Last week's massacre at Virginia Tech evoked an emotional outpouring that included expressions of shock and disbelief that such a horrific, unspeakable act could have taken place.

Among those not surprised was Garen Wintemute, director of the Center for Violence Prevention Research at the UC Davis Medical Center.

"We have no right to shock and horror and disbelief," Wintemute said. "We are the parties responsible."

Wintemute, a national expert on gun violence and public attitudes about guns, has conducted extensive research on gun accessibility, connections between gun ownership and violence, and related topics. He said much of the blame for the massacre at Virginia Tech resides in laws that allow easy access to guns.

"We and our policymakers have consciously, deliberately constructed a society in which violence is not just tolerated, but celebrated, and in which weapons that are collectively capable of mass destruction are available to everyone," Wintemute said.

Wintemute said many states, including Florida, Georgia and Texas, have passed laws that greatly broaden the circumstances under which it is legal to shoot someone. For example, under the laws, a person may legally shoot another if he or she simply feels "threatened." He also pointed to the half-dozen states that are considering or enacting laws that allow employees to have guns in their vehicles while they are in their companies' parking lots. The laws would override any company's prohibition against such a practice.

In Virginia, lawmakers passed a law aimed at the Mayors Against Illegal Guns Coalition, a group of 210 mayors in 40 states that works to prevent criminals from illegally obtaining guns. The coalition's main tactic is to conduct and videotape sting operations on gun sellers identified as known sources of illegal gun sales. The Virginia law bans such sting operations.

At the federal level, Wintemute said, there has been a refusal to maintain bans on assault weapons, whose sole purpose is to kill large numbers of people. In addition, policymakers have declined to enact laws to keep guns from people with a high likelihood of using them illegally, Wintemute said. In most of the country, he said, a person can be convicted of a misdemeanor assault and still legally own a gun, even though statistics show that such an individual is 15 times more likely to commit a violent crime with a gun.

Referring to the Virginia Tech shootings, Wintemute said, "No one predicted precisely this event, at this time and place. But it was inevitable that such an event would occur somewhere. Policy makers are now declaring that nothing substantive will be done. It will happen again, and we will again be pulling the trigger."

Given the historic nature of last week's killings, the massive news media coverage of the event was entirely predictable and understandable. But the media's decision to broadcast images and words of the killer received widespread denunciation from survivors of the victims, commentators, Virginia Tech students and others, who believed airing the material not only served no purpose, but instead was harmful.

Peter Yellowlees shares that viewpoint. Yellowlees, a professor-in-residence in the UC Davis Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, said, "My main problem with the media was their giving all this publicity to the killer's video and messages, which I think is dreadful. This is exactly what the killer wanted."

Normally, Yellowlees said, the media refrain from airing detailed information about suicides, "because we know that this engenders copycats. There's clear evidence of this."

Why the media veered from this traditional practice "is incomprehensible to me," Yellowlees said. "Presumably, a major reason for doing this was to post his views to the world, no matter how disturbing they are. But in doing so, they fell completely into a plan he developed."

Yellowlees described two broad categories of people who might be encouraged by the coverage given to the killer's "manifesto," as it has been called, to act similarly. The first, which Yellowlees described as the "disaffected," are antisocial, angry and have a "chip on their shoulder against society." Individuals in this group, who feel marginalized, may believe that striking out against others will make them "powerful and strong."

The second, much smaller group, called "delusional" by Yellowlees, constitutes "people like this killer, who are mentally ill, paranoid. They see this man as being successful and are encouraged to do the same."

In addition to possibly encouraging others to act in a similar fashion, the media coverage of the killer "takes away the focus on the victims, their families and the healing process. The victims need to be heard, and there are some very valuable parts of media attention that can play a role in this regard."

Coverage devoted to the killer also deflects attention away from the issue of the easy access to firearms, Yellowlees said.

"Here was a young man who appeared to be mentally ill, but was able to legally obtain high-powered guns," Yellowlees said. "It was way too easy. Those are really important issues that are getting lost in this voyeuristic coverage."

Yellowlees, a strong proponent of stricter gun-control laws, said, "Imagine if everything was the same, but he had been carrying two knives, instead. He might have hurt two or three people, but then he would have been overwhelmed by others."