This is (poorly) written from the context of a local boring, suburban, professional, often left/libertarian-leaning middle aged dad who happens to have been safely around guns and gun culture from a very early age.

@3: I'm not sure I understand this, unless you're saying it just for effect? Having a trained, armed person (like maybe that hardcore principal who tried to stop the shooter with her bare hands?) there to counteract some guy bent on shooting the place up at least helps the odds. It certainly doesn't guarantee a good outcome (nothing does) but I'd much prefer it to my kids sitting there cowering and waiting...

@5: I think everyone is all for prevention, but a) you can't prevent crazy all the time and b) there are something like a quarter billion guns in this country that we know about. There's no magic wand you can wave that deals with a) and/or b) instantly, but you can take steps to improve the survival odds of unprotected people starting literally right now. If you want to work on a) and b) I'm all for it, but are you suggesting we and our kids should just sit around unprotected in the meantime?

@6: With all due respect, this just isn't true. You are vastly overestimating the power of what you're calling an "assault rifle," (I'm making the leap here that you're thinking of a .223 AR-15 semi-auto) and vastly underestimating the power of a well utilized semi-auto handgun. A couple of well placed shots with hollowpoints (a technique that responsible, defense-minded people practice, vs spraying shots wildly like crazed killers) could have worked wonders here. Again, no guarantees, but the odds would have been better.

@22: Setting aside the details of how to implement better local school security, if my napkin math is right federal outlays last year were ~$3,800 billion, so $11 billion would be something like three tenths of one percent. Not nothing, but manageable if we were serious. Some suggestions on where to find the money - we could stop: the Afghanistan war, massively expensive fighter jets built to fight an enemy who no longer exists, hassling pot smokers nationwide, hassling people who come to the US to work their asses off, massive payouts to giant corporations to subsidize shit that makes us fat and unhealthy, etc etc..

@33: I think the point is that, if you're serious, you'd do an assessment at each location and structure accordingly - you do not need to have TSA-style metal detectors (which don't work anyway) and a prison-style atmosphere to, again, *improve the odds* of avoiding nutjobs like this. I have background more in digital security and am no expert in physical security, but at my daughter's elementary school I would think that a combination of discreet cameras at the entrances, swipe-card locked entry, and a shift officer from the local PD or professional security who pays attention to the above and can respond immediately to problems would suffice (plus, and I am not making this up, the kids swarm the PD guys when they do career day - no joke). I would also note that probably 80% of the parents of the kids in this school who go to work each day use essentially this exact system at their place of employment.

@34: This gets into very sensitive and probably dangerous ground for the sake of this discussion, but this is where normal citizens with concealed weapons, and criminals with a high degree of ambiguity as to where it's safe to operate come into play. "Gun free zones" really do seem to me like an advertisement for a nutjob looking to be famous like this - they just do. Getting rid of them seems like it's the same reasoning that goes into people leaving ADT signs on their lawns even if there's no alarm running - you're introducing ambiguity into the mind of someone looking to do harm. Even if you don't want guns in the schools - tell the insane that you reserve the right to have armed individuals onsite at any time.

Which brings up another sticky point - I guarantee you, reader, that you come into contact with many, many more conscientious armed people in the course of a week than you'd ever realize - it's just the way it is. I know a lot of other boring douchebags like myself who take the security of our families and neighbors extremely seriously and are willing to put in the time, money and training to make sure that we (broken record) improve the odds of avoiding bad people with bad intentions. THE LAST THING WE WANT TO DO IS SHOOT ANYBODY, EVER. If someone ever gets into my house when my family is here, the steps are: get everyone to the hiding place, dial 911, get the gun out of the safe, and wait for the cavalry. Bad Guy, take any material crap you want, I can replace it. However, if you even remotely threaten the wellbeing of my family by coming near the hiding spot, I'm going to do my utmost to make sure you're fucked. I can't do that with pepper spray, a baseball bat or "mental health treatment." And if the son of a bitch has an AR-15, I'm not liking my odds if I have a single shot duck gun.

And for better or worse, those assholes are going to have guns for the rest of all of our lifetimes. If you think you can confiscate 250,000,000 guns, look how successful drug prohibition has been. I'm just not going to stop protecting my family as a goodwill gesture, and there are tens of millions of people like me. Criminals exist, they can get guns and threaten us - we didn't make up the situation, but that's the way it is.

This is too long so I'll finish up - I'll try not to sound condescending here, but all of you advocating for better gun control policy owe it to yourselves to be better educated about how guns work. I get it - people want to do something, but if possible you should try to emphasize the stuff that actually might matter. An "assault weapons ban" will do almost precisely nothing - they are just rifles, they look scary to you but they are no different functionally than what you think of as a hunting rifle, and in most cases are significantly less powerful - honestly. Googling "rifle ballistics" and 10 minutes of reading will clear this up.

High capacity magazines - again, it may feel good, but the practical effect is zero. For one thing - there are tens of million in circulation - criminals will have access to them, or they will make them. For another thing - do you have any sense of how much time it takes to fire 30 rounds from one 30 rd. mag vs 30 rounds from three 10 rd. ones? I'd say maybe 20 seconds, total, for someone who practiced a couple dozen times. It's meaningless, except that it antagonizes people like me and makes us much less likely to support your cause because it is so perfectly mindless and easy to rally around and would have absolutely no safety effect whatsoever.

I hope this contributes something, and I wish there were some real way to counter the stereotypes here about how anyone who takes guns seriously is a mindless, toothless redneck one-note asshole. For any of you Stranger writers - I would make a serious offer to teach you some of the above about how guns actually work (including a trip to the shooting range on me) so that you can speak from a position of knowledge when you talk about "doing something," even if I disagree with what you ultimately advocate. Let me know...