This guy killed 10: http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2010/05/man_with_cleaver_attacks_schoo.html

This inventive bastard killed 8 students and two teachers (and injured two dozen more) using a homemade flame thrower fashioned from an insecticide sprayer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne_school_massacre

And lets not forget the Bath school bombing, in which 45 children and teachers were killed by several improvised bombs made from farm explosives.  Sure, the stuff he used isn’t legal any more, but there is still plenty of stuff on a farm these days which would be just as devastating: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

Mass murders will mass murder.  They often use guns because they are convenient.  But if guns aren’t available, they’ll figure out something else.  Nobody goes “I’m so angry that I NEED to kill a bunch of kids, but I don’t want to put any effort into it so I won’t bother”.

Gun control – especially the “assault weapon” ban that everybody is screaming for right now – is security theater.  It makes you no safer than the asinine TSA liquid ban.  We HAD an assault weapon ban for a decade, and it did not affect gun crime statistics one bit.

Men also commit most killings in defense of home and innocents. 

http://gunowners.org/a12152012.htm

According to http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/syria

Syrians at last count held firearms at a rate less than 1/20th that of Americans. For all practical intents and purposes they were “disarmed.”

Firearms ownership rates, from the same site:

Syria: 3.9/100 pop.
Libya: 15.5/100
Australia: 15/100
UK: 6.7/100
US: 88.8/100

Also, if you believe the SWAT-team scenario you describe would be the case, it basically buttresses the paranoid fantasies of the gun-loony right-wingers.

By your reasoning, why bother with police corps? After all, they fundamentally do the same job the army does in occupied countries, so might as well just use the army “internally”.

Reality is not a mathematical equation, you can’t just abstract away.

Exactly because it has such great societal value, reducing access would result in a net loss for society at large, both in logistical and educational terms. Children would learn that their own communities are naturally “bad”, that you’re supposed to live your life in a bunker; it’s the sort of environment that you already find “in da ghetto”, and we already know what sort of educational development it “fosters”.

Security is a trade-off, and militarizing schools is just not worth the price.

And no, it doesn’t fucking matter and you’re not a humorless pedant to correct a satirical news site for possibly getting a small detail wrong in this case – you’re just a horrible person.

As the saying goes, try killing 26 people with a knife. 

No, it doesn’t tell us all.  It does, however, tell us something critically important.  The passage of time does not alter human nature.  There have always been nutjobs willing to hurt innocents for no rational reason.  They can use all sorts of tools, from guns to planes to gasoline to cars to fertilizer.  The tools used and their availability, legally or otherwise, simply don’t factor into the equation.  Nutjobs can hurt lots of people if they make up their mind to do so.  Such has been true for the last few thousand years and will remain true until our species is extinct.  I have abandoned hope that we’ll grow out of this shit.

In this case, the shooter used some tools I, personally, love and he used them to destroy lives I, personally, find more precious than most.  My biases are thus laid bare and you may feel free to mock my grief on that basis.  I don’t care.  I realize I made a mistake by partially sobering up this morning so I’m climbing back into a bottle for the next few days.  The headline, “Fuck Everything”, fits both this story and my attitude better than any I’ve ever read. 

Seriously, if you don’t see how the gun control debate threatens the perceived “power” of gun owners, I feel sorry for you.

Guns are a weapon of power. Any idiot can easily control lives of others by owning one. There are very few other items one can possess that can give someone that sense of power. 

This was a tragedy to be sure, but it is a minor one.  A fuck-ton more children were killed on that same day and same hour than those 20 white kids.  Granted, I know they are white and so worth at least 5 not-normal children, but still.  Even in terms of things that can kill white people, surprise mass shooting are VASTLY less likely to kill your kids than your pool, choking on your food, or getting struck by lightening.

So, how can we prevent 20 white kids from dying in the future?  Use more lightening roads, don’t own a pool, and make sure you know how to do the Heimlich maneuver.  If you are indifferent on the color of the kids that we want to stop from dying, you could probably just sent one month of your pay check to someplace poor, or stop dropping bombs on people.

It is sad how much energy we can waste on this while utterly ignoring the rest of the world.  How the fuck someone who wasn’t personally involved gets all teary eyed at 20 random kids dying, yet somehow functions perfectly well knowing that the US kicking over Iraq’s government killed a few hundred thousand and displaced millions is completely and utterly beyond me.

Take the gun in your closet out, kill a soldier, take his stuff.  Use that stuff to kill other soldiers and take *their* stuff.  Lather, rinse, repeat, until you have enough materiel to support an actual insurgency.

The AR-15 is a semi-automatic weapon – it only fires one bullet per pull of the trigger (though someone with a little experience can pull the trigger repeatedly with some speed). It is usually  chambered for what is basically a .223-caliber round.  Where I’m headed with this is: that gun (in various calibers) is used for hunting by quite a lot of people for small game because it’s accurate and relatively powerful for a smaller round.  Go Google “ar-15 hunting” and see for yourself.

I have no particular dog in this fight; I’m a gun owner, but loathe the paranoid right-wing gun culture.  But I think if you’re going to have a discussion on a subject with some technical aspects (i.e. guns), it’s vital to have a passing grasp of said aspects.

And while mass-killings without firearms do occur, they tend to have much lower death rates. Two I know of in Japan were the Osaka school massacre in 2001 and the Akihabara massacre in 2008. If either of these people had access to guns, far more people would be dead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre

simply because: “governments” now have far heavier firepower and other methods of oppression than the relative peashooters that civilians have in the form of guns.