Yet another school shooting rampage, and yet again the Brady Campaign can't resist exploiting the tragedy to push their gun ban agenda, regardless of whether whatever "common sense" restriction is currently fashionable with them would have done anything at all to prevent the tragedy.
http://www.bradycampaign.org/
Ahhh, it's a simple problem, just place strict limitations on who can obtain dangerous weapons to make it harder for "the wrong person to get deadly weapons". The recent Dawson College shootings in Canada suggest that it may not be so simple to determine who "the wrong person" is; the perpetrator, Kimveer Gill, apparently passed whatever qualifications were required to buy and register the Beretta Storm carbine he used (a "restricted" weapon in Canada). http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Looking beyond idealistic "It was committed with guns, so stricter gun laws will magically stop any event such as this from ever happening again" reasoning pushed by the Bradys, one wonders what can be done.
Perhaps instead of wasting money on teaching abstinence or how to take a test er, uhh, I mean how to make schools accountable so that no child gets left behind, we should be giving teachers and students practical exercises in how to take out a lone gunman. The children outnumber the attacker, and would be small, fast targets - they would be very hard to hit, especially if they are throwing textbooks at the guy and charging at him swinging chairs or other heavy objects. If the teacher and every one of the students grabbed something and converged on the guy from different directions, collectively they should be able to beat the guy senseless. Yes, most likely one or two would be shot and injured, but their chances of survival would be much better than when being shot while tied up in a line.
Looking back to the attacks on 11 SEP 01, the attacks worked for the first three planes because airline personnel had been trained to cooperate with hijackers, try to follow their directions so no one gets hurt while they negotiate for whatever it is the want, and generally let them have control of the plane. As soon as it became clear that this approach did not have the desired effect, and the passengers resisted the hijackers, this mode of attack failed. If drawing a parallel is valid (admittedly a very big IF), then teachers and students should be taught to assume that some gunman stomping into their classroom and waving a gun around to take control wants to kill them, and most likely himself, and that their best chance of survival is to resist. Have the attackers in any of these school shooting rampages held hostages in hopes of obtaining their demands? It seems that most of them are disgruntled sociopaths who are beyond reasoning and who are best disposed of as quickly as possible.