Little did I realize while shooting this video of me walking down the spiral stairs at the Norton Simon Museum, that it would be the first thing that I thought of when I heard the News about a gunman who massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, cutting down his victims in two attacks two hours and a half-mile apart before the university could figure out what was going on and get the warning out to students.

The downward spiral.

Looking at the Van Gogh's and the Klee's and the Picasso's at the Norton Simon Museum, I thought about the changes the World was going through during and since their times. Can't the Art they made save us? Can't Art heal us? Can't Art make us safe?

Reading a post in my favorite site I read about a film called, "The Killer Within" a documentary where a seemingly average professor and father reveals how on one night in 1955, as an unassuming Swarthmore College student, he killed his sleeping dorm mate. He planned to kill more students but at the last minute had a change of heart. After being committed to a hospital for the criminally insane, he was released five years later. Witnesses said he had a calm look on his face.

Today Trey Perkins, who was sitting in a German class, told The Washington Post that the gunman barged into the room at about 9:50 a.m. and opened fire for about a minute and a half, squeezing off 30 shots in all.

The gunman, Perkins said, first shot the professor in the head and then fired on the students. Perkins said the gunman was about 19 years old and had a "very serious but very calm look on his face."