NRO has a symposium up, in which various contributors comment on the shootings at Virginia Tech. Some bits of that:

Fr. Thomas Berg:

The danger here is that we become numbed to the violence. Young nihilists who randomly kill fellow students manifest the most extreme ambivalence to violence. And that should make us realize that we need to move beyond being spectators to the sensationalism.

Matthew Franck:

Pathology of this sort or that will be diagnosed; maybe even a brain-chemistry explanation will be advanced. I mean no disrespect to my friends in psychology when I say that all such accounts, however true they might indeed prove to be, can never be more than partial. Human beings are responsible moral agents with free will, and in the end a willing actor had to pull that trigger. Do we really have a better explanation than our ancestors who believed a man could be possessed by evil — even by Evil Incarnate?

Annie Hendershott:

The continued attempts to psychologize and “understand” such deviance — even in the face of evil such as that which occurred on this campus — show the distance some will go to avoid applying moral categories of judgment.

Michael Pakaluk:

Before we begin to agree with critics who might point to crimes such as the Virginia Tech massacre, or Columbine, as a sign of some unusual sickness in American society, we should consider that the scene of a madman with power, killing others remorselessly out of malice and envy, as he descends to his own self-destruction, was played out on very a large scale in Germany, Cambodia, Russia, and other nations in the last century.

Also, there is a John O’Sullivan article on the event, and also one by Nancy French.