The strange, sad tale of the Virginia Tech shootings became so much more bizarre now with the confirmation that the shooter deliberated over this for at least a couple of weeks and possibly longer. Sending videos of his ramblings and bewildered, angry thoughts to NBC, inbetween the shooting incidents at the dorm and the engineering building where he killed most of his victims, is just insane.

Enough has been said about this lunatic to last several lifetimes, but how do we expand the safety net to ensure that the warning signs people like this give off actually result in restorative action, and not inaction?

I think of an individual who lived on my freshman hall at Vanderbilt. Very depressed, very bizarre behavior, would threaten people and actually spent an alarming amount of time watching and re-watching "American Psycho." This guy (who some readers of this will know who I'm talking about) could've been set off while we were in school and certainly could have committed acts of random violence. It just didn't happen, for whatever reason.

This individual ended up dropping out of school later in that same freshman year, and committing suicide a couple of years later.

Is it a masculinity issue? How much is the presence of violence in our culture to blame? Is it just a random atrocity? Or are we going to have to endure another one of these episodes again in the next 2-3 years? This VT guy cited "Eric and Dylan" from the Columbine incident as his brothers-in-arms, after all...this latest incident could spark even more.

The whole thing is just disgusting and very unsettling. Who knows where it goes from here.