"I was nothing short of furious when the NRA crowd began suggesting having paid armed guards at every school...perhaps one of the worst and most disgusting ideas I had ever heard. I tried to allow for the fact that people do overreact to tragedies and can say and do some crazy things in the aftermath.

It was a little hard to fathom though that there were people that actually believed that the solution to a shooting in a school was to put more guns in the school.

Once you head down that path the question again becomes "Where does it end?"

Do you surround every school with 20 foot fence and barbed wire? Build guard towers and place snipers in them? Have a gated entrance to the parking lot with armed guards and dogs to search every car that enters? Do we want to send our children to a maximum security prison each day rather than a school? Every person is searched and goes through a TSA style check to enter the building. Bag searches, random full body cavity searches, interrogation rooms to take people for further questioning...and maybe some water boarding if the "paid security staff" is not getting the answers they wanted...

If we do this at schools why not movie theaters and shopping malls? Hospitals and restaurants?"

That does seem to be the rub, Reg. We still are sum backward-assed society. Lines drawn in the sand. Alcohol to rouse the inner rabble, a mob to strengthen our misguided resolve, and no real attunement to the illumination that has not once stopped lighting the darkness all around us. If we only took the time to notice. The Lakota knew it, lived it, saw it fall to chains.

Now any of us can circle around the globe west from here to London and see the atrocities being fueled, the ire being fed, the mountains cut into flat plateaus for the love of fuel & plastics, but it really is only HERE where the love of a semi-automatic, the sound of the report, the feel of the kick, the stopping of the heart, the cleansing of the clear waters with the blood of innocence is just as important if not more important yet ..than the feeding of starving children, or the healing of disease (That's not to forgive the mindless bloodshed in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, the lot, but there is a weakness here in the States fueled by corporate greed & base-hatred among the people, and strengthened by your local hometown gun collectors). I’ve not said nearly enough. Tried to build a bridge linking the best intentions of both sides of this argument. I failed. But hey..

At least the discussion continues. Now if only something actually meaningful to the greater good of humanities will come of it more sooner than later. In the meantime, don’t get hit by flying bullets.