Vulture watch: Virginia Tech editorials from around the nation
San Francisco Chronicle
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.
New York Times
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.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Detroit Free Press
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.
Detroit News
Dallas Morning News
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.
New York Post
America yesterday suffered through the worst shooting rampage in its history - the massacre of 32 people at Virginia Tech University.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
St. Paul Pioneer-Press
Chicago Sun-Times
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.
Atlantic City Press
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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.
Newark Star-Ledger
When there's a tragedy, especially one involving the young, the aftermath is always electric with explanation and blame.
Arizona Republic
A sense of helplessness accompanies madness
It is with us again.
Miami Herald
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).
Houston Chronicle
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.
USA Today
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.
Washington Post
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.
Los Angeles Times
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.
I'd love to do a cross check and see how many of these papers criticized the Bush Administration for selling our liberties short in the aftermath of September 11.
Posted by: Ken Shultz | April 17, 2007 at 02:38 PM
I thought Rutten's piece today was excellent, as was your restrained editorial yesterday. My only wish is that Steve Lopez was on it. He'd get the backstory. I miss seeing him about my LAT pages of late. We need more reporters like him in times like these.
Posted by: Adrienne | April 18, 2007 at 09:23 AM