Like a cultural earthquake, the Virginia Tech massacre violently jolted all news and events to a halt. Or, rather, all non-massacre news and events.

Massacre updates remain constant: the survivors' ghastly stories, which are ghastly; the victims' harrowing ends, which are harrowing; the campus authorities' inexplicable actions, which are inexplicable. Is there anything more to learn?

True to compulsive American habit, we want to know why the crime occurred, what drove Cho Seung-Hui, a chronically maladjusted individual of irredeemable evil, to shoot 28 students and four professors to death on a chilly April morning -- as though the secret still to be deciphered lies with him.

But even as the murderer's life is scrutinized for a "motive," we also come to understand there is no "reason" to explain this supremely irrational crime. So, liberals conclude insufficient gun control is at fault. If only Cho hadn't been able to get his hands on handguns, the theory goes, this heinous mass murder -- the worst school shooting in U.S. history -- would never have happened.

But owning guns doesn't kill people. And under even the strictest gun control laws, Cho might well have taken a page from the black book of Andrew Kehoe, who, back in 1927, perpetrated the biggest school massacre in U.S. history when he used dynamite to blow up a Michigan school. The blast killed 38 children and seven teachers.

A conservative explanation of the crime points not to the existence of guns in society, but rather to the existence of evil in the killer -- a man who, according to reports, left no fewer than three bullet wounds in each of his victims. But even evil is not enough to explain why this crime happened, or, rather, why this crime was virtually allowed to happen.

The fact is, Cho Seung-Hui wasn't the "quiet man" you read about who one day "snapped." He was notorious in his academic circle long before the heinous events of this week. Indeed, one former classmate, Ian MacFarlane, has written that on reading the twisted, violent plays Cho wrote for an English class, "we students were talking to each other with serious worry about when he could be a school shooter." Continued...