As everyone is weighing in on this, I sort of feel compelled to give my take on this whole affair. While grieving for the dead and their families and friends, I think it is important to try and curb overreactions and mass hysteria and Jesse Walker’s post about the shooting’s aftermath at Reason is a very good starting point.

To be frank, we should avoid a counterproductive discussion about guns as it has the potential to lead to policies and measures that will simply not address the core of the problem. And that is, I think, the propensity of societies to create such deep feelings of alienation and resentment that from time to time it produces unguided monsters like Cho Seung-hui. And this is by no means just a western or capitalist phenomenon, communist or authoritarian regimes have also had their share of mass murderers, although I have no firm numbers to suggest they appear in equal numbers across the globe.

Wherever such resentment and anger translates into violence, there will be tools available, I can think of quite a number of ways to massacre innocents in a society without guns. So while there is no solution, the keys to avoiding these disasters are proper safety measures – and the jury is out on how this was all handled by Virginia Tech – and developing ways in which we can spot and prevent disturbed loners from acting out their violent fantasies. The latter will be difficult too and a witch hunt for potentially dangerous loners or sociopaths will be prove to be just as elusive a goal as outlawing guns, but at the very least it will give us some alternate tools in preventing the carnage we witnessed yesterday.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey's post here indicates that Cho had been on the radar screen as a potential candidate for counseling and that that very knowledge should at the very least have prompted a different repsonse from Virginia Tech authorities. So it comes down to proper information sharing - once more.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Read this post by Ross Douthat too.