Better than wishing that guy had killed just himself instead of all those people?

As to firearms in a college classroom, I was at a debate — on, interestingly enough, whether students at the U of M should be prevented from carrying firearms for their own protection while at the U — at a college classroom the U of M, last year. I know that at least fifteen of the people attending the debate were (lawfully) carrying, and I know that the head debater from the antigun group knew that there were folks carrying, too*; it didn’t stop her from interrupting her debating opponent and behaving with other mild rudeness, and, unsurprisingly, the only thing that was shot her way or threatened to be shot her way were some irritated glances. (She obviously wasn’t worried about the prospect for gunfire; she brought her young child with her.)

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* One of the antigun folks had attempted to get the U police to interfere with that; the U police were conspicuous by their absence, presumably doing something rather more useful.

I have and so have all hunters and gun owners.

Semiautomatic fire is not distinguishable by sound from revolver fire.

I don’t really understand your comment about gunshots sounding like firecrackers. They do a bit at some distances, but I do not think most gun owners would be fooled for long. Do you say this with reference to a string of firecrackers and the rapidity of the ‘bangs’? If so, and if I couple that with your question about recognizing semiautomatic fire, I question whether you are confusing automatic and semiautomatic.

Semi-auto fire is not necessarily rapid. When I shoot my semi-autos I usually shoot quite slowly.

I have been shooting handguns for 44 years. I am right handed and a ‘good’ shot. It would be very difficult for me to repeatedly or rapidly shoot accurately beyond 50-75 feet. Handguns are inherently inaccurate and semi-autos even more so. I could not shoot accurately at all with my left hand. If I tried to shoot with both left and right hands at the same time I would likely lose even more accuracy in my right handed shooting. Shooting at a moving target is at least an order of magnitude more difficult.

People think that with repeated or multiple fire, as in machine guns or shotguns, there is bound to be a hit. It just is not so. Consider the many game birds that fly through a cloud of shot. Consider the ratio of ammunition expenditure to hits in war. 100 to 1? 1000 to 1? Consider the mathematics of the thing. A handgun shot is a tube of less than 100 feet about 9mm in diameter that exists for less than 1/10 of a second. Do not believe your TV. Shooting someone from a distance is a very chancy thing.

If someone were shouting at me, running at me and throwing things at me I would be hopelessly inaccurate, particularly if I were to try shooting with both hands, from the hip, Hollywood style.

Had a sufficiently large group of people been able to coordinate to swarm Cho, while yelling and throwing things, they would have succeeded. Even more so had they been armed, or had good throwing objects.

I think the following are reasonable questions:
1. Should schoolrooms have arms in them at all or should all use of force be abjured.
2. If yes, should the arms be deadly, or should some lower intensity armaments be made permanently available. Everything from bows and arrows through steel ball slingshots down to a stack of baseballs could be a weapon.
3. Should schoolrooms have defensive items in them? Body armor, vests, shields, flash-bangs, tear gas?
4. Should students be taught how and when to coordinate defensive attack and tested periodically with drills.

I’m not sure I like the idea of a firearm in a schoolroom. I see no harm in a stack of elastic powered hunting slingshots and a jar of 1 inch steel balls or some throwable objects. Even baseballs.

I seriously object to my children being completely defenseless. We know the state will not and can not defend us very well as it is a great, gross, blundering, blunt instrument.

It may be right to say the VT students acted correctly in their circumstances, but it is not enough. We must consider those ‘circumstances’ very carefully.

But . . . is it at least worth considering the possibility that in this or another potentially horrible situation folks having thought about it in advance led them to make what turned out to have been and might in principle have also been a good series of decisions?

In response to your last, Meryl, I do think that responsible adults should think about — and discuss with both kids and other responsible adults — what to do in all sorts of unlikely circumstances. Nobody has ever tried to force either of my kids into a car, for example — but it is something that we’ve discussed, most recently after one of my carry permit students shared that his college-age daughter and a friend had been the subjects of an attempted abduction… his daughter fought back, and was left seriously beaten up on the sidewalk; her friend complied, and was hurt rather more seriously over an extended period of time.

Jim, I don’t think Joel is on the “They should have fought harder” bandwagon. He’s just asking us to think about ways we might be able to prepare people for things like this in the future.

Mind you, I think there’s simply no realistic way to prepare for it, and I don’t see colleges offering “Columbine Prevention 101″ courses, but I don’t think that’s what Joel is getting at, either.

Let’s lower things a notch, please.

Well, except I wish that Cho had done that, too. But he was fucking nuts on top of everything else. Apparently, not nuts enough to kill just himself, though.

Sure. There might have been a better result if that freak had started off by putting the barrel of his gun against the roof of his mouth and pulling the trigger.