"For or against us"

33 dead in Virginia Tech shootings

On April 20, 1999, I picked up the paper and read about the Columbine shootings. I read it cover to cover and cried. I can clearly remember The New Paper's two-page spread detailing the route the gunmen took through their high school. Keeping in mind this blubbering twelve-year-old, I'm currently minoring in Media Studies, a department where Columbine is now a key case study in media violence research - the consideration of whether a link between consuming media violence and subsequent aggressive and violent behavior exists.
On a morning almost exactly eight years later, it's back, this time at my neighbor university (currently this URL is malfunctioning because everyone is unsurprisingly trying to get on the site at the same time) and surpassing Columbine as the deadliest campus shooting in American history.
Just last night I was reading about the self-defeating journalistic stand that "news must essentially be about us... violence and terrorism have long been privileged as key news values, but they remain hostage to the defining news value of cultural proximity." Why should human life in America be valued so much more than in other regions by a relatively neutral bystander like myself, so much as to selectively experience this kind of emotional impact?
Maybe I'm forgetting it's not always to do with neutrality. And also that I am no longer neutral. It's to do with childhood, happenstance, and the fact that I am a uni student in America, have friends in V-Tech and had to facebook them to make sure they were okay.