One point on Stephanie Miller made me think ...

[zbdent]

What if the students at Kent State were armed, too?

[Wickerman]

1. more would have died? n/t

[zbdent]

2. ding!

[CaptainRant]

7. Yep

.

[Deep13]

9. how?

[Wickerman]

11. uh, Guardsmen ringing the population with rifles

on high ground, organized, at the ready. Student population blissfully walking through a dish shaped common area, unprepared, with (imagined) a variety of handguns, notably inaccurate at distances respond to the first shot (believed to be errant, fired by a nervous guardsman) by whipping out their guns and firing at the Guard, perhaps each other, seeing fellow students blazing away. Rather than the Guard ceasing fire after a few moments, realizing a horrible, uncorrectable error was made, a full-fledged firefight take place. How long does it last? Hours? Days? Full-fledged war breaks out? How many dead? How many more?

[Deep13]

12. My fault for not reading thoroughly.

I thought they were talking about V.T. not Kent State. Duh, plain English.

[soothsayer]

3. many more people would be dead. the point is they were UNarmed.

which is why it's horrifying that they were killed. And please don't forget the black students killed at Jackson State 10 days later...

http://phi.kenyon.edu/Khistory/60s/welcome.htm

[Deep13]

5. "10 days later..."

You mean 10 days earlier maybe? Anyway, you are guessing about what the result might be.

[Wickerman]

6. Kent State. May 4, 1970, Jackson State, May 14, 1970

When I went to school, back in the advent of new math (might be the problem here), May 4 was earlier than the 13th.

:shrug:

YMMV, but if it does, check your calculator.

[Deep13]

8. Oh, I thought you meant 10 days after the VT murders.

I see. It is all very clear to me now.

As a purely academic point, the media is claiming that this is the worst school shooting in American history. (I wonder if there was a worse one elsewhere?) In point of fact, a far worse event occurred on the grounds of the Lutheran Seminary in Adams County, PA on July 1, 2 and 3, 1863. I don't know that a Civil War battle counts as a "school shooting."

[Wickerman]

10. there was a school explosion in Michigan in 1927

oft-forgotten.

Dude blew up an elementary school after he lost re-election to a local office. Fortunately he did a reasonably bad job of planting the dynamite - they found over 500 lbs of it unexploded after the event. 45, immsc were killed.

[JPZenger]

14. Worst Shooting that was not part of a War

Worst one day of shooting of innocent people that was not part of a war was the slaughter of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in the 1890s.

[Deep13]

4. The shooter took them out piecemeal because his victims were helpless.

He knew his victims were unarmed. It was indoors in confined places. Had some of the students been armed with a working knowledge self defense, there might still have been some murders, but no massacre. Ultimately, we cannot look to the state to protect ourselves from violence. America is a violent society because Americans are violent to each other. To some degree that is human nature. Some countries, for example, have little violent crime, but high suicide rates (Austria and Japan come to mind). In those places there is no safe outlet for aggression, so people aggress on themselves. This 'cutting' problem among teenagers is a lesser example of this.

No society is perfectly safe no matter what the law is. Individuals can get help from authorities, but ultimately we are all on our own. No one should have a duty to be a victim.

[zbdent]

13. Uh, yeah ... but

also the element of surprise usually beats out the gun in the drawer, too ...

along with locking the doors of the building, so that people can't escape ...

But then, the (assumed liberal, because "universities" and higher education facilities are rife with liberal professors) professor/instructor who barred the door so that there could be survivors didn't help, did he?