All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

One year ago tomorrow, a troubled student went on a rampage that became the worst campus massacre in American history. Thirty-three people died at Virginia Tech, including the gunman.

Many close to the tragedy are still trying to heal. Watch the Notebook for more.

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Thalia Assuras is a national correspondent for CBS News, based in Washington.

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It's been only four months since the massacre at Virginia Tech, such a short time and yet such a "long winter" for Holly Sherman. She lost her 20-year-old daughter Leslie, a history major to the troubled mind of a violent young man, Seung-Hui Cho. Leslie is now part of the university's history, a history marred by the conclusions of a state panel.

Echoing the report, Holly Sherman believes that lives, including that of her daughter, could have been saved had there been a warning about the first two murders.

In fact, she personally holds the university responsible for a failure to act, the decision not to act and she is especially harsh on the knowledge so many had about Cho's mental state, calling the officials negligent.

This is a mother whose pain, for the most part, is still contained -- admittedly so, as she has sought answers to her questions so many families had about how this tragedy could have happened. She told me she has many answers, doesn't believe anything has been whitewashed, but can't understand how this could have happened.

It is when she talks about leslie - "always cheerful...never a disappointment" that Holly Sherman dissolves in tears and pain. and she has another worry now - another daughter, Lisa who started at Virginia Tech just this year. The two sisters were to room together.

(To see Thalia Assuras's report from the CBS Evening News, just click the image on the left -- Ed.)

Last week’s killings at Virginia Tech are still on all of our minds—and it may be too soon to talk about a public policy response. But the fact is, national activists and politicians already are. For last week's "10 Questions," just days after the VT assault, we spoke with a leading proponent of gun control.

This week, we hear from the other side of the debate. We posed some questions to Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig, a longtime NRA board member and gun control opponent. We talked with him about assault weapons, background checks, and the Second Amendment.

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1. Senator Craig, do you want any changes in America’s gun laws?

In the past, I supported a proposal with Senators McCain, Schumer, and others to improve the National Instant Check System (NICS), which helps enforce current gun laws. Part of the bill addresses the lack of mental health data in NICS. Federal firearms law does not permit individuals with mental disabilities to purchase firearms, and NICS should be able to stop those sales. While privacy concerns have made it difficult to populate the database with accurate information, this bill takes steps to close that information gap while respecting those concerns.

2. You’ve served on the board of the NRA since 1982 and have talked tough about Democrats wanting to take away people’s guns. Were you surprised that the leaders of the new Democratic Congress didn’t speak out for more gun control last week?

Not one bit. A lot of anti-gun advocates have lost their Congressional seats because of their support for more gun control. That fact was not lost on either party in the last election. Democrats realize that gun control is a losing issue with much of the electorate, particularly with the union and blue collar workers they claim as their political base. They even went so far as to recruit pro-gun candidates who are now part of their caucuses in the House and Senate and resistant to flip-flopping on this issue...

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I woke up this morning to the news that the FCC may be able to regulate violence on television, without doing harm to the constitution.

No word on whether that includes regulating Rosie O'Donnell.

But hot on the heels of that news, comes Dick Meyer's latest opus, with some provocative thoughts:

The FCC has apparently surveyed the research and found connections between violent entertainment and media imagery and violent behavior and imagination. I don’t know if Russell Simmons and the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network have surveyed the research and discovered that woman-hating, violent and racially degrading music foster, um, anti-social behaviors.

Certainly the idea that eliminating these three specific words from rap lyrics would have any real world effects is ludicrous. Certainly the idea that a new law, enforced by the FCC, regulating what times it is appropriate to air chain-saw massacres and slasher movies on cable would diminish the production of future Dylan Klebolds and Cho Seung-Huis is farcical.

But I applaud both these efforts.

How else can “society” – the collective “we” – fight back against an entertainment culture that is perverted? Put it another way: I applaud almost any attempt to protest and mock this piggish, warped media machine, no matter how ineffective, illiberal, anti-First Amendment, prudish or uncool it may be.

Wander over to Against the Grain for more. And watch your mouth.

In the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy, gun control has again become the subject of national debate.

Is there a way for us to find common ground on this controversial issue?

Click the monitor to watch.

Sharyn Alfonsi is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

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When I was growing up in Northern Virginia, Virginia Tech was considered the "13th Grade." Dozens of my classmates and many of my dearest friends headed to Blacksburg after High School.

The fall of their freshman year, many of them returned home with their cars covered with stickers declaring their "HOKIE PRIDE". I had no idea what a Hokie was, and even the best explanations only further confused me.

This week, America and I learned what it means to be a Hokie. We watched in horror as their campus was terrorized, and watched in awe as they pulled together. We saw students go home to be with their families and return to campus comfort their classmates. We watched them operate with courage, dignity and class during even in the most difficult moments.

Today, I watched thousands of brave students return to class. Among them Derek O'Dell. He was shot in the arm by Seung Hui Cho during his German class. After the gunman left his classroom, he tied a belt around his wound to stop the bleeding; called 9-1-1 and helped classmates barricade the door. Cho came back and kept shooting.

Today, Derek’s bullet wound is still raw, and he appears to still be in a bit of shock, but he was determined to move on, even if he's moving a little slower.

Derek O'Dell is a Hokie -- now, we all know what that means.

The third week of April has seen some extraordinary -- and extraordinarily tragic -- history. This has been a time of loss, and grief, and remembrance.

Just click the monitor to watch.

When the tragedy at Columbine happened on April 20th, 1999, I was at a Broadway event to raise money for AIDS research. I had turned off my cell phone, and someone came in and pulled me out to say there had been a school shooting. The next thing I knew, I was on a plane headed to Denver where I would eventually make my way to Littleton, Colorado -- a town in shock, a town wishing it could turn back the clock and change the course of events on that horrific spring day.

Fast forward eight years: similar circumstances, different place, slightly older students. It was a Monday like any other, as President Bush said at the school’s convocation on Tuesday. And while it should have continued that way, with students carrying backpacks, pronouncing new German words, listening to a lecture in a civil engineering class, the day unfolded in a sick, unimaginable form. I can’t help but think of the disbelief and horror these students must have felt as this demented and terribly disturbed young man extinguished lives in an instant. The terror felt by parents upon hearing the news but not hearing from their children. The photographs of these innocents. The "Facebook" entries with typical teenage comments like “let’s go buy some shoes!” The intrusion of scores of satellite trucks lined up like soldiers on the campus so that information could be dispersed to the rest of the world stunned by the images of terror and death. The importance, as the parents of Austin Cloyd, an international studies and French major, said of “making happy memories with your children.” I still think of those mothers and fathers, waking up after their only escape, sleep, living with the aftershocks -- the reality that it wasn’t simply a bad dream...

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Sarah Birnbaum is a Desk Assistant for CBS News Radio in New York. She's spent the last few days in Blacksburg, Virginia.

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On my flight back from Virginia Tech yesterday, I sat next to a 24-year-old booker from CNN. She’s a year older than me.

“When I was doing my degree in broadcast journalism, I wish there had been a course called ‘Covering Tragedy,’” she told me. “How am I supposed to behave? How am I supposed to go up to people in mourning, and try to talk them into going on air?”

This problem was especially difficult for me, because I wasn't only in Blacksburg as a reporter; my family was in mourning too. My fiancé Brian is a professor at Virginia Tech. He was on sabbatical this semester, but he ordinarily teaches on the second floor of Norris Hall, where the shooting spree took place.

“I keep on picturing my classroom and my students, and what the killer must have looked like when he came through the door,” Brian said to me on Monday night. His friend Jamie was teaching in that classroom on Monday morning, and was shot in the head.

Brian and I held a get-together at our house, which was doubling as the CBS Radio Blacksburg Bureau, after the candlelight vigil so that our friends on faculty could get together and talk. “What do we tell our students?” Brian and his colleagues kept on repeating. They didn’t have courses in “covering tragedy” either.

So, what did we all do?

The answer I found was that everyone reverted to what was most familiar...

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Almost invariably, America can't suffer a gun tragedy--like this week's massacre at Virginia Tech--without a gun debate immediately following it. The basic question is this: Should government impose restrictions on what kind of guns can be sold, and to whom? Would those restrictions make us any safer?

For one side's perspective on this issue, we turned to Paul Helmke, a Republican who is the former mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana, former president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and President of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a pro-gun control group.

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1.Mr. Helmke, it almost seems too early to discuss a policy response to the tragedy at Virginia Tech. And yet, people are already lining up behind various ideas including more gun control-which your group obviously supports. Are there any measures that could have been taken to prevent this tragedy?

We’ll never know for sure if this horrific shooting could have been prevented, but it seems quite clear that what we’re doing now is not working and that this individual should not have been allowed to get his guns and ammunition so easily. It’s still unclear whether his mental health history legally disqualified him from purchasing weapons. If so, this information apparently didn’t get to the state and federal authorities who should have disapproved these sales. In approving gun sales, the focus should be on completeness, not quickness. If his documented history wasn’t a disqualifier, it should have been. Requiring references could have made it obvious that guns shouldn’t be sold to this person. A stronger, more extensive system of real background checks might have made a difference. In addition, ballistics microstamping technology might have allowed the police to determine more quickly after the first two killings who the shooter was.

2.What do you say to those who argue that Virginia Tech had already implemented several gun safety measures on campus-banning guns in classrooms and dorms-that apparently did nothing to help?

Partial restrictions by a university or a city are going to be of limited effectiveness when an individual can go off-campus or out of the city or to the next state and easily acquire these weapons – in this case, not once but twice. We need effective, enforceable, national, common-sense restrictions to prevent such easy, quick access to so much deadly firepower.

3. A leading Virginia gun rights group said that if one of the victims were carrying a concealed weapon, this massacre might have been averted. What's wrong with that argument?...

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