I sit next to a libertarian at work, and she kept talking about "soft targets" and vaguely implying that maybe if they'd had a cop or the teachers had been armed this never would have happened.
I could see (and occasionally, probably in error, have argued) that argument with a high school or college. But fuck, really? It's an elementary school. What the fuck do the teachers need to be armed for? Should they put in metal detectors? Come on, they're little kids. The most likely scenario of a cop in the school is a first grader gets pepper sprayed for throwing a tantrum. The most likely scenario with a teacher being armed is the teacher taking the gun off because it's rubbing against their pelvic bone and some little kid blowing his head off. What's the other alternative? We set up fucking sniper towers around the building and pick off strangers? Background checks and urine samples before people enter the building? The door already had a maglock, apparently, and people had to be buzzed in. That still didn't fucking stop him!
for the record: I was raised around guns, I love guns. I'm a gun supporter. But if we'd had stricter background checks and better licensing standards for firearms it would probably go a long way to stopping tragedies like this from happening in the first place. Call me a cold motherfucker, but I would love to know what (if anything) the shooter's mother was doing to control whatever illness he had, and why she thought it was a great idea to have a collection of handguns and a fucking assault rifle in a place that he could get to them. I sure as fuck know it wasn't 'home defense', considering that Newtown, CT has had a whopping 4 murders in the last ten years in a town with a population of nearly 30,000. It was the upper middle class WASP small town template for the country.
I think it's time to license everything, register everything, make everything require a background check of you and the people living with you. If you go out to buy a gun and your live in son has schizophrenia, tough. You don't get to buy a fucking gun. Get a pit bull if you're so petrified someone is going to steal your TV.