Aspects of the problem

There were armed guards on duty at Columbine, Fort Hood, and Virginia Tech.   Once a loonie is inside the school with an automatic weapon, being able to eventually kill him (or her, must be politically correct) just reduces the eventual body count.  Most of them kill themselves, anyhow, when they're about to run out of ammo.

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Newspapers don't give a lot of space to the copycat aspect of these tragedies.  What kind of a person would read about a school massacre and say, "God, wouldn't that be cool?"

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A question that answers itself.

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Schools actually are pretty safe, statistically.  Only two percent of homicides of school-age children occur in school.  Dear old Dad is more likely to kill you than some wacko off the street.

Which is no answer.

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If I were a parent, I'm not sure what I would do.  The argument that school shootings are really very rare might not convince me – a lot of our fears are irrational, but nevertheless real.  (Real as pi, you might say.)  A private school is about six grand a year.  Home schooling is even more dear, in a different currency.  But those venues do buy your children security.

A lot of magical thinking, or lazy thinking, obscures the problem.   "If all teachers were armed, the problem would go away" . . . but aren't there one or two teachers in your memory who were scary enough armed with just a ruler?  And don't you remember a couple of hard guys who had to rebel against the teacher no matter what?   Their testosterone is not going away just because the State has raised the ante.  ("Dr. Haldeman talks big but he's just a pussy . . . he'd never use that gun . . . watch this . . . . ")

Of course enveloping the whole problem is the genie that will never go back into the bottle:  America is saturated with guns and ammunition, and no politician who tries to take them away stays employed.

It's the snake eating its own tail, but growing so fast it will never be consumed.

Joe

(Who, forgive me for repeating this, does have the victim's right to an opinion, having been shot both in combat and as a civilian.)