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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is the bottom line. 
Your child's school is protected against this kind of incident for the same reason that whatever airplane you are flying on is protected from extremists flying it into a building. Your child's school is protected because--statistically speaking--this stuff never happens.  It will never happen to you or your kids.[/quote]

I wish this were true! While schools are certainly among the safest places, including home, for any child, evil can strike in the most peaceful communities. Statistically speaking we're often very few degrees removed from evil disasters. To prove it, try this: I personally know two people who died in 9/11, I myself was shot in one of the safest places on earth by some crazy person wielding a weapon, and my husband ran into one of the victims of the notorious Empire State building shootings. So how probably is it for our children to be fully sheltered from evil? Let's not stick our heads in the sand. All these incidents are actionable lessons that, as a society, we need to do more to foster peace and to keep the deranged away from means of murder and destruction.[/quote]

I your personal experience of being shot has understandably colored your perception, but, no, your elementary school is not going to get shot up by a crazy person. I can guarantee you that. In the same way that I can guarantee you are not going to win $50 million dollars in Powerball.

The chances of you having an anvil drop on your head while walking to work are much, much greater. You don't obsess over that. And you don't consider yourself "sticking your head in the sand" either. [/quote]

One last thing: none of this means that we shouldn't "foster peace" and keep deranged people away from firearms, either. [b]We should do that for its own sake[/b].[/quote]

What does "We should do it for it's own sake" even mean?   We should do it because, if we don't, someone somewhere is going to blow and some other large group of innocent victims is going to pay the dearest price: their lives.  (especially now that the world knows that when you viciously murder a lot of small children, the world is shocked - that's what deranged people like this guy are looking for, that world attention/shock).

You're probably right that statistically speaking it's more likely an anvil will fall on your head.  But neither you or anyone else is in a position to say "it'll never happen to you" because, look, it just happened.  It happened to someone (26 smeones, tragically), and that's now 26 famlies plus the family of the killer who have to deal with the aftermath and mourning.  We have to do something different because we don't want this to happen again, and it will if we don't address the roots (and it's a lot more than "fostering peace" - we need to look at how we handle chronic mental illness, gun control, and whether we shouldn't take certain video games off the mainstream market where it's shown some of them desensitize long-term players to violence.[/quote]

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