The tragedy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute has reawakened a fear in Americans that seemed to have dissipated in light of years of terrorist threats and the focus on international danger. While the horrors of the victims of the Columbine shooting will never be forgotten, the constant lurking fear of "weird" and "unpopular" kids carrying guns to school had ceased as the months and then years went by. Additionally, the high-school shootings failed to seem relevant to college life. That is where we made our mistake. We stopped being vigilant as more and more kids who needed serious help slipped through the cracks. This tragedy should not have happened, period. But to blame the entire situation on the university or on Virginia's gun-control laws is too simple. A two-pronged solution involving both factors is the only way to reduce the very real risk of future mass killing sprees in our nation's universities.

The old National Rifle Association mantra "Guns don't kill people, people kill people," is outdated and overused. Clearly, without guns, angry and disturbed people would still find ways to kill but they would do so far less effectively. While homemade bombs are quite successful, it isn't exactly easy for a 10-year-old to bring one to school-and yes this has actually happened. Gun-control laws are too lax as they stand and must be made more stringent if we are to get any grasp on this terrible trend.

Seung-Hui Cho, the mass murderer of 32 people, walked into a Virginia gun shop and bought one of the two weapons used in the attacks without any issues. While the owner did run a mandatory background check with the state police on Cho, it was not enough to prevent what has now become the largest massacre by a single gunman in United States history.

If Cho was such a seriously disturbed man with well-known behavioral oddities, why didn't something show up on the background check? If someone who stalked girls and wrote grotesquely violent plays and poetry can own a gun, then that should indicate that something is severely wrong with the system.

It's not as though these incidents of bizarre behavior were not reported to the school and the police. According to CNN, Cho's suitemates warned girls that he was stalking them and encouraged them to alert the authorities. They also called the police when he threatened to commit suicide after the girls reported his frightening actions. While he was put into outpatient therapy as a result of these incidences, he somehow managed to appear as though he was simply depressed and was able to stop attending therapy shortly after starting treatment.

According to The New York Times, Cho should not have been sold the guns because "federal law prohibits anyone who has been 'adjudicated as a mental defective' as well as those who have been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility, from buying a firearm." Having been found mentally defective and a danger to himself, Cho should not have come up clean in a background check. Clearly, something went wrong in the communications between the Virginia system and the federal system.

On top of all this, the former chairwoman of Virginia Tech's English department, Lucinda Roy, repeatedly attempted to have Cho forcibly placed in psychiatric care after reading his disturbing and violent writing. His work was so frightening that his poetry teacher actually threatened to quit if he was not immediately removed from her class, and his fellow classmates feared he would become violent if they critiqued his work too severely in peer edits.

While Brandeis does not appear to take such a laid-back approach to the safety of its students-take last year's bomb threat, for example-the University lacks a system that would enable students to know immediately that the campus is on lockdown. A campuswide alarm, while loud and unseemly, would certainly serve to alert students to stay where they are until otherwise told. Clearly, mass e-mail messages do not ensure that everyone is aware of the danger and thus do not guarantee the safety of the majority of the student body and faculty.

In light of such tragedy and with perfect hindsight, it is easy to place blame. Yet pointing fingers at the Virginia Tech administration, the police or even the incredibly lax gun control laws will not change the tragedy that occurred last Monday. In one sense, poor enforcement of gun control laws and administrative gridlock in dealing with perceived threats are both to blame, but it is time to start working with lawmakers and school officials, as well as concerned citizens, toward the common goal of improving the safety of our nation's students.