On December 11, 2012, I was sitting in my living room watching TV when somebody tried to break into my home. Unable to get to a telephone without making myself a target trough a window, I grabbed my trusty M1 carbine and waited in the shadows of my dining room for the burglar to break in. Fortunately, he decided not to try to break the locked glass door, or the heavy oak door in back of that, and went away. I didn't hear of any burglaries on the news, so maybe he just gave up. I hope so. I have heard that people who own guns are compensating for something. In my case, I was compensating for the fact that I was a 72-year-old cripple in a town where the average times it takes for a young, healthy burglar to break in is ten seconds and the average time for a police response to a call for help is around 17 minutes. Fortunately, I have never lost a gunfight! I wasn't absolutely positive he would have tried to do me harm, but if he had overcome all the security and protective measures I have installed, I was willing to bet his life on it. Fortunately, it didn't come to that.

I am also fortunate that I don't live in a school. Otherwise I would have been defenseless against an armed intruder. The Gun-Free School Zones Act (GFSZA), introduced in the U.S. Senate in 1990 by Senator Joe Biden and signed by President George H.W. Bush, prohibits any "unauthorized individual" from knowingly possessing a loaded or unsecured firearm "moved in interstate commerce" at a place that the individual knows, or has reasonable cause to believe, is a school zone. It applies to public, private, and parochial elementary schools and high schools, and to non-private property within 1000 feet of them. It provides that the states and their political subdivisions may issue licenses that exempt the licensed individuals from the prohibition.

Three days later, twenty children and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut weren't so fortunate. They were shot dead by 20-year-old Adam Peter Lanza, victims of the belief that there is some virtue in not being able to defend oneself against vicious criminals. Gun control works! Guns were outlawed at Sandy Hook; only the outlaw had a gun!

Actually, it was against the law for him to have a gun - especially in a school. He had one anyway, because he was an outlaw. Outlaws don't give a crap about laws! That's what makes them outlaws! The Bushmaster XM-15 rifle he used was reportedly registered to his mother. He stole the rifle, then shot and killed his mother as she lay sleeping. He drove to the school in her car where the students and faculty were protected by, among other equally ineffective things, their anti-gun policy and a supposedly locked glass door that had, in fact, been propped open. Ignoring both, Adam Lanza entered the school, and began killing people at the rate of one every eleven seconds. None of those people had guns.

Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach heard gunshots, rushed to their source, and, completely unarmed, confronted Lanza. He shot them both dead. Natalie Hammond, a lead teacher in the meeting room, pressed her body against the door to keep Lanza from entering. She was unarmed as well. Lanza shot her through the door.

In a first-grade classroom, Lanza shot and killed unarmed teacher Lauren Rousseau. Then he methodically shot and killed all the children in the room except one little girl who played dead, along with all the other children in the room and Ms. Rousseau, who actually were. None of them were armed.

Victoria Soto, another unarmed first-grade teacher, attempted to hide several children in a closet and cupboards. Several of the frightened children came out of their hiding place and tried to run for safety. None of them had guns. Lanza killed them all. Soto threw herself in front of the students to protect them. Lanza shot and killed her, too. While he was thus occupied, her other students escaped. Without a weapon of any kind, Anne Marie Murphy heroically shielded six-year-old Dylan Hockley with her body. Lanza shot through her, killing them both. Rachel D'Avino, a special-needs teacher, attempted to protect her charges with nothing but her exemplary courage. Lanza killed her, too.

School nurse Sarah Cox, unable to defend herself, hid under a desk in her office. School secretary Barbara Halstead hid in a first-aid supply closet, equally defenseless. First grade teacher Kaitlin Roig hid her students in a bathroom and barricaded the door. Librarians Yvonne Cech and Maryann Jacob hid their children in a storage room and barricaded the door with a filing cabinet. Music teacher Maryrose Kristopik barricaded her fourth-graders in a tiny supply closet during the rampage. Lanza arrived moments later, pounding and yelling "Let me in," while the students in Kristopik's class quietly hid inside. Teacher Abbey Clements pulled two third-graders from the hallway into her classroom, where they were unable to do anything except hide and pray. Laura Feinstein, a reading specialist, hid her students under desks for approximately 40 minutes. Finally, the police arrived. By then, there was nobody to protect; they were all dead!

Ironically, the only person who did anything effective to stop the slaughter was Adam Lanza himself. Faced with the prospect of encountering people who actually had guns, the police, he killed himself - with a gun. The police didn't have to use theirs; the fact that they had them was sufficient. Most of the dead were first-graders, 14 in one room and 6 in another. The six adults were all women. None of them carried a gun. Guns are outlawed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Only the outlaw had a gun!

By all accounts, Newtown police dispatch first requested officers on the scene around 9:35 AM. Their arrival time was reported to have been between 11 and 18 minutes; Adam Lanza was dead in five. Still, he had more than enough time to murder all those people, even if he had used a bolt action rifle instead of a semi-automatic. It is reported that he actually fired between only 50 and 100 rounds, enough to shoot all his targets between two and four times. Six year old Noah Pozner sustained 11 gunshot wounds, most of them probably after he had already died! The teachers didn't fire any rounds at all; they didn't even have guns! Guns are outlawed at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The people of Newtown, Connecticut, and much of the rest of the Nation, are still in denial, the second stage of grief after shock. Nobody that I know has suggested that they freely chose knowingly to allow a tragedy like this to happen by making sure only outlaws had guns. They probably had the best of intentions, but the facts are clear: everyone obeyed the laws except Adam Lanza, and that's what got them all killed. Unable legally to obtain a firearm, he stole those of his mother, murdered her, drove to Sandy Hook school, and murdered twenty six victims who did nothing whatever to stop him. Adam Lanza killed himself. The people who arranged for the victims not to have the ability to do anything except die are still wrestling with their guilt. The next stage of grief is negotiation. New Haven attorney Irving Pinsky seemed to think that a negotiated settlement of 100 million dollars as penance from the voter/taxpayers of Connecticut (including the parents of all the dead kids) for failing to "take steps to protect the minor children" ($5 million per child) was about right. (He has since withdrawn this action.)

Faced with their absolute failure to protect the vulnerable Sandy Hook school children, the local police promised a "full investigation," including a declaration to "examine every bullet," as if that would help, somehow. They seem to be trying to do something now to resolve the tragedy then, given that the people responsible for the safety of those children chose to do nothing effective themselves. I wish them well. The police don't have anything to feel guilty about; they came as fast as they could. It just wasn't fast enough. Too bad!

A very large number of people, unable to face the fact that gun control makes it easier, not harder, for criminals to murder little children, have proposed "tougher gun control laws." Senator Dianne Feinstein is one of them. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is another. Neither has ever served in the military or police. Their opinions are based on theory, not practice. In theory there is no difference. In practice, there is! They are willing to sacrifice the lives of other people's little children to the criminally irresponsible belief that there is not!

I am surprised at the number of people who want "military style weapons" to be banned so that child murderers will find it easier to choose weapons designed virtually to guarantee killing an animal the size of a 14-point buck! Military weapons are designed preferentially to wound, not kill! If Adam Lanza had used a hunting rifle and ammunition, there wouldn't have been 26 dead people at Sandy Hook, there would have been parts of 27 dead people. Natalie Hammond would certainly have been killed. Of course, military-style rifles are designed to engage targets at 300 yards. This makes them much more deadly than handguns at close range, but purchases of handguns are restricted by current gun control laws, so the child shooters have to make do with the more lethal long guns. Some people, like Mike Bloomberg, want to outlaw high capacity magazines as they are in Washington, DC, so that the criminals, using "illegal" magazines, would be able to keep shooting while the people protecting the children would be forced to stop and reload.

The theory that more restrictions outlawing weapons will somehow eventually stop the outlaws from obtaining them may be comforting, but it flies directly in the face of extensive experience, not to mention common sense. We haven't been able to do that with marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine, and, believe me, we've tried! We tried so hard with alcohol that we outlawed it by a Constitutional Amendment, the 18th, on January 16, 1919. That turned out to be such a ghastly mistake that the 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st less than 15 years later. Indeed, the ability of the government to regulate alcohol, tobacco and firearms is rooted in the fact that they are all legal in the United States.

To be sure, there would be less gun violence if every single one of the firearms in the United States were to disappear, so that there would be no guns for outlaws to steal. If anybody knows how to make that happen, or even to reduce the percentage of firearms illegally possessed, please email me. Allowing only outlaws to have them doesn't work. Ask anybody in Sandy Hook!

The belief that there is some virtue in leaving innocent little children vulnerable to the predations of gun-toting killers is held by many with religious fervor, like belief in a 6000 year old universe or that Jesus spoke Shakespearean English. Internet discussions on the issue quickly degenerate into calling the other side names. "NRA" has become as despised among gun control advocates as "ACLU" among Protestants, and the term "gun enthusiast" is used the same way that the KKK uses the term "nigger." In one discussion, Sep Palin probably reached the depths of nonsensical meanness when he stated publicly that he thought National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre, who advocates having armed guards in all schools, looks like a child molester. (Are people with rimless glasses all child molesters?) Mr. Palin apparently thinks his kids would be much safer around adults who just let anyone who wants to shoot them, instead of one who advocates shooting back. On the same page, Enrique Rea brought up the subject of whether Mr. LaPierre was offering to pay for the armed guards he advocated. The estimated cost of arming US schools is about two billion dollars, 45% of an aircraft carrier, or the price of three packs of cigarettes for every worker in the United States. Connecticut's per capita share would be $22.8 million, less than 1/4 of what Mr. Pinsky was asking. Would the good citizens of Connecticut prefer to pay $100 million to be sorry or $22.8 million to be safe? What would Mr. Pinsky have received in either case? What did he plan to do with his money?

My personal opinion is that the gun control advocates are so vehemently devoted to leaving little children defenseless because if they are shown to be wrong, those people who outlawed guns at Sandy Hook (and other places), and those who aid, vote for, or advocate that, have the blood of those innocent children on their hands! Nobody wants to admit that, even if it is irrefutably true!

The argument that guns kill people (30,896 annually at last count, 2006,) is hardly relevant. Motor vehicles kill about 33,000 people every year, but who is lobbying for tougher federal motor vehicle control laws? Alcohol kills about 95,000 people in the United States each year, but nobody I know is lobbying for tougher alcohol control laws. And don't even get me started about tobacco! The best defense against getting killed by a bad driver in a car is being a good driver in another car, not a pedestrian. It's the same with firearms.

There seems to be general agreement that our nation should "do something," but we've had enough experience with situations like these to bear the responsibility for not "doing something" already. Not five months earlier, James Eagan Holmes shot 70 people in a theater in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 of them. Although he had purchased the weapons he used legally, it has been against the law in Colorado for a long time to murder people. It is legal in Colorado to carry a firearm in public, yet the murderer was the only person in the theater known to have carried one. Why? Holmes was sentenced to 12 consecutive life sentences plus 3,183 years without the possibility of parole and is currently being fed, clothed, protected, cared for and housed, at taxpayer expense, as prisoner number 02350-122 at United States Penitentiary, Allenwood in Gregg Township, Union County, Pennsylvania. Does anyone think that will make everything all right again? Really?

About five years previously, Seung-Hui Cho, a senior-level undergraduate student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others in two separate attacks, approximately two hours apart, on the University campus. Cho, like Lanza, also committed suicide. Also like Lanza, he was able to shoot and kill anyone he chose, because none of his victims or bystanders was armed. Guns were outlawed at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Only the outlaw had a gun.

The actual reaction to the Sandy Hook shootings has been truly bizarre! Gun stores all over the Country have been selling guns, ammunition and other shooting paraphernalia so fast they have run out. Some gun store managers have made a big thing about not displaying the guns, but they haven't been melting them down for concrete reinforcing bars, either. In Los Angeles, California, a gun "buyback" program acquired over 2000 firearms, including two "rocket-propelled grenade launchers" that were in fact completely harmless metal tubes, in exchange for groceries. One has to wonder how much Angelino taxpayers paid for them. They were talking about "getting them off the street," but these didn't look like street guns to me. They looked like guns stolen from collections, such as the one from which Adam Lanza stole his. (Nobody checked to see if the people selling the guns actually owned them, so maybe Los Angeles is now encouraging people to steal guns as a way to make a living. Then the victims can depend only on the Los Angeles police or Sheriff's Department for defense if the gun thieves come back. Good luck with that, by the way!) As it turned out, numerous gun buyers showed up to buy (for considerably more money, and no background checks!) the classic guns the sellers wanted to exchange for cash. I tend to doubt that many criminals turned in any of their guns. It is not clear what, if any, benefit accrued to the unarmed taxpayers from all this. Hopefully, time will tell! (Or, perhaps, hopefully it will not!)

Naturally, an idea this stupid attracted the attention of some political candidates. Beto O'Rourke, former US Representative, unsuccessful candidate for the US Senate and failed Democratic Presidential wannabe, promised that he would use US tax money to "come after" privately owned weapons designed to "kill people," apparently allowing members of "well ordered militias" to "keep and bear" only Nerf Blasters and Super Soakers.

In Modesto, former Marine Corps private Greg Pusley showed up, completely unarmed, in somebody else's old sergeant's uniform, and stood around for most of the day guarding his balls with his hands (unlike real Marines, who stand guard with their hands behind them and are smart enough to know that people standing armed guard are, first of all, armed). Mr. Pusley was quoted as saying, "I don't need to be armed to do this. I don't have a fear in the world that if someone came here, I'd have the strength and the ability to protect them." Laura Fong, the principal at Hughson Elementary School, said it was a "very heartwarming thing" when the former Marine showed up and made those incredibly stupid remarks, and that his presence made her and the staff feel safer. One has to wonder how safe they would have felt if somebody had actually put to the test Mr. Pusley's bet about the outcome of being armed only with ideals in a gunfight. To my mind, the stakes were unacceptably high!

Bryan Fischer blamed the tragedy on the school not forcing all the kiddies to pray to his own personal god who, he claims, purposely allowed the tragedy to happen as a direct consequence. His repugnant, odious, petty, nasty, vindictive, little pusillanimous deity sounds suspiciously like the ancient Mayan god Yucatec. Does any sane person really think forcing the kiddies to pray to Yucatec is likely to make them bulletproof? Really? Does Mr. Fischer know what happened to the Mayans? I would be in favor of a law not allowing him to have access to sharp or otherwise dangerous objects, let alone guns! Personally, I don't think he should be allowed to run around loose unless he's supervised by somebody who carries one.

In various other places, police were assigned to guard the schools in the firm belief that making hall monitors out of highly trained law enforcement officers is a good idea. It has not been reported why they were previously on the streets in the first place if they weren't needed there!

Quick to use this catastrophe for political gain, President Obama appointed the Vice President to come up with a list of measures he could enact by Executive Order. None of them involve providing the same protection to the masses as his children receive in their schools. He seems to be targeting guns, not child killers. In actual fact, he hasn't actually accomplished anything to reduce the number of guns in circulation! According to a Congressional Research Service Report, published exactly one month before the Sandy Hook school shooting, The number of guns in circulation increased from one for every two residents during the Johnson Administration, to more than the population of the United States, one gun per person, for the first time, during his!

On the other hand, as Michelle Obama pointed out, for the President's most ardent supporters, life is not good. They are divided into a community that is just downright mean. They are guided by fear. They've become a society of cynics, sloths, and complacents, a population of struggling folks who are barely making it every day. They're just jammed up, and it's gotten worse over her lifetime. One of the distinguishing characteristics of that group is their tendency to shoot each other and, most recently, police officers. Making it harder for them to get guns may not be such a bad thing!

In an act of supreme irresponsibility, not to mention total disregard for people's right to privacy, the New York Journal News published an interactive map showing thousands of names and addresses of residents who have handgun permits. Reactions were swift and varied, decrying the possibility that the homes could become targets of gun thieves (who, presumably, don't mind stealing guns any more than they do shooting children), and that burglars could decide which homes to rob on the basis of which ones were (or were not) on the list. There was some concern about unarmed households whose occupants might be more vulnerable to armed criminals, or who might be offended by their armed neighbors, but I suspect that the armed neighbors probably won't care. I don't.

I believe that it is a non-issue. Owners of shotguns, deer rifles and Barrett M107A1 anti-vehicle rifles are not listed, and anyone who breaks into the home of someone wielding one of those is in for a really nasty surprise! Burglars may be reluctant to break into homes like mine where the owner is known to be armed, and has a history of winning gunfights in places like Korea and Vietnam. It will be interesting to see what, if any, responsibility the paper takes (or is required by a court to assume) when somebody gets killed because a bad guy used the list to decide whom to rob. Either way, I see a lawsuit a'brewin'! Those families who have chosen not to arm themselves can take comfort in their moral superiority if an armed burglar or child rapist breaks in and has his way. I regard the situation as an example of evolution in action.

Opposition to guns appears to me to be predicated on the belief that if there are absolutely no legal guns in society, criminals won't be able to get illegal ones. Criminals get illegal things all the time from Mexico (where estimates place illegal firearm possession at 99.67% and illegal use at 90%), so that argument is fallacious, at best. Even if the bad guys were somehow unable to get guns, they would still have access to acid, gasoline, various kinds of explosives, lighter fluid, broken glass and knives, all of which have been used against defenseless children in the United States and other countries. The best defense against bad guys with any deadly weapon is good guys with guns - just as the Founding Fathers realized! Experience with gun-toting bad guys in this country, including Sandy Hook, has proved this over and over again!

Maybe, instead of getting all hysterical and political about gun violence in the United States, we ought to take a look at the facts. The aforementioned report indicates that the average murder rate by guns in the United States since 1993 was 67.14%. This means that over two thirds of all murder victims were killed by guns. This is truly a disaster by any standard. That's the bad news!

The good news is that the situation has gotten at least marginally better. Both per capita murder rates and gun murder rates declined during the Clinton (42%/6%), and Obama (6%/6%) administrations. During the Bush administration, the per capita murder rate fell by 4% but the murder rate by firearms remained the same.

Yearly statistics are shown in the following table. An increase in number of victims per 100,000 residents is shown in red and a decrease in green. Colors of the percentages indicate a figure above the 19 year average of 67.14% in red and that below the national average in green.

What this says is that the per capita overall murder rate in the United States since the beginning of the Clinton Administration through the first three years of that of President Obama, has fallen by over 50%. The rate involving firearms had fallen by over 51%. Murder by firearm has remained pretty much the same, less than two percent difference in nineteen years. So the problem is not guns, people! It's not poverty, political parties, lack of diversity, restrictions on abortion, gay marriage, or affordable health care, either. It's murderers! DUH! My ideas about dealing with potential murderers are on record.

And speaking of records, According to 18 USC §922 (d), it is unlawful generally to sell or otherwise dispose of any firearm or ammunition to any person knowing or having reasonable cause to believe that such person:

(1) is under indictment for, or has been convicted in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;
(2) is a fugitive from justice;
(3) is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance;
(4) has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution;
(5) is an alien illegally or unlawfully in the United States; or has been admitted to the United States under a nonimmigrant visa;
(6) has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions;
(7) is a citizen of the United States who has renounced his citizenship;
(8) is subject to a properly issued restraining court order that explicitly prohibits physical violence;
(9) has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.

I would change "knowing or having reasonable cause to believe..." to "without reasonably having ascertained that the recipient is not a person who..." I believe that anyone in possession of a firearm or ammunition should be legally responsible to make reasonably sure that someone who he allows to have it is not going to use it for lawlessness, including suicide. This would make whoever has the weapon responsible, not the one who wants to have it. Also, the kind of weapon or ammunition would be moot. Dead is dead, regardless of whether the murder weapon is actually designed for protection, hunting, target practice, or war.

Amid all the discussion of this horrible tragedy, I find it puzzling that the language of the Second Amendment, which specifically provides for a "well regulated Militia," has been so completely disregarded. My Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines "militia" as 1) a part of the organized armed forces of a country liable to call only in emergency, or, 2) the whole body of able-bodied male citizens declared by law as being subject to military service. The Founding Fathers obviously had similar, if not identical, definitions.

The Second Amendment specifically authorizes The People to "keep and bear Arms." The operative words are "keep" and "bear." It does not say "buy, sell, steal, borrow, lend, hide or conceal." It does not require them to be kept stored locked up at home or allow them only for hunting or target shooting. (Actually, it doesn't say anything about storage, hunting or target shooting!) The whole point of the Second Amendment is that The People have the right to be armed so that they can respond appropriately, and in time, to any emergency that requires that. Having someone in your school methodically killing first-graders fits any definition of "emergency" that I know of, and the only reasonable response to that is instantly, not when the police get around to it. That fact was tragically demonstrated in Uvanle, Texas! Why weren't the Sandy Hook and Robb Elementary School staff and faculty formed into a "well regulated Militia" so they could just shoot the sonofabitch dead! It can't possibly be that they were all women, can it?

I was struck by the fact that the only people who did anything at all to protect the little children at Sandy Hook were Vicki Soto, Anne Murphy, and Rachel D'Avino. When her panicked charges ran into Lanza's field of fire, Ms. Soto heroically interposed herself in front of them, saving the lives of the remaining escapees while he was busy killing her. Nobody threw a chair or a book or pot of scalding hot coffee or a bottled beverage at him. Nobody even tried to tackle him! I suspect the nuns who taught me would have died knocking him down and smothered him with their bleeding corpses. (On the other hand, those nuns were pretty savvy, and were totally dedicated to caring for us kids. They could have been packing some serious heat under those voluminous skirts! Who would have known?) Several of the other women got themselves killed, but accomplished nothing otherwise. Being unarmed in the face of violence not only takes away your options, it takes away your rational thought processes and common sense as well.

When citizens and their representatives start thinking rationally about what to do about this problem instead of reacting to blind emotion, it might be helpful to recognize that US schoolchildren and factory workers hardly ever die in fires anymore. That's because everybody recognizes that protection from fire does not involve making everybody's matches, lighters and candles illegal and hoping victims trapped in burning wooden buildings will somehow survive if there are enough fireman hanging around. No, fire protection involves fire resistant materials, fire exits, conveniently accessible fire extinguishers and hoses, well-marked exit routes, fire doors and partitions, regular drills, and, most of all, planning about what to do if somebody sets something ablaze. Every school official in the United States knows instantly what to do in case of fire. Nobody knows what to do in case of armed intruders bent on mayhem!

For shame, people; for shame!

What to do to prevent this terrible tragedy from happening again * is absurdly simple. It doesn't involve taking police off the streets to wander around the schools in distinctive uniforms, easy to ambush first! It doesn't require hiring armed guards. It assuredly doesn't require dorking around with the Constitution, the greatest work of mankind that ever was or ever shall be! It doesn't rely on ill-advised "knee jerk" reactions or impersonating Marine Corps NCOs either, no matter who proposes them!

What it requires is the rational approach we have taken for fire protection. Doors that are supposed to be locked against entry should not be able to be left open or unlocked - ever! Walls and doors and partitions and desktops should be bulletproof. School furniture should provide protection from gunfire. There should be enough safe places to hide and everybody should know how to get and stay there. Protocols should be developed to deal rationally with armed intruders, not just to get the good guys killed so they can't protect the kids. A giant can of Mace or pepper spray in each room, easy to get to, wouldn't be a bad idea, either. And the kids and staff should be made to practice periodically to be able to react instantly, and appropriately if a bad guy shows up! *

This idea could work in movie theaters and churches and nightclubs, too. There doesn't appear to me to be any good reason why bus, church and theater seats shouldn't be required by code to be bulletproof down to the floor, or why taverns and clubs should not have sufficient bulletproof partitions to protect all the patrons. I would personally feel a lot safer if the management and staff were conspicuously armed as well. They are in my local gun stores, and nobody has ever entered one of those looking for trouble!

It's high time we recognized that the unique guarantee of freedoms that is the 2nd Amendment creates a unique challenge to protect our citizens against those who would abuse those freedoms. The Founding Fathers met the challenge of how to protect us from the danger of a dictatorial government. We betray their memory if we allow their work to be perverted by people who are equally mortal enemies of a free and responsible society. Let's face it, people: Pretending "it will never happen" isn't working!

Additionally, what I propose is simply to do what the Founding Fathers, in their vast wisdom and foresight, recognized: to admit that outlawing guns in the hands of responsible citizens is a bad idea, repeal laws and rules that do that, and require every teacher and school official to go about his or her business - conspicuously armed with a gun he or she is trained to use, just like the police. That's the "well regulated" part. I'm not talking about just "having" a firearm, or keeping it in your desk, or locked up in a closet, or in the principal's office, or in your car, or at home in a gun safe or in a locked storage unit somewhere. I'm talking about wearing it in "on your person," just like the Secret Service and professional bodyguards do. I don't have any objection to wearing it conspicuously in a holster, like the police, either. That will make any potential sorry, child-murdering bastard think twice about hurting little kids, and if he makes the wrong choice, they can instantly blow him away and save everyone the cost of a trial and prison, regardless of whether he plans to commit suicide or not! Problem solved, just like the Founding Fathers intended!

On the other hand, if you are absolutely, positively, irrefutably convinced that you, personally, cannot protect children entrusted to your care, you can probably find some excuse that sounds good to you not to attempt to do that. But you may want to keep it to yourself unless you want to sound like a fool - or a coward! Nobody that I know is saying that arming school employees should be done instead of other effective protective measures, but when those measures fail, as they eventually do, the armed protector is the final defense against outlaws. Basically, it is much better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it, as happened at Sandy Hook, Columbine, and elsewhere. That's basically what the Second Amendment says.

The fact is, people who protect military installations are armed. People who apprehend criminals are armed. People who merely investigate the apprehension of dangerous criminals are armed. People who work in an office and file paperwork about dangerous criminals are armed. People who guard money are armed. People who transport jewelry and works of art are armed. People who tend bar are frequently armed. Convenience store owners are often armed. Hell, people who sell firearms are armed. How dare someone claim that being armed isn't necessary to protect little children from dangerous criminals! For shame!

In several discussions I saw on the news, various teachers stated that they "didn't feel comfortable" bearing arms to protect their charges, or that it "wasn't their job." My feeling is that if you don't feel comfortable or don't think it is your job to protect innocent young children entrusted to your care from being brutally murdered, you probably ought not to be around little kids, let along responsible for them. Actually, it seems to me that if you aren't willing to do your part as a "well-regulated Militia," you probably ought not to be here. Maybe you would prefer to live in China. They have the most strict gun control laws there are! China doesn't allow its citizens to bear arms at all, except under very restricted circumstances, and then only under the closest supervision of their central government.

Speaking of China, on the same day of the Sandy Hook massacre, Mr. Min Yong Jun, 36, stabbed 23 children and one adult in a primary school in the village of Chenpeng, Henan Province, in Guangshan County. There was a string of similar assaults against Chinese schoolchildren in the last two years that killed nearly 25 and wounded more than 115. Chinese response to these attacks has not been any more effective than that in the United States. They have, however, outlawed guns.

The same thing happened on April 9, 2013 at the Lone Star College Cy-Fair campus outside of Houston, Texas, when a suspect sent 14 students to the hospital after slashing them with an animal dissection knife.

Back in China, on March 1, 2014, eight Uighur separatists wielding knives wounded over 143 people in the Kunming railway station in Xinjiang, killing at least 29 of them. The law-abiding victims involved in all three cases were powerless to stop the knife-wielding assailants.

They didn't have guns, either!

*PS: Exactly 62 months later, to the day, nineteen year old expelled former student and reported "professional school shooter" aspirant, Nikolas Cruz, walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, through an unlocked, unmonitored, unguarded door. He then activated the school fire alarm, and, in the resulting turmoil, shot seventeen people dead and wounded fourteen others within six minutes with a Smith & Wesson M&P15 semiautomaic rifle. As terrified and bewildered students fled in panic, Cruz discarded his rifle, blended in with the fleeing students, left the campus, and calmly strolled to a nearby Subway restaurant where he purchased a soda. He then walked to a McDonald's restaurant and hung around for about half an hour. He was arrested without incident in nearby Coral Springs about 40 minutes later when law enforcement authorities recognized him as the perpetrator. His activities were recorded by school surveillance equipment which allowed police to watch him twenty minutes after he fired on all those people, but not while he was actually doing it. This made it impossible for them to find out where he was until after he was gone! He slaughtered fourteen students and three faculty members, shooting one person every 12 seconds. So far, he has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder. Nobody has been charged with failing to stop him or letting him into the school in the first place.

In heroic, but futile, gestures, three totally unarmed faculty members rushed to protect their charges from the massacre. Scott Beigel, a geography teacher, was assassinated while unlocking a door to a classroom where students could hide. Chris Hixon, the school's athletic director, was gunned down as he ran toward the sound of the gunfire. Aaron Feis, an assistant football coach and security guard (!) at the school, was slain as he shielded two students with his own body. One has to wonder 1) why a school security guard was unarmed, and 2) what would have happened if every single faculty member in the school had rushed Nikolas Cruz with their own guns blazing. Of course, we'll never know. Guns are outlawed at Stoneman Douglas High School; only the outlaw had a gun!

Deputy Scot Peterson, a school resource officer at the scene of the shooting, reportedly failed to enter the school to confront the gunman and instead remained outside at another building for four minutes "with his gun pointed at nothing" while Nikolas Cruz was busy murdering people next door. It was also alledged that Coral Springs officers "found another three Broward County Sheriff's deputies cowering behind their vehicles" when they arrived a few minutes later, after all the carnage was over. I think it is possible that the echoes from the buildings on the campus, combined with the noise of the fire alarm, made it impossible to tell where the gunfire was coming from. The teachers who confronted the armed murderer knew, of course, but they didn't have guns.

In a heartrendigly impassioned plea on CNN, Lori Alhadeff, mother of murdered student Alyssa Alhadeff, screamed, "President Trump, please do something! Action! We need it now! These kids need safety now! What can you do? You can keep guns out of these kids' hands. You can put metal detectors on all the doors..." As usual, he didn't do anything effective.

One can certainly sympathize with Mrs. Alhadeff's grief, anguish, heartbreak, and frustration. Her entreaty raises several questions, though. Given that the President has sworn to uphold the Second Amendment, that "...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed," how, exactly, does she expect him to "keep guns out of these kids' hands" in Broward County, Florida? Isn't that more of a function of the State of Florida, where Mrs. Alhadeff resides? Isn't putting "metal detectors on all the doors" (and keeping them locked, and monitoring them, and guarding them) a function of the Broward County school district where she pays taxes? Did she ever attend a school board meeting and demand that money spent on soccer and hockey uniforms and equipment be expended instead on "metal detectors on all the doors" and better methods to identify, locate and monitor the activities of every "crazy person" who might pose a threat? How many metal detectors and door locks and investigators of crazy people could be paid for by the money that is going to be wasted to tear down and replace perfectly good Stoneman Douglas School buildings? And if she really wants to repeal the Second Amendment, has she ever written her state representatives and insisted that they vote to do that?

In any case, Mr. Trump has had other things to be concerned about, like breaking up immigrant families and not helping hurricane victims in Puerto Rico. Given his selections for Secretary of Education, it does not look like things are likely to change for the better.

Mrs. Alhadeff, along with Mr. Ryan Petty, who also lost a daughter in the Parkland shooting, announced their candidacies for Broward County school board membership, but only Ms. Alhadeff, representing District 4, is currently serving on the all-female board. So far, not one of these women seems to have been able to do anything meaningful to assure that the schools provide appropriate equipment and training for security guards and security enhancements for the physical plant. Reportedly, Ms. Alhadeff attended a "March for Our Lives rally in Washington DC, establishing once again her conviction that demonstrating about an issue is an effective substitute for doing something about it. One has to wonder what, if anything, the other ladies on the school board were accomplishing while she was traipsing around in Washington! They continue to leave their students defenseless by purchasing cheerleading uniforms and sports equipment instead of armed protection. We'll see how that goes. Watch this space!

Much as I personally hate to defend Mr. Trump, the fact remains that he has done what it takes to protect his kids. Every one of them is surrounded by people dedicated to their protection, members of a "well regulated militia," who "keep and bear arms."

On May 24, 2022, in an atrocity eerily reminiscent of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, 18-year-old high school dropout, Salvador Ramos, after severely wounding his grandmother by shooting her in the face, stole her pickup truck and drove to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde Texas with the expressed intention of shooting up a school. After firing shots outside the school for approximately five minutes without attracting the attention of school security personnel, he entered the school through an unguarded door that had been propped open. Once inside, he fatally shot nineteen students and two teachers with an AR-15 style rifle and handgun. He also wounded seventeen others before locking himself inside a classroom where he had killed the victims and remained there for over an hour before being shot and killed by a United States Border Patrol tactical team.

Nobody in the classrooms shot back. They didn't have guns. The people with guns were outside, protecting themselves!

This was the third-deadliest American school shooting, after the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, and the deadliest ever in Texas, where their legislators are currently concentrating on harassing pregnant mothers and protecting children who haven't been born yet. It took place only ten days after a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.

Hopefully, the traumatized people of Uvalde will eventually become tired of useless, time-wasting activities like planting flowers and crosses and posting pictures of dead children and marching around and calling for other people to "do something" because they can't think of anything better to do. If they ever do that, they may want to take another look at having on their city council an ineffective police chief who waited 77 minutes until federal agents took over and righteously put at least a dozen bullets into that crazy child murderer! If Texans can spend all that money they do on guns and cowboy hats, they certainly have enough for some tar, a couple of pillows full of feathers, and a rail to use to ride him out of town!

The Uvalde tragedy is proof positive that the assertion that citizens should not have right to defend themselves and their loved ones by armed force if necessary and depend instead on their law enforcement authorities is a dangerous and damnable LIE!

Clarksville School District, Arkansas

After they realized that hiring an extra security guard would cost $50,000 a year, the Clarksville School District decided to train more than a dozen teachers and staff members as armed guards, for a one-time cost per person of $5231. Now teachers, janitors, computer technicians and other staff members are ready to respond to an armed intrusion. In an interview with KFTA, social studies Kim Krohn claimed, "If we didn't do this and somebody came into this building or any of our school buildings and harmed children, it would be hard to go to sleep that night thinking what else could I have done and at least we've done what we think is the best thing to protect the children of Clarksville school district,"

Hanover School District #28, Colorado

The District voted to allow teachers or other employees at its two schools to carry concealed handguns if they volunteer to serve double duty as security officers in an emergency and complete training.

South Dakota school districts

At least two school districts in the state have launched a "school sentinel program," which allows the arming of school employees, security guards or volunteers. School administrators noted that law enforcement resources are "too far away. Arming school employees gives them a fighting chance." Armed staff members undergo at least 80 hours of use of force, weapons proficiency, legal aspects and first aid classes. They also have to be approved by the school board and a law enforcement agency. No complains have been received by parents.

Callisburg Independent School District, Texas

About four years ago, the district started a "guardian" program. It allows a small force of volunteer school staff to carry a concealed firearm on school grounds. Superintendent Steve Clugston stated in a CNN interview, "We'll do whatever's necessary to protect our kids and staff. We don't want to be at the mercy of somebody that's intent on doing harm." According to Ed Lavendera of CNN, about 17% of Texas school districts allow a teacher or administrator to carry a firearm on campus.

I regretfully predict that in the not too distant future, somebody is going to walk into some other school and murder somebody else there because the faculty and staff don't believe that it is their job to protect them. And they'll blame the National Rifle Association. (My prediction was fulfilled only 34 days later. See Below.)

* PPPS: As a result of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, 1.5 million high school students held a country-wide protest a month later to picket gun violence and bash the NRA. One of the popular issues was the belief that Florida Senator Ted Cruz received $1.05 in campaign contributions from the NRA for every student in Florida. The children seemed to think that was significant, somehow.

I did a little research and determined that if each protester had spent $1.05, they all could have bought the following:

31.5 Years of salary for a full-time security guard
136 Full page week day advertisements in the Miami Herald
301 Training classes for armed faculty members
450 Walk-through metal detectors
1371 256 GB iPhone X's
2172 AK-47 Rifles
2629 AR-15 Rifles
2863 M1911-style .45 caliber semi automatic pistols
3748 Self-powered keypad combination door locks
10,104 Motion sensor door chimes
10,500 Hand held metal detectors
20,038 Electric emergency sirens with strobe lights
26,254 New X-box games
33,625 Pairs of Guess women's power skinny jeans
52,500 Memberships in the National Rifle Association
311,265 Big Macs
3,214,285 "Forever" postage stamps for letters to Congress
28,350,000 Miles of travel somewhere in a hybrid sedan

(By the way, immediately after the Parkland shooting, in March, the NRA received 2.4 million dollars in donations, mostly from small donors, setting a 21st century record. I wonder what they spent it on.)

* PPPPS: Thirty four days after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, immediately following the weekend of the 1.5 million student "Never Again/March for our Lives" protest, 17-year-old Great Mills, Maryland, High School student Austin Wyatt Rollins shot and fatally wounded his former girlfriend, Jaelynn Willey. He also wounded another student, just before classes started that day, in the 17th US school shooting of the year. Within seconds, School resource officer Blaine Gaskill arrived and fired a single round. Rollins simultaneously fatally shot himself in the head with the 9 mm Glock automatic pistol he had stolen from his father because he couldn't legally purchase any firearm.

Officer Gaskill is a good guy... and he had a gun - and didn't wait around 77 minutes to use it!

John Lindorfer