In sjhoward.co.uk’s first ever Guest Post, regular commenter Mort Karman provides an American perspective on the shootings at the Virginia Tech campus.

At latest count 33 people, human beings, are dead, shot to death by some crazy gunman we have not been told anything about except that he also killed himself.

Virginia Tech is a fine engineering university located in a peaceful area of rolling hills in the Virginia countryside.

It is the kind of campus parents like to send their children to because it is supposed to be located in a safe place.

Today, that place was not safe.

In two individual, but apparently related incidents, what appears to be a lone gunman armed with two assault rifles entered the open campus of the school and proceeded to murder people.

At a press briefing police and university officials offered little real information about what happened.

They just gave the figures: 33 dead including the shooter, and about 17 wounded or otherwise injured.

The university president and the local police chief sounded like the Keystone cops when they tried to explain why it took two hours to warn the students and faculty and why they did not lock down the entire campus. Super Cop said they thought the shooter of the first two people had hightailed it out of Dodge, so why bother to do any more.

I am sure there will be investigations up the yazoo and perhaps the university president and the police chief will get new jobs working as animal control officers, but that doesn’t bring back the dead people.

I don’t have answers.

We can’t turn our schools and universities into high security prisons with gates and a moat and machine gun toting guards. But we can’t keep loosing our young people and the folks who teach them.

Pictures from The Guardian