Va. Tech Shootings: “These Kids Are Going To Lose A Lot Of Their Innocence”

Shep Smith was “the only anchor or correspondent to ask a student being interviewed ‘how are you doing?’ and sound like he really meant it,” an e-mailer says.

This morning on Fox & Friends he was quite dramatic:

I’ve been to a lot of these kind of scenes… and I know what’s going to happen in the next few days. These kids are going to lose a lot of their innocence. They’re going to realize that their university will never be the same, that their lives will never be the same, that Virginia Tech will never again first and foremost be thought of for the Hokies who make this school so proud on the football field or the fine acad rep that this university has garnered, it’s going to be remembered as the place where 33 people died… they’ll never be able to get past that. A real learning experience is coming here. They will look back on the timing of it all and say ‘if only.’ If only the storm hadn’t been so bad and they could have gotten helicopters up; if only they had decided to close down the campus; if only they had been able to get more students out on ambulances. But the if only’s are passed. And now the hope is, together, that they’ll be able to get through this.”