Opinion: Vulture watch: Virginia Tech editorials from around the nation

The massacre in Virginia APRIL IS, indeed, the cruelest month, the month that comes straight out of T.S. Eliot’s wasteland of useless carnage and lost hope; at least for American students in this last decade. For it is the month when the shootings happen.

Eight Years After Columbine Yesterday’s mass shooting at Virginia Tech — the worst in American history — is another horrifying reminder that some of the gravest dangers Americans face come from killers at home armed with guns that are frighteningly easy to obtain.

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Violence lessons unclear, unlearned

Unfortunately, the person who knows the most about the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history, unleashed Monday on the campus of Virginia Tech University, is dead. The gunman evidently took his own life, but only after killing at least 32 other people.

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A Shared Horror: Texans know the grief felt at Virginia Tech Imagine the horror. You’re a college kid sitting in class on a normal Monday morning, and suddenly, pop, pop, pop. Your pals next to you fall to the ground, dead from a gunman’s bullets.

UNFORGIVABLE America yesterday suffered through the worst shooting rampage in its history - the massacre of 32 people at Virginia Tech University.

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Answers hard to find in shocking rampage The details were sketchy about Monday’s horrific shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech, where, at this writing, more than 30 students and others had been killed, and more injured. As likely as it was that the unidentified shooter acted alone before turning one of his guns on himself, there remains the possibility he had assistance or had told someone about his plans. The shooter, reportedly in his early 20s, is said to have been provoked by an unhappy development with his girlfriend, but as with the attack at Columbine High eight years ago almost to the day, it appeared substantial planning went into the rampage. And though school authorities defended their actions, students and parents angrily demanded to know why, during the two hours between the first wave of the shootings and the second, the thousands of people on campus were not alerted to the unfolding tragedy -- and when they were, it was through an e-mail that didn’t reach many students.

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Mass Murder: We’re all wounded SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD The horror at Virginia Tech will leave wounds at campuses, schools and communities all over America. For a society that prides itself on openness, the mass killing was an assault on values as well as people.

Virginia Tech’s tragedy When there’s a tragedy, especially one involving the young, the aftermath is always electric with explanation and blame.

A sense of helplessness accompanies madness It is with us again.

No Editorial, but provides AP copy of the amazing story of engineering and math lecturer Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor killed while apparently holding a door closed in his classroom (details are sketchy).

Massacre: Another American figure combines easily attained weapons with a capacity for cruelty. A gunman’s slaying of 32 people before taking his own life is a crime of shocking proportions. Virginia Tech, once before the scene of a manhunt following two fatal shootings, joins the ranks of American campuses known more for a shooter’s infamy than for education.

On a Virginia campus, another American tragedy Just last October, Americans were stunned by the story of a father of three who invaded a tiny Amish school near his home in Pennsylvania and shot and killed five little girls. Only something truly hideous could vie with that, and it came on Monday, when a gunman entered two buildings on the sprawling campus of Virginia Tech and began shooting.

A Killer in Blacksburg: Virginia Tech’s tragedy is America’s, too. EVEN IN a nation numb to violence and inured to recurrent school shootings, the scale of the human tragedy at Virginia Tech yesterday was heartbreaking. The nation watched, transfixed and horrified, as grainy cellphone images and video footage from Blacksburg conveyed a sense of the carnage and mayhem at a university seized in the blink of an eye by terror. And the nation grieved, once again, as young lives brimming with promise and possibility were cut short by that now familiar campus scourge: an aggrieved gunman, or gunmen, on a rampage.

Too terrible for words: In the wake of such a horrific event as the Virginia Tech shootings, a respectful silence is best. IN THE BIBLICAL Book of Job, the anguished hero is visited by three friends who attempt to comfort him by drawing airy and sententious lessons from his agonies. Of course, they end up adding to his troubles; Job endures not only the real pains of grief and sickness but the indignity of having his suffering milked for rhetorical effect.