of this atrocity and their families. I can scarcely believe that eight years after Columbine, nearly a decade punctuated by school shootings against a backdrop of horrible, unrelenting gun violence in cities across the country, there has been virtually no action against this plague. The so-called "rights" conferred by the Second Amendment of the Constitution are nothing more than a scourge on the youth of our country; the almost limitless access to guns across the United States is a national scandal that we wake up to only intermittently, in the face of events such as yesterday's.

What happened at Virginia Tech makes me physically sick; it is hard not to be so affected so soon out of college, thinking of the bright, promising, decent people lost yesterday. It is hard, also, when one considers one's family and friends on campuses across the country, and the awful vulnerability of a place and a culture built so purposefully on openness, tolerance, and trust. And finally, one thinks of the spiralling gun violence in cities like Oakland and Richmond; the young lives lost almost daily in those communities are intimately tied to the dead of Blacksburg,Va.

The vision crystallizes at such moments as this. Would the Virginia Tech killings have taken place in a nation not so awash with guns? Quite possibly. Yet in the U.S. it seems the simplest thing for those intent on killing to arm their evil with terrifyingly powerful weapons.
It is unspeakable that eight years after Columbine, a truly clarion wake-up call if such a thing is indeed still possible in this nation, that we now have Virginia Tech. There have been no serious efforts at national reform of the legal foundation of our gun culture; indeed, during the past eight years the NRA and their ilk have made it their priority to expand this lethal franchise.

The NRA and their allies in our country's political "leadership" will no doubt respond to the killings at Virginia Tech in their typical fashion, which they have of course have had far too many opportunities to rehearse. They will wait a suitably respectful period in somber reflection, and then they will begin the pandering and the peddling of excuses. They will blame everything, everything, but the extraordinary ease that they have promoted for the legal attainment of firearms. They may even have the audacity, once the dust settles, to question whether more guns might have in fact been the very ticket in this situation. One shudders to think what they will do with Virginia Tech's thoroughly sensible prohibition against guns on campus.

I close with the caveat that if this seems an overly emotional reaction, then I find that it is hard to have anything but at present. There is much we still do not know about this situation, and surely we should wait to hear more information before jumping to any conclusions. Yet the pink elephant is sitting in the corner of the room, and it is one that we can be fairly sure President Bush, in his public reaction to the crisis, will ever-so-tactfully avoid acknowledging. But enough of that.

I am so deeply sorry to those who have lost somebody at Virginia Tech. Our thoughts and prayers are with you.