I have problems with some of your arguements. First of all, in the example that a teacher has a gun in his/her desk and a student takes the gun and kills someone with this. This presumes the gun causes the crime. It is the person who causes the crime. If the student wanted to kill another just grab a baseball bat or the axe from the fire drill. It is illogical to prevent the tools because someone could use it for evil.
Also you said that morals and personal responsibility needs to be instilled in the students. Then you said hold the parents responsible. If you hold another person responsible for a crime someone else does, that does not make the criminal responsible. You are transfering responsibility to a third party , whether that is a parent or some one else. Your statement was inherently contradictory. Also if you want people to be responsible you have to trust them to do the right thing. Again that is a trust issue, should the people be allowed to use dangerous tools. Young people have to be trusted to do the right thing. Also they have to be taught that guns are a tool and can be dangerous. Classes in gunhandling should be taught in school as well as the proper gun ethics.
Farmers and students in my fathers days were taught how to use explosives since that was a useful skill. Now to have some pipes and ferilizer you are presumed that your are making bombs and are a terrorist.
Remember police are to catch criminals, not protect you. That is your responsibility. IT was not the authorities that made the last jet to crash and thus fail to complete its mission on 9/11, it was the people , the passengers. The best preventive measures from bad people is the general populace. If people had not been trained and told to allow the hijackers to be handled by professionals, none of the attacks would have suceeded. Ordinary people will do what is necesssary if they feel that that they can without being condemned.
I watched the Columbine disaster, and the police did nothing, but prevent ordinary people from doing something. This prevailing attitude that we are not supposed to act and only allow the authorities to act for us, is to transfer our own freedoms and authority. This is not the attitude of free people.
Would Leigh Brackett's 1953 Sci-Fi/Fantasy novel The Sword of Rhiannon have anything to do with it?
I have a mint condition copy of The Sword of Rhiannon as it was the second Sci-Fi book I every read. First was Robert Anson Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy.
Those two made me a Sci-Fi fan till death... And beyond!
BTW for other readers(From http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton/aced30.htm )
The Sword of Rhiannon is about 50,000 words. It is a reprint (apparently identical or nearly so) of "Sea Kings of Mars", published in the June 1949 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.
This is probably the most famous of Brackett's Martian stories, and justly so. It is different from her Eric John Stark stories (such as those paired in the Ace Double People of the Talisman/The Secret of Sinharat) in that it is predominantly set in the distant Martian past, when the planet was verdant and its seas were full. It still manages to evoke the sense of ancient mystery, and the sense of something wonderful now lost, that is so central to the other stories.
Matt Carse is a 35-year old archaeologist and thief, born on Earth but living on Mars from the age of 5. He encounters a true Martian thief in the old city of Jekkara, who shows him a great treasure, the Sword of Rhiannon, the Cursed One. Long ago Rhiannon, one of the human but very powerful Quiru, had sinned by giving forbidden technology to the serpent-like Dhuvians. For his crime he was imprisoned in a tomb while the rest of the Quiru left Mars for greater things. Carse realizes that the other thief must have found the entirety of Rhiannon's tomb, and eager for more riches he forces the other to take him there. But Carse is betrayed, and he ends up pushed into a mysterious black sphere, from which he emerges into a different Mars.
Hardly believing what has happened to him, he is soon imprisoned by the agents of Sark and their warrior princess Ywain. He and a chance-met fat thief named Boghaz are sentenced to be galley slaves on Ywain's ship. But Ywain recognizes his sword, and she and the sinister Dhuvian accompanying her soon try to extract the secret of Rhiannon's tomb from Carse. Only something unique about Carse -- his Earth heritage? or perhaps the dark voice clutching at the back of his brain? -- allows him to resist, and eventually lead a mutiny. Carse is able to lead his fellow slaves back to the Sea Kings, free rivals to the empire of Sark. But even there, he is not trusted. The lovely Emer, who consorts much with the Sky people and Sea people of Mars, senses something sinister in Carse. And when his offer to reveal the location of Rhiannon's tomb leads to disaster, only a desperate strike by Carse can save the people of Mars from the oppression of the Dhuvians. And Carse must still confront his fears of the presence lurking in his brain ...
It is really wonderful pulp Sword and Sorcery, pitch perfect, beautifully written, twistily plotted. The resolution is deeply romantic, with a shadow of true sadness. Yes, the plot itself depends on some coincidence, and some implausible action -- but so goes the form. The characters are two-dimensional, but highly colored -- if it is hard to believe in Ywain, and her combination of villainy and bravery and loveliness, or Carse's bluntness and untrained heroism and crude sexiness, still we like to make ourselves believe. And the prose -- purely within the pulp tradition, but using that tradition to produce real beauty: "Lean lithe men and women passed him in the shadowy streets, silent as casts except for the chime and whisper of the tiny bells the women wear, a sound as delicate as rain, distillate of all the sweet wickedness of the world.", or "Now, over the bones of Mars, Carse could see the living flesh that had clothed it once in splendor, the tall trees and the rich earth, and he would never forget. He looked out across the dead sea-bottom and knew that all the years of his life he would hear the booming roll of surf on the shores of a spectral ocean." Mariner stole that from us, I suppose, and Kim Stanley Robinson showed a differently beautiful Mars -- but I will always love Brackett's Mars, the purest SFnal Mars of all.
Instilling moral values in children is a conservative belief. Parental responsibility for raising their children is also a conservative belief. There is nothing "inherently contradictory" about those two statements.
I'm not going to bother to respond to your other statements.
Frankly, I don't appreciate getting badgered so please stop posting to me on this topic.