Because based on past performance, it seems that the media will be all too happy to pounce on any admitted mistakes, and that would be a PR nightmare for Tech.

Actually...I blame that recent phenomena, 24-Hour Cable News.  In the past, if something big happened, it might get a quick update between commercials...if something REALLY BIG happened, they might cancel the regular show to cover the event.  But now, the news companies have to fill 24 hours with nothing but news.  Granted, it's a big world, but there are days when not much happens.  Still, the advertisers need to be satiated so networks fill in the void with ENDLESS replays of the event along with tons and tons of "expert analysis"

Cue Dramatic Music and lurid graphic:

"As you can see from the FoxCNN News Helicopter there has been no change in the toddler stand-off at Pleasant Hill Daycare.  Later in the hour we will hear from Rock Blondenhead, noted child psychologist, as he explains why 9mm pistols and mothers mix can form a deadly cocktail."  

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

Completely agree. I think you see it over in the other thread about the Gonzalez, too. It's abhorrent the way this administration has behaved in terms of failing to accept responsible. At the same time, when any admission of the slightest mis-step is can't be qualified as, hey live and learn, because of the scrutiny it receives, the desire to admit nothing becomes at least comprehensible.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

Pretty much the first response from the media after the Tech shooting, after the "oh the humanity" handwringing, was to try to figure out whom to blame.  Most of it fell on various authority figures at Tech, as well as guns (one example I have critiqued in a recent diary entry).

I have come to expect certain things as pretty much unpreventable and the cost of living in a free society. No matter how many laws you pass you will always have some psychopath find a weapon and kill people without provocation. Detecting a low frequency but high significance event like that is extremely difficult -- much more so than preventing a terrorist act because the nutcases in those crimes usually go it alone.

Without SWAT teams on every corner there is probably nothing that the folks in VT could have done to stop that nut. Even then, you'd always have the chance of one of the SWAT officers or policeman going rogue and doing something stupid as happens once in a while. Therefore, my thought on gun regulation is that there has to be a least restrictive reasonable approach to weapons availability, and that can and should be open to public debate but a full out ban would probably not work. Perhaps this also applies to your gun post (which by the way, I would have voted for had you turned it in as a sub).