Yes, guns don't kill people. Bullets kill people :)
[WS:] Funny. But you are barking at a wrong tree, Carl.
The point that I was making is that focus on guns is an attempt to fetishize the issue over which we as society have little control. The guns nuts, as evidenced by Doug's earlier posting, seem to believe that having the gun fetish would do something to stop the carnage. The gun opponents seem to believe that banning the gun fetish would do something to stop the carnage. Both arguments have some superficial believability - it is true that if someone that classroom had a concealed weapon, he/she might have used it to incapacitate the perp and thus fewer people would have died. It is also true that if the access to guns were restricted, fewer psychos could get them and thus fewer people would die.
But the fact of the matter is that none of the measures would actually stop these tragedies. We need to realize that these are random events, not trends - so thinking of them as manipulating one variable (access to guns) to change values on another variable (number of people killed) simply does not apply here. Each of those occurrences are idiosyncratic events carried out by deranged individuals - they are totally unpredictable, and thus difficult to control. You can reduce the number of weapons many-fold, but as long as a psycho can put his paws on one of them - you will have the exact same outcome. Conversely, you can issue concealed weapon permits many fold, but if the psycho takes everyone by surprise - which is usually the case - he can kill many people before he is taken out.
The reason why we thing think about these "solutions" (i.e. banning or permitting weapons) is that we find random attacks by psychos extremely threatening, yet we do not really know how to stop them. Therefore we resort to magic to get a peace of mind that 'something can be done." In the same way, the governments devise contingency plans for containing nuclear disasters (either accidental or war-related) or catastrophic oil spills, even though it is obvious that once the thing goes off, there is not much that can be done to avert the impending doom. But we want to keep out peace of mind, so we convince ourselves that we can do something by going through contingency plans, drill rituals, banning or acquiring fetishes etc. We are not that much different from prehistoric societies in that respect.
One more thing - the only effective means of containing - but not eliminating - these kinds of incidents is effective profiling of potential perps and self-defense training. The profiling for certain kinds of offences (e.g. child abuse) is already in place as every health or education professional in most states is a "mandated reporter" i.e. has a legal obligation to report all suspected cases of child abuse, whether substantiated or not. And it works. Self-defense training - which is different from mere owning gun fetishes as the gun nuts stipulate - involve a variety of skills of neutralizing dangerous individuals by any means - from persuasion, to incapacitation by various means.
Wojtek