Tell you what, when they start teaching firarms safety in school, then maybe I will consider getting behind the establishment and agreeing to some funding for legitimate programs. I taught Hunter Safety because it is required for most folks to get their first hunting license in many states. The parents had a vested interest in their children's successful completion, and those who didn't take it seriously never completed the program, either quitting or getting bounced. It is funded by hunters and I felt it was the right thing to support, so I got involved. Nothing felt better than to take lumps of clay and stuff them with a healthy dose of knowledge and respect so that all the novelty of firearms was wiped from their minds. There will always be the one or two rare students who will comply and subjugate themselves long enough to get through the program, then screw around later on, ignoring all the training, and eventually they lose their privileges anyway, sometimes tragically. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to use public school facilities to teach our program, so we look to places like churches, Masonic, VFW and other fraternal lodges, occasionally civic centers who are not overly paranoid about liability, and sometimes private facilities like Sportsman's Warehouse if they have the room.

The point is, I want to see our leaders get more pro-active about the education aspects, and not so alarmist about the whole business that it draws the wrong kind of attention to such events. I firmly believe that if the kids at Columbine had been put through a program like what we taught, there's a darned good chance they never would've gone forward with their little plan. As for the latest nutso, he is a good example of how badly our system can fail. How many laws did he break, and yet the only one that people seem so fixated on is the murder. I will be happy to hear about how the investigation leads to indictments against the criminals that sold/gave him the firearms, the hospital administrators that discharged him, all the parts of the system we spend so much money on to ensure this sort of scenario can't progess in the first place that didn't do their job. If someone must be villified, make it the incompetents that let this happen despite all the opportunities to prevent it, rather than attacking our rights once more. Get the people we elected and appointed to start enforcing the existing laws. If not, then making more laws won't do us any better.