Free Republic

Many people may be dead following a shooting at a high school in Finland, police have said. The individual with the gun is still inside the vocational college in Kauhajoki, 120 miles from Helsinki, and students are being evacuated.

Did anyone fight back? I hope there are some stories we will not hear because those who tried to fight back are now dead. I believe there were some heros here. I hope to hear someone say that without so and so, I would be dead. Is it wrong to ask this question? I think, of 30 or so killed. Could they all have been by themselves, with no one around? As far as we know, it was 1 person doing the shooting. Have our college campuses become too pacified? I know not many college students want to protect their...

OAKLAND -- Even though he'd played trombone with Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, his death might have merited no more than a paragraph on the obituary page had Taswell Baird Jr., an 80-year-old African American, not had the misfortune to become this city's homicide No. 100 for 2002.-snip- In this city -- which last year had the highest murder rate in California, with 85 slayings -- the bulk of the homicides involve one felon killing another, what Mayor Jerry Brown calls "taking care of business" homicides, "one man stealing another's stash or not paying debts."