Yes, Virginia, this is about guns.

   Some person somewhere, who is claimed by many of our species to be a member of our species, genuinely argued today that we should train children to tackle gunmen, and that that would solve everything.  

Also, as in the wake of just about any mass shooting I care to recall, there has been a knee-jerk freak-out from gun enthusiasts explaining that the answer is more guns.  Talking points have been hit, as they are want to do.  Switzerland, and their world leader percentile of households containing guns (which are there due to their being issued for mandatory military service by citizens as Switzerland has no standing army...) and low gun crime was brought up.  Just don't mention that all  bullets are strictly controlled by the state and only available for purchase and  use at approved shooting ranges, or that bullets issued to service personnel (in case of invasion while traveling to military installations) are given in sealed packets which are checked to ensure no unauthorized use, or that a national inventory is taken to confirm the whereabouts of each bullet... Shockingly the NRA fell silent until today - lord knows how they'll tackle this one.

  But look, squirrel, moar guns in schools comes the tweety-bloggy cry - because if someone had been there with an ankle piece in a sock or a fanny pack holding their Saturday night special, then somehow none of this would have happened.
   It's that school yard fuzzy logic in motion for the particular Death Wish Gun Enthusiast - in which a gunman comes into a school and shoots no one - because someone reading his mind shoots him instead though they never go to jail for it because it was proactive self-defense.  Everyone gets puppies, and free ice-cream, and if you really want to know the truth of it they're holding out for a quick handy from a grateful teacher or two.  Oh and also they're taller than in real life.  Maybe an inch or two.  Except the gunman's mother is still back home dead, but just push that under a rug.  Good.  Now.  Everyone neat and pretty?

When I was younger and the space shuttle Challenger exploded in the air, I had an acquaintance my age who was very upset by it. Christie McAuliffe, (a teacher we might note) quite publicly died in the explosion with the rest of the crew. This kid was traumatized by her death in particular, I think because he didn't know any astronauts, but he saw teachers every day at school.  Perhaps it may have been a little Everyman at play as well.  I'm sure from his test scores he held no illusions about his space camp potential, but hey if the woman who grades vocab drills could make it - maybe he had a shot too.  He watched all the news whenever he could leading up to the launch, and made McAuliffe his own.  Then.  Well.  Shock, denial, most of the stages completely out of order.

  For hours and hours he'd argue with me about basic physics (which were still too advanced for our age set), demanding that if only she had waited and then jumped up in the capsule right before impact she would have survived!
  I said no - she was probably already dead before impact, but even so, even if she somehow amazingly was alive, awake, unhurt, and able to time a jump with superhuman precision, she'd still be going really, really fast because of kinetic energy and she'd be just as dead when she "landed," because that's how the world works.
  My brother-in-law did engineering work in jet propulsion, and was often engaged in or somehow otherwise consulted on NASA projects.  A Floridian, he had made a habit of watching every space shuttle launch possible on live broadcast (if he couldn't be in the state I suppose).  I'm not even sure he'd missed a launch before that one. 
  As I understand it from the time, he'd refused to watch that particular launch on the grounds there would be a high probability of catastrophic failure.  There had been problems with sealant rings, with earlier launches postponed, but it was evidently clear to him that the conditions causing the malfunctions would not have been adequately fixed by the steps that they had taken.  Other engineers would have undoubtedly had similar concerns, and no doubt warnings were given, but this is a highly specialized field - and it's possible the greater majority of people on the team were not even aware how one subset of problems might affect things.  Unfortunately it was also a period in NASA's history in which the actual scientists had been pushed out of any higher management or decision making roles in favor of project leaders with significantly lower technical understanding but a good sense of organization skill.  Part of the mission management may even have been political appointees.  Why am I reminded of all this?
  First because telling me that the answer is more guns in school shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works on par with a third grade understanding of physics.  Second because this situation may be completely avoidable if the right steps are taken - namely sensible gun law based on practicality (instead of trauma or NRA lobby dollars) and as or even more importantly, reliable mental health care.
  We all know there is a problem with the system.  The people who have been trained in this field tell us there is a problem with the system.  We continue hitting the launch button anyway.
 
  Fill schools with guns. Go ahead. What then? Grenades when someone throws a grenade in a school?  Improvised Explosive Devices in the lunchroom?  Dirty bombs in every class?  What about buses?  Grocery stores?  The movie theater?  Restaurants?  Build-A-Bear?  Gymboree?  Is Chuck E. Cheese packing?  Is Ronald?  Guns everywhere?  Every waking moment?   In every hand?

  The heart of the matter:
  26 people were murdered in under three minutes, many of them - let's be frank - with multiple shots to the head.  There's no sensible reason that ammunition clips of that capacity should be sold to the public. Anyone with a gun would likely not have even gotten it out in time before it was all over. There's no sensible reason it should be easier to purchase a gun than to identify and help treat a mental disorder that would cause someone to want to use a gun in this way. Setting aside that the person sitting around daydreaming about the opportunity to "take out" a would be shooter is, I daresay, one bad afternoon's distance from being the person sitting around daydreaming about being would-be shooter. 
  The solution to a horrible misuse of guns (if we are to presume the position that they have necessary uses) is not to inundate and drown our culture with more, more, and more guns. 
  What are you teaching the children in this school? In every school? That the answer to someone being mentally unstable is not to have bothered to restrict a gun purchase, not to have bothered to find the reason for their instability before selling them a sidearm, nor have bothered putting in place a system to address it... To have just not frankly bothered.  Instead teaching every child in our country that the fix is learning to kill faster, kill quicker than anyone else can, world without end. 
  I cannot imagine a more dehumanizing, wholesale race to the bottom of human endeavor.