Massacre at Virginia Tech (Updated)

This is an absolutely terrible and gut wrenching story. ABC News reports that at least 29 persons are dead, apparently including the shooter himself, and at least 17 more are injured following a horrific shooting spree at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. Blacksburg, itself, is a beautiful and remote part of Virginia and the school, officially Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, dates back to a land-grant in 1872 and is one of Virginia's premier institutions of higher education.

It is foolish to think of any place as one where "it can't happen here." But psychologically the sense of unlikelihood of such an occurrence, the biggest mass shooting on a college campus in American history, happening at Virginia Tech almost approaches the enormity of the act itself.

On a personal note and as a native Virginian, I have known dozens, perhaps hundreds of Hokies or Virginia Tech graduates over the years, my older son considered attending there, and I know at least one faculty member there who I hope and pray is unharmed and safe. This is awful, awful news and my heart goes out to the victims, the families and friends of the victims and the entire Virginia Tech community.

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UPDATE: The death toll has now risen to 33. Predictably, the blogosphere is awash with commentary, also predictably all over the map, some of it measured and sane, some of it not.

Over at Reason's Hit & Run, commenters are engaged in a lively but largely puerile debate over gun control, while Michelle Malkin has taken to posting reader's views on the campus weapons ban at Virginia Tech, suggesting that a well armed student body might have prevented or reduced the carnage. Maybe. So would wearing legal and readily available body armor. It is one thing to argue the right to bear arms, another to suggest that we all do so as a matter of course in our daily lives. Does anyone really want to live that way, and would it really make that much difference to a deranged murderer, or would his choice of weapons simply shift from firearms to explosives?

Meanwhile, The Nation's David Corn, writing at his own blog, notes that other societies have made other choices regarding firearms. True enough, although not self-evidently relevant. He quotes another blogger who, by way of attempting to provide some 'perspective,' writes: "Multiple body counts and explosions and shootings are the daily experience of the people of Iraq. They have been living this hell for four years. Just keep that fact in mind as you mourn the deaths of 22 American students slain in Blacksburg, Viginia." [sic]

One shouldn't need to reply, although apparently one does, that Iraq is a nation at war not only with the U.S. but with itself. Whatever the merits or failings of the war in Iraq and America's role in it, comparisons between a war zone and a killing spree on a college campus are obscene. Say what you will about firearms and gun control or, for that matter, the ugly brutality and bloodshed of any war at any place or time, firearms have always been plentiful and ready access to them has always been the case in America.

We can resume those discussions and debates tomorrow, not today. Such tragedies as today's in Blacksburg and before that at the University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere have not always been the case. This particular sort of insanity, for there is no other term for it, is of recent vintage.

It seems somehow inappropriate to quote even as respected a science fiction writer as Robert Heinlein today, and yet when events such as today's occur the first thing that comes to my mind is his calling (in 1941, no less) this modern era "the Crazy Years." Perhaps there has always been much madness in the world. Certainly today there is too much.