It is fun to talk about hypothetical responses to individual disasters, to even make up laws that might fight the kind of movie plot threats generated by those who are more interested in excuses to violate basic rights than to promote safety.
But lets be honest. Sometimes if we want to save lives, we do have to take drastic action. We have to work outside the accepted norms, and accepted risks and say, hey, we have had enough.
It appears 9 kids are dead. Once again it appears that, like Adam Lanza, the guns were taken from a family arsenal. Like so many conservatives and progressives out there, I am looking at you Vermont and Washington state, our chickenshit governor is in denial about the fact that guns kill people, and want to maybe pass laws that treat this particular threat, and does not really solve the problem. Maybe if we just put parents in jail that do not lock up the guns, we will solve the problem!
Despite the throwing around of the AR-15 moniker, there is little reporting that anything more than a shotgun and handgun were used. Many people who want to protect their houses have a shotgun because they are deadly, indiscriminate, and effective for someone who does not have the skills to use a gun. So we ban AR-15 which means that maybe we don’t have someone killing from a hundred yards away, but we see that a dedicated shooter does not need an machine gun, as we used to say.
A long time ago Texas had a hero in a major leadership position named Jim Hightower. He wrote a book, that while extreme, has a good point. The only things in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos.
So we either need to work a gun ban, or accept these occasional massacres as a tribute to our deities. Many cultures sacrifice children to their beliefs, and there is not necessarily any shame in it. What is shameful is denying that we are doing so.