[latefordinner]

If given the choice, I would rather live in a society without guns (voluntarily without guns), but if I'm going to live in one with guns I'd prefer that they be spread around and not concentrated in the hands of a few. Gun control is about as stupid as any other type of prohibition.

That being said, I think the 2nd Amendment defense often latched onto is basically irrelevant. The 2nd Amendment had less to do with the right to have guns, than the right to protect yourself against a dictatorial government and the ability to overthrow that government, violently if necessary.

Which stops making sense when the government has apache helicopters and tanks and you have a couple handguns.

You will know the extent that a resistance movement is threatening the power of the corporate plutocracy by the extent of the violence and repression used by the State against them.

--

back on track: any hand-wringing in retrospect here is silly. We live in a world where we all have relatively easy access to technologies that can result in mass death. If i wanted to, I could come up with ten ways to kill over 50 people tomorrow and there is nothing that could be done to stop me. The technological death genie is already out of the bottle.

However, you can create social conditions that make such events unlikely, abnormal, and isolated tragedies rather than the opposite

(Though I'm waiting for the anti-immigration folks to jump on the "foreigners are evil" bandwagon since it seems likely the shooter was here on a student visa.)