A glimpse of evil as ghastly as Americans got in Virginia yesterday tends to cast a pall over the nation. President Bush spoke for millions when he said, “We hold the victims in our hearts. We lift them up in our prayers and we ask a loving God to comfort those who are suffering today.” Millions got up as they ordinarily do yesterday and expected to spend a normal day, only to find themselves glued to the television sets as the grim story unfolded. Parents thought about their children. Children thought about their friends. From all walks of life people tried to comprehend the kind of monster that stalked the Virginia Tech campus.

Soon the talk will turn to the policy implications, as our Bradley Hope reports on page one this morning, particularly because it occurs at the start of a presidential campaign in which Mayor Bloomberg is seeking to make guns a national issue. The shooting erupted as a little noticed legal war was gathering between Virginia and New York over our city’s legal maneuvering to stem the sale of what Mayor Bloomberg calls illegal guns. The smell of cordite hadn’t cleared from the Virginia Tech campus when the declared candidates for president began addressing the shooting, ending, as Mr. Hope put it, “what had been seen as an unwillingness to fully address gun issues so far in the campaign.”

Only weeks before the shooting, Virginia’s legislature “shot down,” according to a January 31 report on the Web site of the Roanoke Times, a bill that, as the paper put it, “would have given college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus.” The story reported that a spokesman for Virginia Tech, Larry Hincker, was happy to hear the bill was defeated. “I’m sure,” the paper quoted Mr. Hincker as saying, “the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.”

Today, however, the question hanging over this tragedy is whether the legislature acted wisely or whether, in fact, the campus would have been safer had the students and others been permitted to keep and bear arms in the dorms and on the greenswards. It’s not a theoretical question. In 2002, according to a report on CNSNews.com, a disgruntled student at the Appalachian Law School, Peter Odighizuwa, allegedly shot and killed the school’s dean, a professor, and a student on campus. He was subdued, CNSNews.comreported, only when two students reportedly ran to their cars to fetch their own guns and returned to confront the killer, who surrendered.

This led the president of the Second Amendment group at another school, George Mason University, to start looking into reforming bans on weapons on campus. That issue, already alive on campuses across the country, will grow only larger in the wake of the tragedy at Virginia Tech. It will be an important debate. We don’t believe any public policy will be able to expunge from society the kind of insanity or evil that leads to the kinds of acts witnessed yesterday. But we do believe that Americans have the capacity to reason out their own choices about how to defend themselves. And to reach out in their thoughts and prayers to the families who lost loved ones on the campus of Virginia Tech.