Or to hold that mass high schools, institutions truly run by the inmates, are inevitable breeders of the kind of violence that stews in social isolation. Public figures variously lament, deplore, regret. President Bush, in his debut in such matters, condemned the shootings as an act of cowardice. Actually, these periodic bloody spasms aside, youth violence, particularly in schools, as been declining for years and has settled in at a relatively low level. A disturbed kid with a gun is going to do a whole lot more damage than a disturbed kid with a pea shooter or a sling-shot or any of the other armaments of the childhoods of yore.
Guns turn troubled children into lifelong convicts.
There are nearly 200 million firearms in this country. If you figure toddlers and folks in nursing homes probably are unarmed, that's about one each for everyone else. We have tons of laws relating to guns but no coherent system of control, and many of the strongest laws engage only after the damage has been done. There was a flutter toward sensible controls after the Columbine horror but the National Rifle Association and the rest of the gun lobby, briefly disoriented, soon righted themselves and had pliant politicians kowtowing to the gun once again. The Colorado legislature wouldn't even plug the gun-show loophole that armed the Columbine shooters.