More on guns and schools

From a comment in the thread at deadmonywalking

The summer before my senior year we had a kid blow up the auditorium. Nobody was hurt. He went to prison. Because of the Apollo program a lot of kids got interested in rockets and rocket related explosives.

When I was 15 (10th grade) I took vocational ag and one kid got rattlesnake bit at the ag barn (school property but off campus). Our ag teacher told us to carry a weapon when we went to the ag barn. My dad got me a .45 out of the Army Reserve arms locker (it had to be returned for an Inspector General inventory once a year) and I kept it in the trunk of my '56 chevy.

The main difference between then and now is that now my dad and that teacher would go to prison.

The '56 chevy and the pistol were in the school parking lot everyday. There were a lot of guns in the school parking lot, deer rifles in gun racks mostly. It was a different world. People took care of themselves pretty much.

That's also when Whitman drug his footlocker full of rifles up the stairs of the University of Texas clock tower. That was the same year I was taking a gun to school everyday.

So, yes, we had stuff happen every once in a while. But nobody thought Whitman went nuts because he'd been in the marines and had guns. We just figured he went nuts because that's what happens sometimes.

We didn't have 24 hour cable news though. We had 30 minutes a day of TV news.

The police don't control things any better now than people did on their own back then. In most ways the police do a worse job of it.