Even as President Bush called the nation to prayer yesterday, the shooting death of 32 people at Virginia Tech has thrust Mayor Bloomberg’s national campaign to reduce illegal gun possession into the center of the presidential election campaign.

Hours after Mr. Bush addressed the nation on the massacre, candidates began issuing statements about the shooting. The two-hour incident is being described as the worst act of criminal gun violence in American history and is expected to put an end to what had been seen as an unwillingness to fully address gun issues so far in the campaign.

Several candidates, including Mayor Giuliani and Senator Clinton, sent their condolences to the families of the victims.

Mr. Bloomberg, who without formally entering the race has let it be known he is considering running for president, has spent much of his second term working on making illegal guns an issue of national concern. He lobbied in Washington, D.C., created a national coalition of mayors to fight illegal guns, and filed lawsuits against out-of-state gun dealers that the city says broke the law.

Three weeks ago the Governor of Virginia, Timothy Kaine, a Democrat, signed into effect a law aimed squarely at Mayor Bloomberg’s out-of-state sting operations. The law criminalizes any investigation of gun dealers by anyone except law enforcement officers or those supervised by law enforcement officers.

“If Mayor Bloomberg wants to reduce crime in New York City, he might consider expanding the police force rather than trifling with the rights of law-abiding citizens,” the delegate who sponsored the law, Scott Linamfelter, a Republican, told the Roanoke Times last month.
A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, Jason Post, said Virginia is the “top source of illegal guns used in crimes committed in New York City” and that the city would be undeterred from stemming the flow of illegal guns from the state.

The Virginia Tech shooting immediately drew comparisons to the Columbine high-school rampage, but the death toll at Virginia Tech was more than double the 13 students and teachers who were murdered in Colorado on April 20, 1999.

The shooter, who wasn’t identified last night because he was carrying no identification, also killed himself with a gunshot to the head, the police chief of Blackburg, Va., Wendell Flinchum, said at an evening press conference.

At about 7:15 a.m., the shooter struck for the first time, killing two students in a dormitory room on the campus, Mr. Flinchum said. Police swarmed the building and an e-mail was sent out to students notifying them of the shooting, but the suspect eluded capture, he said. Two hours later, the shooter struck again, this time at a building associated with the college’s engineering school half a mile away, Mr. Flinchum said.

Students speaking on television and in published reports described a frantic scene where cowering students were shot execution-style in classrooms, while some survived by pretending to be dead alongside their bullet-riddled classmates.

By the time officers entered the building, the shooter was dead in the basement. Beside his body were two handguns, a 9mm and a .22 caliber, and a large amount of ammunition, Mr. Flinchum said.

The university’s president, Charles Steger, called the shooting “a tragedy of monumental proportions.” Addressing the nation, President Bush said the shooting was felt “in every American classroom, in every American community.”

In an earlier statement, Mr. Bush’s press secretary, Dana Perino, included this line: “The President believes that there is a right for people to bear arms.” The statement suggested that the shooting’s policy implications were on the horizon.

The massacre is also likely to re-ignite a push by the Democrat-controlled Assembly in Albany to pass new gun regulations that have faced opposition from Senate Republicans, who argue that stiffer criminal sentences are more effective in deterring gun violence.

Assembly Democrats are expected to focus their efforts on a bill that would require firearm dealers to purchase liability insurance of at least $1 million, to train employees, maintain sale records, and take more precautions to prevent illegal buyers from using an intermediary to buy a weapon. Under the proposed legislation gun dealers would also be charged with a class E felony for repeatedly failing to comply with the regulations.

The Democratic speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, said yesterday that while “evidence as to what happened here has to come out,” the state needs to hold gun dealers more accountable.

The last time Albany passed major gun control legislation was in 2000 in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shooting. Governor Pataki surprised some conservatives by joining Assembly Democrats and proposing sweeping new regulations, which drew a condemnation from the National Rifle Association.