Take an MSM holiday advises Sheldon Droby, at the Huffington Post:

If you want to get through the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre in a healthier way, don’t watch the news for about a week. If you did not need an anti-depressant before this event, you may have to start if you decide to listen, watch, or read the news. These vultures will do you in.

Spend a week with your family and hug them everyday to appreciate them. Take some time off from work and connect with the people you love. Go to the movies or a museum or do anything that interests you to divert your attention from the toxic doses of media poisoning that is about to follow. The MSM will spend endless hours talking about the “why did he do it” or “why did this happen” routines that they always go through. And the answer is there is no answer or rational explanation for this. Given the state of our society, I would ask why this does not happen more often here.

Yesterday’s tragedy is a daily event in many other places in the world.

Then, alas, he starts blaming Bush over Iraq, so I’d stop there, and not bother reading the whole thing.

Liviu Librescu, Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics

Jerusalem Post:

a 76-year-old (Holocaust) survivor sacrificed his life to save his students in Monday’s shooting at Virginia Tech College that left 33 dead and over two dozen wounded.

Professor Liviu Librescu, 76, threw himself in front of the shooter when the man attempted to enter his classroom. The Israeli mechanics and engineering lecturer was shot to death, “but all the students lived – because of him,” Virginia Tech student Asael Arad – also an Israeli – told Army Radio.

Several of Librescu’s other students sent e-mails to his wife, Marlena, telling of how he had blocked the gunman’s way and saved their lives.

Read the whole thing.

Predictably, the European press is blaming the lack of a state monopoly of force for the killings at Virginia Tech. With characteristic incompetence, too, many of these European editorialists blame the expiration of the (so-called) Assault Weapon Ban, which, of course, had nothing whatsoever to do with events at Blacksburg.

The killer evidently used an ordinary 9mm Glock semi-automatic pistol and some kind of .22 pistol. There was no authentic, or even mislabeled, assault weapon involved.

In the strongest editorialized image of the day, German cable news broadcaster NTV flashed an image of the former head of the National Rifle Association, the US gun lobby: In other words, blame rifle-wielding Charlton Heston for the 33 dead.

The German Bild offers a typical example of the journalist’s failure to acquaint himself with the actual facts.

Now we will probably begin discussing the overly lax gun laws in the United States. There, buying a machine gun is often easier than getting a driver’s license.

He must be thinking of Iraq, not the United States. Americans have needed a costly federal license, involving lots of paperwork, since passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934, to own a fully automatic weapon, and a number of states do not allow private ownership of full-auto weapons, period.