>>Had their been properly trained and armed people (preferably concealed so they aren't easily picked off in the opening moments) in the school, the issue might have been avoided altogether.
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>Bill, I don't know what the solution is - but if you have reached the point where schools need to be protected by armed marksmen there must something seriously wrong with the system.

The system, what system? There's a melange of programs here and there, but I haven't noticed much of an overall system that would be guaranteed to exist in every neck of each wood.

And in the manner of politician amnesia (you debunk them a dozen times, catch them red-handed, and the next time they keep on as if nothing happened, the kind of teflon coating that was invented for Reagan and it, ahem, stuck), the points were reached long and many times ago, so what - the non-system goes on as if nothing happened. Just look at various points already mentioned:

- the psychologically unstable and outright dangerous people are not on the budget, unless they are in prison. They got off the budget in the eighties, and all the gov't sponsored programs to care of such people were revoked (no system, just programs - which can then be left to expire or just be revoked)

- the CIA's involvement in drug trafficking during the Vietnam war didn't cause too many heads to roll. Is there any evidence they absolutely stopped?

- the drugs of both kind are peddled left and right; check the stuff prescribed for ADD (and the other one with one extra letter, I'm bad with names), depression etc, often on recommendation of school nurse. And even more dangerous things are peddled through various testing programs - the guy who killed so many in Blacksburg few years ago was on something of the kind, which wasn't repeated too often in the media (and that was back then when I was still occasionally watching/reading them).

- the psychiatrists have too much power; you get deurinated by some stupid rule (check Tracy's link to that mom's article - when I was a kid, the dress code, what we had of it, annoyed me enormously, and I was considered mostly normal) and then they find that "protesteth too much" is a kind of a syndrome they voted in last year, and put you on drugs. Recent suggestions for their list include "mentions the Constitution too often", "is contrarian to the authorities", "mentions his rights too often" and such. They can put you on mandatory treatment at will.

- the young have no future. Their jobs are gone. What do they do with themselves?

>I'm trying to work out why, when in the UK no-one feels the need to carry a gun for self defense (including the police), it should be felt neccessary in the U.S.

I guess everybody wants to have one because everyone assumes everyone else may have one. It's a different mindset.