I don't see anyway to stop incidents like VT .

I order to do this not only would all concealed weapons have to be banned and black market guns stopped but you would need a fool proof system to keep track of any student and their mental health which could change at any time , such as crimes of passion . This is only a small part of the entire problem .

You would need the imput and reliance of all parents and a constant monitoring on a daily basis of all conditions .

This is simply not going to happen , ever . It would then be a perfect world with everyone safe and this is also impossible .

This would only increase all school staff and raise the cost of education and a police force that could find all black market guns and destroy them .

We will never have a perfect world or one even close to it .

This seems to happen once every 30 years or so at colleges. I don't think we should be changing our entire country based on one event.

Incidents like this (generally of lesser magnitude) happen with appalling frequency.

How quickly we forget the Amish kids, the high school shootings, the workplace shootings, the mall shootings, fast food shootings, etc., etc.

Seems to me, they share common themes.

mentally ill people would make a difference, but, you could be right.

Except Vermont and Alaska.

The VT assailant was carrying his concealed weapons illegally, and guns were already banned from campus entirely. Banning them again would do no good.

Just ask almost anyone in Iraq.

How can we as americans go ahead and bomb Iraq knowing they had nothing to do with 9/11 and then expect america in it's internal workings to work any better . It's an over all condition of murder being almost acceptable as a way to solve any problem .

It may have solved the murderers problems , well it certainly did .

And there have been many workers gone "postal" and as things get worse this is yet another issue that will be more intense .

We have to face the facts that this country has become one sorry mess with all efforts placed on gains and success but not of social safety nets . I feel Katrina was much more horrific than VT but look how this turned out and this is just one issue also attached to the war .

Look what bush has created with the vets returning home with brain injuries or mental stress issues .

"who is to blame" and "what could have been done to prevent this?" Prevention and caution are fine up to a point and after that there is a point of diminishing returns.

The OJ Trial, one trial causing a zillion demands for change of the entire system - because it appears it could not handle one very exotic and unusual case.

911 - we've turned ourselves upside down and inside out over it, but there is just as much chance that there were no further terrorist attacks planned as that anything we did headed one off.

It just seems automatic, especially where the perpetrator is dead and so we can't do anything to him.

allowed one in my house, never bought a toy gun for my sons.

This is about how we've ignored mental illness but also how threadbare our sense of community has become.

A close community has better communication than VT did on that day, for example. And, I'm not criticizing the college admins or the police because they are only two elements in the whole.