Grief, horror, sorrow and sympathy — after a tragedy like Monday's shootings at Virginia Tech, these are the appropriate first responses from not only typical Americans, but the nation's political leaders. Part of any president's job is helping the nation grieve, and President Bush, as he has before, assumed that responsibility gracefully with his appearance at Tuesday's memorial for the young people senselessly slaughtered the day before.

But in the face of tragedy, the responsibility of political leaders is not just to look back in sorrow. Their job is to look forward toward practical steps that might reduce the risk of repeating the awful experience. It's too early to say conclusively what lessons public policy should take from Monday's rampage. But it's not too soon to say that is the question Washington should be asking once the immediate shock has passed.

That may seem obvious, but it's not. In these circumstances, the understandable first instinct of many Americans is to focus on the private factors that shaped the shooter's character — family, friends, religious institutions. Confronted with such chilling evil, most Americans would probably agree with William Faulkner, who said that we cannot legislate what is in men's hearts.

That is likely Bush's first instinct as well. In 1999, when he was governor of Texas, I interviewed him eight days after two students slaughtered classmates at Columbine High School in Colorado. Without much enthusiasm, Bush marched through his positions on gun control, school safety and other relevant policies. But he came to life when he spoke about the limits of the law.

"Of course there are going to be reactions — pass a law," Bush said. "The big law is the universal law: How do mothers and dads do their jobs? The fundamental question is going to be: Can America rededicate itself to parenting as the No. 1 priority for all of us?" He paused and smiled. "That's called a peroration," he said.

There is wisdom in that answer, but evasion, too. No one doubts that increasing the number of children reared with strong values would reduce the burden of violence in this nation. And no one imagines that laws can always deter someone driven to harm others.

But that doesn't mean we should not constantly search for better ways to reduce the threat of random violence. The issue isn't whether we might have prevented the Virginia Tech attack if we had closed a particular legal loophole last month. It may be that no combination of plausible policies would have deterred this rampage. And it is almost certain that the next horrific attack will present different facts.

The better question is whether we are doing enough to diminish the overall risk of violence in our society. Bruce Reed, who helped coordinate President Clinton's response to the Columbine shootings as White House domestic policy adviser, strikes the right balance. "It doesn't have to be about going back in the time machine with a policy that would have prevented this specific crisis," Reed said Tuesday. "It's taking the crisis to heart to see what we can do to stop future ones. In the wake of Sept. 11, we didn't just look at policies to stop planes from flying into buildings. We looked at how vulnerable we were to foreign attack. And we didn't . . . say if someone is crazy enough to fly a plane into a building, they will find a way to kill us somehow."

If we approached the Virginia shootings in the expansive spirit we summoned after 9/11, we would explore broadly. We would assess the availability of counseling for troubled young people. We would question Bush's decision to de-fund the Clinton program that subsidized the hiring of more local police — especially since the nation's violent crime rate increased last year for the first time since 1991, according to FBI statistics. And, yes, we would reopen a discussion that both parties have silenced about access to guns.

In the shadow of Monday's killings, Washington won't ignore these questions, but whether either party will grapple with them more seriously than Bush did at a perfunctory conference on school safety last fall is another question.

The redeeming grace of tragedy is that, throughout American history, it has sparked reform. The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire, which killed almost 150 workers in a New York City sweatshop, inspired workplace safety breakthroughs in the Progressive era. The 1989 attack on a Stockton, Calif., elementary school by a drifter armed with an AK-47 provoked outrage that led to the important gun-control laws of the 1990s.

The ineradicability of evil ensures that we will never be free from terrible days like Monday. But we will compound this tragedy if we fail to learn from it.

Ronald Brownstein is the Los Angeles Times' national affairs columnist.