Quazimofo said:
I just wrote a bit about that, though I fear it fell prey to my tendency to ramble.
I actually think guns reduce the death toll for these kinds of things, simply because of their ease of use and availibility. The thing is that killing a lot of people with a gun is pretty hard to do, this is why most of these mass shootings have some pretty low body counts. Unless you can pen people in (like happened with the classrooms) people are going to run away from you, and they are going to take cover, and try and put barriers between you and them. This is why for offensive operations (security sweeps included) it's all about setting up patterns to pen people in to specific areas so you can take them down or control their movement, which takes a team.
Remove guns from the equasion and your going to see these people who are already putting a lot of thought into this coming up with far more dangerous solutions. Making an equivilent to napalm is simply some Ivory Snow Flakes and fuel oil away. You can make a pretty deadly gas with bleach and ammonia. Heck Gasoline itself is easily turned into some very deadly incindiary weapons with minimal skill. Someone intent on doing harm simply goes to the gun as the most readily availible tool, and they try and plan around that, because it takes the least effort, and they typically wind up with
an inefficient method of creating a mass casualty situation. The guys who do this kind of thing aren't going to simply give up the entire plan for the lack of a firearm, they are just going to do more research and become more deadly.
If I decided to do the same thing this guy did, for some unfathomable reason, that is to say sacrifice myself to kill a bunch of innocent kids in a school, I sure as heck wouldn't decide the most efficient way of doing it would be to simply walk in the front door with a rifle and a handgun. Simply closing and locking the doors was a massive deterrant to this guy given help being on the way. As I said in another thread if the guy had simply put a bit of creativity to mixing up some bleach and ammonia he probably could have gassed all the classrooms on the hallway regardless of closed doors instead of just getting the rooms that were too slow in locking down.
Of course then again with my training I think of this in terms of a professional. I realize there is no such thing as "safe" and can thus put it into a better perspective. Most people look at this and go "OMG, 18 dead kids.. a gun was the tool, we must hate on guns" they don't bother to look at other incidents and how else this could have gone down and realize how much worse it could have been, and how utterly pathetic an effort this was overall. To be honest the guy was lucky to even get what was it... 22 people all together? Having access to guns gave him a false sense of security, he didn't bother to do any real research into terrorists, gueriella warfare, and just general mayhem to see how the most successful mass casualty situations were pulled off. Without a gun he might have done more of that kind of research (what you learn in classes is condensed information, not really secret) and this would have been even more screwed up.
