you may've seen vultures already circling: some gundits claim tragedy could've been averted had students been allowed to carry firearms on campus.

yeah, or maybe cho—who i think wore body armor, didn't he?—would've taken out the armed ones first or avoided them and killed others. hypothetical is hypothetical.

gun nuts—to their eternal shame—got the assault weapon ban taken off the books, but in this case its relevant feature—banning high-capacity clips—would've made a marginal difference, at best. of course, it wouldn't've seemed marginal to a handful of kids who might've escaped as cho reloaded, but it still would've been an enormous massacre.

somewhere the system broke down: either the gun dealer didn't follow procedure or somebody didn't enter all the kid's legal and medical history into the database.

much as i'd like to hang seung-hui the kid round the gun lobby's neck, it looks like this is actually one of those cases of failure to enforce law—however true it may be that if they'd had their way that law wouldn't be on federal books and that they did get some of its teeth pulled when waiting periods got dropped.

my last feeble hope: that the poor demented kid will turn out to have been an NRA member in good standing.