If just one person on campus had a gun this tragedy might have been curtailed. How far would the shooter have gotten if the student population had been armed?

Gun control has not been shown to stop gun crimes. The states with the strictest gun control -- as graded by the Brady Center -- are also those with the highest rates of gun crime. Violent crime in right-to-carry states is 25% lower than the national average.

It's not the number of guns on the streets that is the problem, it's who is -- and who isn't -- carrying them.

This crime is not a product of the criminal's race or culture. It's the result of it being easy for a person known to have mental problems and violent tendencies to have guns and difficult for law-abiding citizens to do so. The campus had 100% gun control -- no guns are allowed on campus at any time. But that didn't stop anything.

Adam: I quote you "it's the result of it being easy for a person known to have mental problems...to have guns..." This is what happened exactly, the perpetrator was known to have mental problems but because he hadn't been ordered in to a hospital but instead had been ordered to have outpatient treatment, he was still eligible to buy a gun.

Frankly, the idea of having every citizen arm themselves is terrifying to me. But, as my friend Paul points out, the constitution gives everyone the right to bear arms, it doesn't say anything about letting them have bullets.

Gillian, that's not what I said. You're reading my quote to mean that the problem is that a mentally-ill man was allowed access to a gun. What I said is that the problem is that *only* the mentally ill man had access to a gun.

The idea of every citizen arming themselves is terrifying to criminals, too. That's sort of the point behind the second amendment.

States that have concealed carry laws or even open carry laws have much lower rates of violent crime. Such laws allow the few to protect themselves against the many. They place law abiding citizens on equal footing with criminals. Most gun crimes are committed with illegally-obtained guns and increasing gun control restrictions hasn't spurred a reduction in gun crime for precisely this reason. Illegal channels for obtaining guns aren't subject to these restrictions.

Florida has had a concealed carry law for twenty years. Gun crime has not increased there. In the first ten years, Florida issued 457,299 licenses. Only 85 of those licenses were revoked for crimes involving a gun. For the first five years under the new law, Dade County tracked the actual effects of the law. There were only four cases of criminal misuse of a firearm by a permit holder in that time period, and only two were for aggravated assault. One was for an accidental firing of a gun that resulted in a nonfatal injury. In that same time period, seven violent crimes were thwarted by permit holders.

The evidence shows that the solution to gun crime is to allow the populace to defend themselves from criminals with guns.

Apologies - I didn't intentionally misinterpret.
However, I am still not buying it. If the thought of being executed or spending a life in prison doesn't dissuade a criminal, I don't think that the possibility of every citizen being armed would pose more of a deterrent. In fact, many murderers have already decided that death is their ultimate goal. Further many illegal guns come from legal sources. There are far too many violations by gun dealers. http://www.bradycenter.org/gunindustrywatch/

And here are the UK figures:
A quantum difference in gun violence between the US, where shootings claim nearly 30,000 lives annually, and the UK: the latest annual figure (2003) for the UK shows a total of 163 deaths resulting from gunshot wounds. Such figures speak for themselves. Rough difference between populations 5X.

Maybe we agree to disagree because I cannot be persuaded to change my mind on this - maybe growing up in England has something to do that - and maybe you can't change your mind either.

Selecting one jurisdiction and basing a policy on that is folly, especially when you don't look deeper than a simple numeric comparison.

New York City, the most populated US city, has more gun deaths per year than London, England's biggest city. Must be gun control, right?

For the past two centuries, the murder rate in NYC has been nearly 5 times that of London. Gun control laws didn't exist for most of that time. In the early 1900s, New York passed the toughest gun control in the US and England had none at all. The murder rate remained unchanged.

England didn't always have strict gun control. Until the first World War, English citizens had the same rights to bear arms that the US had. And as legal guns have become rare in England, the gun crime rate has increased. In the fifty years following WW2, armed robberies increased one hundred fold. At the same time, the murder rate didn't change.

There must be something else, some socialogical factor that results in the lower murder rate in England.

Recently, however, the murder rate has been increasing steadily in England. And it's been dropping in the US, led by states with right-to-carry laws.

It's also important to look at other crime rates. Other than rape and murder, the crime rate in England has far outpaced that of the US and the gap continues to grow.

The fact that prison isn't a deterrent to people says much more about our prison system than it does about gun control laws. In fact, some historians believe that the reduction in legal weapons coupled with increasing leniency toward criminals is a chief cause of increasing both violent and non-violent crime in the 1970s and 1980s in the US.