LESS than two hours after the appalling events Monday at Virginia Tech, as news organizations scrambled to grasp the facts of what had occurred, a strangely disturbing phrase began to worm its way into the coverage.
As the number of confirmed fatalities mounted into the mid-20s, broadcasts, wire service reports and newspaper websites began to refer to the massacre as "the deadliest school shooting in American history."
In other words, the readily accessible databases that now comprise the news media's collective memory contain a category of atrocity labeled "school shooting" with enough entries to make comparisons relevant. (Ultimately, the Virginia gunman would nearly double the previous record, which had stood since the 1966 bloodbath at the University of Texas at Austin.) There's nothing sinister or even particularly callous in this. This country's recent history is what it is, and the parsing of tragedy is one of the journalist's unavoidable obligations. And yet it's hard to escape the suspicion that a practiced news media's routinization of atrocity has made it easier for all of us to rationalize as unavoidable something we all ought to hold as horrifically aberrational.
Taken as a whole, the news media did a thorough, competent and humane job of covering the massacre at Virginia Tech, particularly over the story's first 24 hours, when facts were most in demand and hardest to come by. That's actually not surprising, because we've all been here before, in one way or another; print reporters and broadcast correspondents know how to cover these events. Perhaps because the reflexes we use to respond to outrages like the Virginia killings are so well conditioned, we blow right past a normative response that deserves far more deference than it now receives. The simple question: Why?
Why are the viciously unstable among us, the murderously angry, those inclined to evil for whatever reason, so frequently attracted to schools? It may not be an answerable question, but sometimes we need to inquire after the unknowable for the sake of our souls' moral sanity.
