Columbine has graduated to the college campus with an inevitability we all should have foreseen.

Yesterday's shootings at Virginia Tech, which left at least 31 dead and 28 wounded, lend us the sort of distinction no state wants: site of the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history.

Until now, that distinction belonged to the University of Texas, where a former Marine killed 15 people and wounded 31 others in 1966. The 1927 bombings at the Bath Consolidated School in Bath Township, Mich., remain the deadliest school incident in U.S. history, resulting in 45 deaths, mostly children.

It will be left to historians and journalists to determine whether "Virginia Tech" becomes an incident so horrific that it needs no explanation, like "Columbine," "Kent State," "Oklahoma City" or God forbid, "9/11."

We have managed to somehow move on from all of those unspeakable tragedies to the point we could even bring in actors and directors and render them a form of entertainment. Whether that's a laudable sign of our resiliency or a symptom of our short attention span is debatable.

But someday, somehow, a catastrophe will befall us too sickening for us to dispatch so neatly in the confines of our psyche. Maybe this event will galvanize us to a sort of action -- stricter gun laws, anyone? or at least force us to seriously examine the extent that violence defines us as society.

Then again, maybe not.

But one thing is certain: You can only have so many of these bloodlettings pile up before we can accurately describe them as aberrations.

After all, it was only last August that Tech's campus was terrorized and shut down during the manhunt for an escaped Montgomery County Jail inmate who is charged with killing a hospital guard and a county deputy.

Elsewhere in this paper, you'll see a lengthy box detailing campus shootings. That this violence is occurring at our temples of higher education, where we send our best and brightest to pursue their promise, should shed light on the folly of our comfort and denials. Violence, and the destruction it wreaks, respects no class.