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If I was a mother who owned guns, and I am. I would want to make sure my guns were not going to be used against me if my son was an obvious psychopath. Everyone has to gauge this for themselves. It is an individual judgement.

Yes, I see a duty to protect yourself, and a duty to protect the community as well. And yes, I do believe folks have to judge these things for themselves. When all is said and done, we mourn for these kids and adults, and those whose loss of them will be catrastrophic. I feel a great deal of compassion for them. None the less, we need to keep things in perspective.

We are a nation of 314 million people. Of that 314 million, we have about 63 million school age (K-12th) children. The CIA World Factbook states we have 32,050,686 male and 30,719,945 female children aged 0 to 14. I believe it is safe to assume that there are roughly the same numbers from 5 to 18. This year, there will wind up being something like a 0.000063492063% (@40) to 0.000158730159% (@100) chance in one of these kids being harmed during an incident like this. We simply mustn't develop laws that negatively (restrictively) affect 99.999935% to 99.9998% of our populace, just to remedy a situation that affects so few.

That's not a caliced response. It's a rational objective response.

Maybe she, as a smart woman, thought he was very normal, well adjusted and reasonable.

I suspect she had a pretty good idea what she had on her hands by that point. I don't think anyone could forsee things going this wrong or they would have had the kid institutionalized. (If they could.)

At some point you have to realize that in a population base our size, there is going to be the occasional wing-nut out there.

Was this kid assessed properly? I'm not convinced, but then can you tell which kid will turn violent and which won't? Sometimes there are no clear-cut answers.

It's tough to admit to ourselves, but there are some things you can't completely eliminate. Sometimes life will suck terribly.

As children we had to come to terms with things we didn't like, but had to do anyway. As adults, this still applies.

We should not accept everything that comes down the pike, but we should be adult enough to determine some things are simply unavoidable, if we wish to remain safe in our own homes, or as we go about our daily lives. The chances are much greater that we or our family members will be victims of crimes in some manner (and even in this manner), than that one of our kids will die in one of these events.

Gun rights should be expanded to the capable law-abiding citizen, rather than restricted further.