CHARLOTTESVILLE -- Members of a state panel investigating the Virginia Tech shootings said Thursday that they have the information they need to reach conclusions about the campus killings and to issue recommendations for preventing similar tragedies in the future.

The panel's chairman said the group will discuss its preliminary findings in public next month before delivering a final report to Gov. Tim Kaine. The eight-member panel has finished the information-gathering phase of its investigation, which began shortly after the April 16 shootings that left 33 people dead.

The group now faces the task of distilling thousands of pages of documents and scores of interviews into a written report, a process made more difficult by federal privacy laws that could limit what the panel can disclose about student gunman Seung-Hui Cho.

"The challenge for us right now is [to] take all of that and boil it down to a point where we can produce a document that's manageable," said panel member Diane Strickland, a retired circuit court judge for Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem.

The panel spent 4 ¹₂ hours Thursday in a closed-door meeting with lawyers to discuss how to handle information dealing with Cho's mental health and academic records, among other things. Those discussions, which will continue next week, will determine how much specific information the panel will discuss publicly and include in its final report.

The panel will hold another private meeting with lawyers Tuesday at the University of Virginia and hold a public meeting in mid-August to discuss its preliminary findings, Chairman Gerald Massengill said.

Kaine appointed the panel within days of the shootings and asked it to examine all aspects of the worst campus shooting incident in U.S. history. The panel has conducted four public meetings. With the help of consultants, it also has conducted private interviews with witnesses, police, mental health officials and Tech faculty and administrators.

Massengill would not say Thursday whether the panel has talked with Cho's relatives. But it has obtained academic and mental health records that could paint a clearer picture of Cho, who was ordered by a special justice to get outpatient treatment in 2005 following complaints from members of the Tech community about his behavior. Some of Cho's mental health records are missing or incomplete, the panel has learned.

"I feel like we have everything that we could get," Strickland said. "There are documents that unfortunately do not exist and that will be noted in our report. But I think at this point, everything there is to get we have gotten."

Strickland insisted the report will be comprehensive, saying, "We don't want it to appear that we just scratched the surface. We want it to be known to the public how much information we did accumulate."

Some relatives of the shooting victims have called for tough assessments of the actions of university officials and police, particularly on the morning of the shootings.

Cho shot two students to death in a dormitory at 7:15 a.m. on April 16. But Tech officials provided no warning to the campus community until 9:26 a.m., shortly before Cho killed 30 more people in Norris Hall and took his own life.

Massengill said the panel will not sidestep the issue. But, he added, "I'm not aware of any decisions made during those two hours that would absolutely have saved lives."

Massengill said the panel may also make recommendations on regulating firearms on campus, an issue that has been raised by speakers in all of the panel's public meetings. State colleges, operating under an attorney general's opinion, have policies prohibiting guns on campus even for those with concealed-carry permits. Massengill said the panel may recommend a state law to reinforce the campus bans.

"It may be a consideration for the governor that some of this authority be put into statute," he said.