20k foot view of school shooting

[mackthefork]

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3. There is no "gun free area" in areas with adequate police protection.

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You can't honestly think this is true? There are millions of areas where it will take the police several minutes to respond while you are pretty much free to go on a rampage as much as you want until they get there (I don't think this is a good thing -- but unless you want to pay 100% taxes there is no way around it other than letting law-abiding citizens carry their own guns for protection).

True, we have decent police protection that prevents hundreds or thousands of people from being killed in a shootout, but for a motivated individual, the situation like we saw in VT would be fairly easy to repeat (and I am not trying to take away from the tragedy here -- I think it is tragic, but there is just not an easy solution to this).



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Just for some statistics, here in the UK the total number of deaths (recorded obv) from firearms injuries in the 10 years 1994-2003 was 2,270 the fairly draconian gun control rules brought in after Dunblane in 1997 seem to be having the effect of saving 100-150 lives a year, guns have never been as popular here as in the US.

This statistics have been taken from an anti-gun source, but appear to have been read out in the UK parliament at some point so they should be accurate.

I understand there were ~29,500 deaths (EDIT 17,000 suicides) from firearms injuries in the USA in 2001 alone, from a population 5 times bigger than ours.

Basically you are talking about 250-300 thousand people getting killed every 10 years as a price for the right to bear arms, I don't think it's worth it, maybe you do. If I missed anything or oversimplified then my apologies.

Regards Mack