Inevitably, pointing fingers will find targets

THE question lingers over the conscience of America like an offensive odor: Who really killed the 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech?

Who was essentially responsible for the blood spilled through the dorm and the classrooms of a peaceful college on a chilly April morning?

We know who pulled the trigger. He lay on the floor with his face shot away, beyond the violence he had created, dead by his own hand, two guns at his side.

But that isn’t enough. Blame is the smoking embers of large cruelties and, like a fire yet to be fully damped, it will burn through the long night of anguish that follows the deed in Blacksburg, Va.

Who beside the shooter must bear at least some of the blame for the gunfire that broke the still eastern morning on a campus just stirring to life? We scramble like children to point fingers of accusation at the perceived villains.

Do we blame campus security for not alerting the students? The city police for not stopping the killer after the first two murders in the West Ambler Johnston dormitory? The state of Virginia for its liberal gun laws? The NRA for its advocacy of weapons in the hands of civilians? The Congress for failure to pass strong anti-gun legislation? The media for their obsession with violence? The killer’s parents for not recognizing his incipient madness?

In a quest to find the boogeyman in the closet, we will ultimately accuse preachers, teachers, immigrants and drug dealers for contributing to the deaths of the innocents on the campus of Virginia Tech. We are as united in the scramble to blame as we are in the oneness of grief and, like the children of Salem 400 years ago, we see witches among us.

The enormity of mass murder at schools and colleges creates an impulse of horror in us unlike even the ravages of the war in Iraq. The war is far away. The school is next door. And wars are supposed to involve killings, aren’t they? Isn’t that what they’re all about? But schools are for learning, for creating, for enhancing the mind to conquer the stars. Not for killing. Never for killing.

We said that after Columbine just eight years ago when 15 died on a Colorado campus, and 33 years before that when 16 died on a Texas campus, and when 10 died on a Minnesota campus, and after that when six died on an Iowa campus, and after that when six died in an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, and after that ...

And after that, the worst campus murders in the history of the nation.

As the weeks pass, as the quest for blame trails off like the last light of a fading day and as the ponderous movement of a government committee stalls against barriers of self-interest, the event will fade into statistical history. Like all of the other campus killings, it will be remembered with tears and flowers on significant anniversary dates: one year from the time, and then five years, and then 10 and 50 and 100.

The immediate response nationwide will be a tightening of security at the nation’s schools and colleges. More campus cops. Higher fences. Sophisticated alert systems. A refinement of the rules of behavior when shooting starts or a bomb goes off, beyond running and screaming.

So who’s to blame for the killings at Virginia Tech? I mean, who is really to blame? The fingers of accusation waver. The question is too vast, too complicated, too multifaceted to point in a single direction. We sigh. We shake our heads. We pray. Then we move quickly onward, like animals leaving one of their own to the lion’s teeth, glad that it wasn’t them that the beast

took.

I watched the news for hours as it unfolded on the television screen. I couldn’t get away. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t blink. Even when the same news by the same people bogged down in redundancy, I sat like a fool at a clown’s grave, hoping, I guess, that it wasn’t so, that it didn’t happen but knowing, of course, that it had.

As the news wound down into repetitions so obvious that even television had to cut away from the murder scenes and from those who were witnesses to the murders, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann came on in somber dissertation to discuss blame, guns and the NRA. Is that, after all, where the weight of massacre will lie, on the conscience of an organization whose mantra is that guns don’t kill people, people kill people?

Simplification is the easy path to solution. Cops blame the full moon for nights of extraordinary violence. Psychologists blame bloody video games as the first steps toward a murderous adulthood. My mother blamed sudden shifts in the weather for the beatings my stepfather gave her.

The solution to human hostility remains decades, perhaps even centuries, away. Meanwhile, we’ll go on killing and go on crying and go on blaming. But at least one undeniable fact emerges from the events of Monday. Although only people kill people, if the guy on the campus of Virginia Tech didn’t have two guns in his hands that dark April morning, 32 good and decent people would still be alive today.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez @latimes.com.