The murderous rampage that unfolded Monday morning at Virginia Tech is a national tragedy. Thirty-three people, most of them students, are dead, including the killer, and many are wounded, some critically. All over America, numbed citizens attempt to explain the unexplainable.

The nation's soul staggers before the enormity of this massacre, which now occupies its own notorious place in the bleak annals of similar atrocities. Excluding battlefields, it was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. In terms of campus shootings, it was twice as deadly as the infamous sniping rampage in 1966 at the University of Texas at Austin, which killed 16 people before police shot dead the gunman.

Other echoes of gunshots fill the collective consciousness -- those of the gunman in Nickel Mines, Lancaster County, who just six months ago opened fire on innocent Amish schoolgirls and killed five of them. Eerily, almost eight years ago to the day, gunshots rang out from two alienated teenagers at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo,, who killed 12 students and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves.

That the latest outrage should occur on an idyllic campus that draws students from around the country makes this truly everybody's tragedy. Pittsburgh was reminded of its personal stake with the news that first-year student Hilary Strollo, 19, a Pine-Richland High School graduate, and senior Kevin Sterne, 22, of Eighty Four, were among the wounded. They need to be remembered by name in the area's general prayers.

The shooter has been identified as a senior English major, 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui, a South Korean legal resident of the United States who has been here since 1992, which is to say most of his life, and was a graduate of a public high school in Virginia. In short, there's little to suggest that his country of origin had much to do with this outrage. He appears to be just another loner assimilated into the familiar American landscape, where guns and grievances mix with tragic results and politicians call it freedom.

It happens time and again, with only the locations and the names of the dead and wounded different. Other countries have their mass murderers, but nowhere does tragedy play out on the same scale as it does in America. Nowhere is the post-death discussion such a clash between entrenched positions, such a mass denial of the obvious, such a dialogue of the deaf.

There is much to be discussed now. The easy part is to look at what the Virginia Tech administration could have done differently to avert this tragedy and learn from it. But what can the nation do?

Some will blame video games or moral corruption of the culture, but they are still left with this: America is awash with guns. Their ownership is a constitutional right, but all rights have limits before they intrude on other people's rights. The innocent dead at Virginia Tech had rights, but they were blown away in a morning of mindless violence.

Debates about the gun culture always follows such disasters, and knee-jerk defensiveness sets in among those who think guns are good for society. The first reaction from the White House was full of it. A spokeswoman said President Bush was horrified by the rampage and offered his prayers to the victims. Then she said, "The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed."

Since that blinding inanity -- why not, after all, call for tougher laws to deter psychopaths? -- Mr. Bush has spoken with a measure of empathy. His trip to the campus yesterday was a fitting gesture that expressed the nation's sorrow in a tangible way, as was ordering the flags to be flown at half-staff in honor of the innocent dead.

The National Rifle Association, which vociferously opposes even the most modest gun limits and restrictions, issued a statement "expressing our deepest condolences to the families of Virginia Tech University." If it were sincere about that, it would work for sensible gun laws in this country.

Americans and their leaders need to ask, What sort of people are we? Are we going to go on like this, mumbling stupidly that guns don't kill people, that people kill people -- when the nation's children are periodically sacrificed on the altar of gun worship? Because if we are, if even the Virginia Tech massacre is not enough to bring us to our senses, then we might as well keep the flags at half-staff.