Last month there was another campus shooting -- this time at Univ. of Texas at Austin. Even though this time around it looked more like a public suicide, it looks like those of us who go to school, work at a school, or even take kids to school, really have to be prepared for a gunman or two. So let me put it to the collective wisdom of the forum: you are in a classroom, guy walks in with a gun -- what do you pull out to stop him?

You need something relatively compact so you can carry it on your person or in your bag/briefcase. It has to have some range to reach across a classroom -- 20-30 feet for a small room, and more for a lecture hall. It has to have stopping power -- enough to stop the gunman so the braver people can rush him and take him down. It may need to deliver more than one shot in case of multiple gunmen.

You can't carry firearms on campus unless you want to risk getting expelled, fired, arrested & jailed, or worse, mistaken for a homicidal shooter by the SWAT sniper. So that's out. Taser can have the same problem, depending on the local campus' definition of a weapon. So what's left?

I looked into various types of pepper spray, but I'm not sure that they'd work:

-- The Mace Pepper Gun is small and has some range (25'). It delivers a stream -- unclear how accurate the stream is at the long end of its reach. It lacks a laser to help you aim.

-- The Kimber JPX Jet Protector has a slightly shorter range (23'), but it seems to be able to fire two shots of liquid OC at 270 mph, which increases the impact. But it only has two shots. You can reload, while getting shot at, I suppose. Kimber also has discontinued this item.

-- Pepperball Technologies seems to make the most powerful devices. It looks like they basically adapt various paintball markers to fire OC-filled balls that explode upon impact. It's reassuring that they also make Pava-filled pepperballs. Because these launchers shoot the balls with compressed air, they probably deliver the biggest percussive impact. The Flash Launcher has an integrated 100-lumen flash and a laser sight, plus the ability to fire five pepperballs with a range of 30'. It is a bit on the big side, though, being basically an 11" cylinder. If you watch a demo on Youtube, you'll see that firing it with accuracy requires holding the launcher with two hands and bracing it against your belly. And even then you're still off by a few inches.

-- Another Pepperball product is the SA-8 launcher, which is basically adapted from a Tiberius Arms paintball pistol. The shape is more amenable to accurate firing, but it's getting rather big at 11" long and 8" high. Definitely a bag item, and not concealable on your body. And let's forget about launchers the size of an Uzi or carbine. (I looked into using other paintball pistols -- apparently these pepperballs are the standard 68 caliber. The problem is that because the CO2 cartridge has to go somewhere, these pistols can't ever get that small.)

-- I also found something called the PepperGun, which is from a company based in South Africa. It's a rather large and intimidating-looking pepperball pistol, probably also adapted from a paintball marker.

With pepper guns/sprays, the biggest concern is the stopping power. If you watch live tests on Youtube, it's not clear how bad the effect is. It seems to take a second or two for the OC to set in, and in that time the gunman could squeeze off a few rounds in a crowded classroom. So it doesn't seem to me like a good solution.

Any thoughts or suggestions? Don't tell me to set phaser to stun.

Da Bing