THE BBC WORLD NEWS STARTED its broadcast tonight with remarks by President Bush at a memorial service on campus at Virginia Tech. "The victims the of this tragedy didn't deserve their fate," Bush said. "They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time."

I wonder if that statement sounded as dopey to the rest of the world as it did to me. Where else should college students and teachers be than in their assigned classrooms on a Monday morning? Wrong place at the wrong time? What kind of dumbass thing is that to say? And to think a speech writer was probably responsible for such words of no comfort, that strain logic, that have the power to reduce heart numbing loss to a phrase of an an ill-thought cliche.

A week ago a high ranking Philadelphia homicide cop used the same words to describe the 99th murder of 2007. "He was in the wrong place at the wrong time," the police inspector said of a man in his 50's shot dead outside the corner store a half block from where he lived in West Philadelphia. Wrong place at the wrong time is when you take an island vacation and the volcano erupts. Wrong place at the wrong time is when you take the wrong exit and end up in the middle of a shoot out between the Crips and Bloods. Wrong place at the wrong time is not a college student sitting in class at 9 o'clock in the morning, or a father shot in the head while getting ready for work by a stray bullet through the window.

They were in the right place at the right time and they paid the wrong price for living in a country and a city where dead innocents are collateral damage in the losing war against handguns.