A friend of mine's daughter is a sophomore at VT. I waited about an hour into the story to give him a call - I didn't want to tie up the phone, besides, at that point it was looking like just one dead - and in a residence hall where she would not likely be. When I made my call, he had already talked to her and everything was fine but it would still be a few more hours before the scope of this thing was even starting to be understood.

Now that the full horror of this thing is beginning to emerge, so are the recriminations with parents blaming the police and the university, etc. At this stage, it would be nice if the media could just back off on the speculation and allow the police to complete their investigation or just confine themselves to reporting the known facts but I know it won't work that way. I stopped listening to Fox on this yesterday at 1250 when one of their on-air commentators suggested that this had to be the work of someone with connections to the military because an act like this would have required the use of automatic weapons. What idiocy! I contacted Fox about that but it's not just them - our media just cannot be counted to report when there is a crisis. We are not served well by any of the outlets when they are caught between official statements and updates with air to fill because it is possible to make a terrible situation even worse.

It reminds me of the W. Virginia coal mine disaster when the reporters just couldn't shut the hell up, and the networks just couldn't break away. They ended up announcing everyone was alive and rescued. Of course, there were a lot of families who got a double dose of devastation that night because of that crap.

At this current work site, I have a wall about 35 feet long covered in plasma screens - we've got the sound turned off though you can tune in on headsets if you like. I chucked mine yesterday when the moron on Fox made the previously mentioned remark.

As I look up from my monitors on the desk, I see from the captions that some of the news channels are spouting off on gun control angles already and it can only be a matter of time before someone is floating the idea of why parents should send their kids off to school with body armor. I know this is a spectacularly horrible event but the media fury and hype is just making matters worse with wall to wall speculation.