Are we now in the paranoia stage?

Yup.

In long.

It's a deeply saddening event.  I'll set aside the deep sadness of the whole event to engage in a little media criticism.

First, from overseas.  A lot of the foreign reporting includes a reference to Bush saying he's been deeply affected by it while emphasizing that its everyone's right in America to have arms.  The German radio has consistently used their word for "weapons", rather than the one for "hunting weapons". The implications in their coverage are pretty clear:  (a) it's tragic, (b) your preznit is an idiot, (c) this is what happens when you have a lot of guns running around, (d) after all the lawless violence you've done overseas, America, you have no reason to expect any different at home.

Now, domestically.

The MSM spent the whole day yesterday on this story.  No speculation was too outlandish to be sliced, diced, hashed and rehashed.  In the most inflammatory terms, when the opportunity presented itself.  Taking a break from work, I ate lunch with MSNBC running, when the host went into an anti-immigrant, anti-foreign student rant, aided and abetted by the former FBI profiler.  Stuff like whether certain ethnic groups were more susceptible to snapping in the manner the poor soul behind the trigger did.  Like whether we should cut back on foreign students.  And so forth.

In toto, the coverage was not much different in character than that which followed 9/11.  Vilify the misguided guy who did the deed, ethnic prejudice, etc., etc.