Are we ready for the next time? Is America ready to prevent, or respond to, an even bigger attack than Monday’s campus slaughter?

The moving memorial service at Virginia Tech on Tuesday was not the time or place, but sooner or later, the school must face the fact that it wasn’t ready. Despite a manhunt on campus last summer after a nearby shooting, despite two bomb threats this month and even after two people were murdered in a dormitory early Monday, school officials moved too deliberately. They were in the middle of a developing catastrophe, but they acted as though they had all the time in the world.

The rising tide of anger of some parents and students is justified. The 30 people who died in the second shooting, more than two hours after the first, could have been saved. Had school officials quickly locked down the campus, canceled classes and told students to stay in their rooms, the toll could have been reduced. Instead, officials acted on a hunch that the shooter of the first two students had left the campus. Elementary police work and common sense tell you not to take chances with hunches when a murderer is on the loose. You secure everyone and everything until you are certain the shooter and his weapon are no longer a threat.

That’s the lesson of the post-9/11 world. We didn’t connect the dots before 9/11, and Monday shows we haven’t come very far as a nation in changing our thinking. President Bush was right when he said that the victims were simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” but it’s a fate that could strike any of us. We always have to have a plan and we have to practice carrying it out. And then we have to put it in place at the first sign of trouble. Without hesitation and without falling back on sloppy hunches.

Cho Seung Hui, the man identified as the Virginia gunman, was a deranged misfit. He was a South Korean immigrant, not an Islamic jihadist. But he could have been, and he could have had a weapon more deadly than two handguns. Just as there were many signs Cho was disturbed, we have been warned by our national enemies that they want to kill us. We have to take them seriously.

But we haven’t, and Virginia Tech’s slow-motion reaction is a metaphor for our laxness. Coming up on six years since the deadliest day in American history, we still have not protected cargo ports. The security perimeters around nuclear plants are flimsy. We are just now getting around to improving rail and mass transit security. Our borders are notoriously open.

As anti-terror expert Stephen Flynn recently wrote in the Daily News pages, “There are more than 500 chemical facilities in the United States, each of which, if attacked, could produce a toxic cloud sending up to 100,000 Americans to makeshift morgues. These plants are the equivalent of poorly protected weapons of mass destruction lying in our midst.”

Yet we move on in deliberate fashion, as though we have all the time in the world.

In coming weeks, the temptation will be to focus on the narrow circumstances of the Virginia killings. But the larger issue is not about gun control or campus counseling or anything else a new law can fix.

The real issue is our state of readiness, our state of mind. We must get ready for the next time.