Three members of the Virginia House of Delegates are calling on radio stations to drop self-described "Talkmaster" Neal Boortz after his comments that Virginia Tech students should have done more to defend themselves.

"Mr. Boortz's hateful comments should have no place in this Commonwealth, particularly at this trying time," says a letter that Dels. Jim Shuler, D-Blacksburg; Steve Shannon, D-Fairfax County; and Chuck Caputo, D-Fairfax County, sent Monday to the eight Virginia stations that carry Boortz.

Starting the day after the April 16 killings of 32 people on Tech's campus, Boortz began asking why students didn't fight back against shooter Seung-Hui Cho.

"How in the hell do you line students up against a wall (if that's the way it played out) and start picking them off one by one without the students turning on you? You have a choice. Try to rush the killer and get his gun, or stand there and wait to be shot," Boortz says in the April 17 program notes on his Web site.

Other commentators have expressed similar thoughts, and gun advocacy groups have suggested that if students and staff had been allowed to carry arms at Tech, someone might have stopped Cho before he killed so many.

Boortz, a libertarian, expanded his question into a larger "wussification of America" theme and said the political left had indoctrinated young people to be passive.

By April 19, Boortz was saying he had expressed his point inappropriately. But he continued to say students' response should be discussed. Boortz's online notes from last week wonder, "Did the relentless attack on individualism by the left play a role? ... Were there students in those classrooms who had been indoctrinated since grade school that you do not retaliate when attacked at school?"

"His characterization of the victims is just outrageous," Shannon said Monday, adding that he had heard complaints from constituents about Boortz. "We're asking radio stations to assume some responsibility for the public good."

No one at WFIR in Roanoke or WFNR in Radford, the stations in the Roanoke and New River valleys that carry Boortz, could be contacted late Monday. No one at Boortz's Atlanta offices could be contacted either.

But Bill Wyatt, owner of Martinsville Media, which carries Boortz on WMVA, one of three stations the company owns, said he had yet to hear a listener complain about the comments.

Wyatt said he had been contacted by representatives of a national campaign to boycott Boortz.

The comments about Tech were "over the top," Wyatt said. "But I listened to two straight hours of him profusely apologizing the next day."

As for the letter from the delegates, which he had not yet received, "What about these people not accepting apology?" Wyatt asked.

Tom Novario, a Blacksburg resident who was playing Mozart on Monday night over Tech's student-run WUVT-FM, which does not carry Boortz's show, said Boortz's comments didn't jibe with his understanding of how the shootings occurred.

"There was no chance to confront the gunman, The whole thing was he was dipping in and out of classrooms," Novario said.

As for calls to drop Boortz' show, Novario said, "If he keeps talking like this, what's the point?

"Nobody's going to listen to him anyhow."