Saturday, April 21, 2007

For everyone who

thinks allowing students to carry weapons in school is a good idea:

"BARABOO, Wisconsin (AP) -- A teenager accused of gunning down his principal told detectives in a videotaped interview that he didn't mean to kill him but "freaked out" when the principal tackled him in a school hallway.

Eric Hainstock, 16, also told investigators in the same interview hours after Principal John Klang was fatally shot that he'd been in anger management classes for years but found them useless."

I can just hear all the scoffing and rationalizing, but it's undeniable that the principal would still be alive if the kid hadn't been carrying.

That happened last September, and while it doesn't prove anything, it shows how allowing students to carry weapons might go wrong. How wrong it goes would be measured in the cumulative number of bodies over time, rather than the number of bodies produced by any mass-shooting that happened (theoretically) because the students were unarmed. But it's reasonable to conclude that the net result would be about the same.