No atheists in foxholes? Maybe not, but there are probably no atheists anywhere when Americans hear that college students, studying to make the world and themselves better, have been massacred.

Was I the only person from whose throat escaped an involuntary "Oh, Lord" upon hearing of the campus carnage at Virginia Tech?

I didn't think so.

Nor was I the only person who cussed out loud when the president's spokeswoman preceded him to the microphone and assured gun makers their livelihoods weren't in danger.

"Right to bear arms," my eye. The president's message of reassurance was not aimed at hunters or recreational shooters but at the industry that makes millions flooding our country with guns.

The good news is that we heard a reassuring message coming from the White House. The bad news is that it was reassuring only to gun makers: Hunters don't use 9 mm handguns, as the shooter in Blacksburg allegedly did.

"The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms," deputy press secretary Dana Perino said. President Bush arrived at the lectern to decry the deaths of the students and their suspected gunman.

C'mon, dawg. The least you could've done was express condolences for the dead kids and their families first.

I don't know about you, but the coded message I heard from the president to gun makers was, "Chill, homes. Nobody's takin' yer guns as long as Big George is runnin' this here country."

Of course the massacre at Virginia Tech on Monday is going to precipitate debate -- no, shouting, since "debate" implies listening to the other side -- about gun control.

The sun shone brightly in the Triangle on Monday, but a cloud hung over the campuses of Duke and N.C. Central universities as word spread among students of the unprecedented death toll of their Virginia Tech counterparts.

Dazed students moved across NCCU's and Duke's campuses. Many had cell phones pressed to their ears or Bluetooths pressed in them. Others moved tentatively with their eyes focused on incoming text messages, presumably about the tragedy. You couldn't help but wonder how these kids will cope, how this nation will cope.

I approached a couple of students to ask what they felt, but I soon felt like an intruder on their grief and confusion.

This is not the first generation weaned on national tragedies. The red letter dates for many of us were the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

Those men were singled out specifically, though, killed because they -- in the words of the anthemic song "Abraham, Martin and John" by Dion -- "tried to do some good for you and me."

As devastating as their deaths were to our sense of national civility, they knew there was an inherent risk in being a leader.

But in being a student?

Many college kids today were 10 or 11 years old when the Columbine massacre occurred. They lived through that, through 9/11 and now will have to live through this national tragedy.

Talk about senseless, sorrowful bookends to mark the transition from adolescence to adulthood.