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When i first heard about Virginia tech i was in shock.

A crowd gathers before a makeshift memorial to observe a moment of silence at Virginia Tech yesterday to remember the victims of Monday’s massacre at the university.

On Monday morning, engineering student Joe Aust will remove his belongings from the Virginia Tech room he shared with the deadliest gunman in modern U.S. history.

"There's no way I can keep living in that room," said Aust, 19, who spent eight months living with mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho. "I'm usually a pretty calm guy, but this thing has hit me very hard.

"I just want to finish my degree and live a normal life," Aust added. "But I don't know if I'll ever understand what happened."

How to get on with life after 32 students and professors were murdered weighed heavily on the minds of staff and students yesterday as church bells tolled across the sprawling campus.

They gathered at noon for a moment of silence at the heart of the campus, wearing the university's orange and maroon colours and determined to forever remember the victims.

Nearby stood Norris Hall, where all but two of Cho's victims were gunned down. What to do with the building – reopen its classrooms, turn it into a memorial, or tear it down – symbolizes the uncertainty of how to move forward after an overwhelmingly traumatic event.

Many students expressed faith in the healing power of time. Authorities, for their part, have launched investigations into a somewhat botched police response to the shootings, and on the treatment Cho received after being identified by a Virginia court as mentally ill and an imminent danger to himself and others.

Academics, both on and off campus, focused on the effects of a culture that sees guns, and their availability, as a symbol of freedom. They pointed to yesterday's anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., as a stark reminder that shooting sprees are an all too common horror in the United States.

"It's a confluence of factors," says Virginia Tech psychologist Danny Axsom. "You've got disturbed personalities and access to a lot of lethal weaponry."

Cho, an English student whose violent writings raised concern among his professors, is the latest in a long line of mass murderers who unleashed shooting sprees in the past 60 years.

There were 45 mass killings during this period, all but a dozen or so in the United States, according to a database compiled by Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia University.

A third of them occurred in schools or universities. Only three of the killers were women, and a third were disgruntled employees. All but one of the mass murders used guns.

Often cited as the first to unleash indiscriminate murder on a university campus is Charles Whitman, the ex-marine who killed 13 people with a rifle from the top of a clock tower at the University of Texas in 1966.

But the post-World War II shooting sprees began 17 years earlier, when unemployed war veteran Howard Unruh shot people at random in his Camden, N.J., neighbourhood, killing 13 people in 12 minutes with a German-made Luger pistol.

Another benchmark came in 1984, when Patrick Sherrill, 44, shot and killed 14 fellow employees in an Oklahoma post office, and the term "going postal" was coined to describe workplace-related violence.

The 1990s saw several shooting rampages in U.S. schools, including Columbine High School, where two teens killed 12 students and teachers with semi-automatic weapons. Cho described the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, as "martyrs" in one of his video rants.

The weapons of choice are semi-automatics, which fire as fast as the trigger is pulled.

"These guys were all losers," said Gary Lavergne, author of a book on Whitman. "When it came to killing, they wanted to be as efficient as possible."

Stone said the almost exclusive use of guns in the attacks satisfies the killers' psychotic needs.

"These people seem to want to see their victims momentarily and blow them away in a more personal way than tossing a bomb in a school," he said in an interview.

He said Cho fits the profile of the typical shooter, particularly younger ones. A "paranoid loner" who may have been schizophrenic, Cho's choice of a handgun allowed him to "stare down" the people he blamed for feeling worthless, Stone said.

In Virginia, the search for a new normal

"For two hours he suddenly became a somebody who had control over the people he envied," he added.

Psychiatry professor Frank Ochberg partly explains the choice of guns as consistent with the image of the gun-totting avenger that gained prominence in popular culture after World War II. Cho tapped into that image with the frightening photo album he mailed to NBC TV.

"In Cho's pictures, the image of the avenger is a menacing young man with guns in each hand," said Ochberg, a founder of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Disorder.

"That was the picture he wanted to create for himself. That's a picture that combines the post-World War II image and the demons in this young man's brain," he added in an interview.

Both Stone and Ochberg see the massacre as yet another example of the need for tighter gun-control laws in the U.S.

"The only reason for owning a pistol is to kill someone," Stone said.

Yet even the worst gun massacre in U.S. history couldn't provoke a noticeable public debate on the issue. A handful of congressmen expressed concerns the day after the shootings, but an astonishing silence prevailed after that.

Ochberg, who gave dozens of interviews during the week, said the only journalists who asked about the need for tighter gun-control laws were foreign ones.

"America has given up on the political debate about sane and civilized gun availability," said Ochberg, also chairperson emeritus of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.

Indeed the loudest voices heard were lobbyists calling for more, rather than fewer, guns.

Philip Van Cleave, head of the Virginia Citizens Defence League, said he would use the massacre to renew a push for legislation that would allow guns on the Virginia Tech campus, where a university policy now bans employees and students from carrying them.

The campus gun ban made students sitting ducks, Van Cleave argued.

"I guarantee you that people in those classrooms were wishing they had access to a handgun during the shootings," he added. "The lesson is that more good people should be armed."

Not one of a dozen students randomly polled by the Toronto Star backed the idea. They described it as a recipe for further bloodshed: How would police know who the killer was if they arrived on the scene to find several people with guns drawn?

Yet few felt moved to protest for more restrictive laws. A common refrain was that criminals and madmen would get a hold of guns no matter what the laws.

Calls for tough gun-control laws after the Columbine shooting failed to weaken the influence of gun lobbies on politicians. Students had to look for other ways to find meaning in the horror.

The high school's library, where several students were shot, was torn down and a memorial was built, noted Ochberg, who advised high school officials at the time.

The decision caused tension among students, some of whom believed the best way to defy the killers was by keeping the library open. There were also differences between those who wanted specific religious symbols used inside the school to commemorate the dead and those who thought they would be inappropriate in a multi-faith institution. Ochberg said he expects similar differences to occur at Virginia Tech during the weeks ahead.

In the meantime, counsellors at the university's Cook Center have posted a notice on their website warning students they may never find a satisfactory answer to why a gunman would open fire on a campus.

It also warns about "survivor guilt" – a feeling of guilt for escaping the massacre while others died – and tells students they may have trouble sleeping and eating. "Remember that grief is a long process," it says.