The fevered minds of the Right have once again regurgitated the aged fallacy of a handgun preventing a tragedy. This idea has been around for at least twenty years, its most notorious iteration in an awful Hollywood movie about a grieving widower pushing for an unrestricted weapons law after his wife was killed in a restaurant massacre - sorry, the movie was so bad, I forgot its title. Just another Hollywood fantasy, not reality.
An object, whether it is a gun or a cell phone or a car, won't make you safe. In fact, an equally valid argument can be made for deadbolt locks. One good thing about having been adjunct faculty for a large number of colleges, I know their policies on classrooms. Two of the colleges I taught at kept their classrooms locked unless in use (not for fear of violence, these schools had gone high tech and had scads of expensive A/V equipment in each room); over half the colleges had working locks on the doors. Faculty were issued keys. Even keys weren't needed on most of the doors, since there was a toggle or thumb latch for the deadbolts on the inside of the door. I know the some of the older buildings at Kansas State University had locks, an instructor once locked me out of his classroom (he didn't want student presentations disturbed by late arrivals - another reason I hated Oral Communications 101).
Guns aren't crucifixes in a vampire movie. Heavily armed policemen have been killed, sometimes without even drawing their weapons or getting a shot off. We've seen it happen. Police dash cameras have recorded dozens of these incidents. Perhaps the most gruesome is the video showing a police officer being taken out by an unarmed man using only his fists (thankfully the officer survived). We've seen it happen to heavily armed soldiers in war zones. To say a handgun would have stopped the Virginia Tech massacre is the worst kind of wishful thinking. To use this fantasy as the basis for government policy is ludicrous.
Not all colleges have locks on classroom doors. Not all issue keys to faculty or have deadbolt latches. Not all students carry cell phones or laptops or Blackberrys to class. Not all students are equally observant of their surroundings. Each one of these might have prevented the massacre. Might not. Locks might have saved some lives, might not. This evil man would have adjusted his plans to take classroom locks into account. Might have made it worse. A massive shootout with untrained students might have killed more people.
We do know how lives were saved. Liviu Librescu used his devotion to life and his quick mind to save his students. Derek O’Dell, Trey Perkins, and others whose names I don't yet know used their minds to save their lives and the lives of others. Guns, locks, cell phones, email, they're all gimmicks. An alert and attentive mind is the best defense against evil. The proof is before us.