That's meaningless though. It only becomes a "mass shooting" if it *isn't* stopped.
That's true.
I think it's quite reasonable to assume that if even a single member of the school staff at Sandy Hook Elementary had been armed, that at least some lives would have been saved, and quite possibly most or all of the children given the order of events.
That's preposterously idiotic. The dynamics of people under tremendous stress aren't automatically improved by making sure more of those people can deliver lethal force easily. What is quite reasonable is that the rate of accidental shootings at schools would increase from zero to some non zero number as a result of armed staff on site.
I'm sure one of us has dedicated a large part of their life to studying this sort of thing, the application of violence against civilian populations, it's motivations, causes, and techniques to minimize negative effects. On the other hand, one of us is a know it all douchebag who makes wild guesses based on his hilariously limited anecdotal life experience. Let's set that aside, though.
The whole "If XYZgroup had guns...etc" argument is quaint and simplistic, so good for TV etc. It does have a few small problems. In the public sector there's the issue of the massively enormous cost of training, liability protection, etc. It would be billions. To accomplish what? To save 15 kids a year in the utopian fantasy best case? Most private schools probably aren't going to bother, at all. Dalton and St Paul's and other elite private schools already have armed security personnel, but random XYZ for profit charter school squeezing every penny out of $25k a year non union teachers isn't about to cut into the bottom line.
Gun control may or may not prevent this sort of thing from occurring as frequently, but it almost certainly would lower the overall homicide and severe injury rate in the US. There are valid arguments that there are potential negative consequences around selective enforcement, creating another source of revenue for criminal organizations, and many more. There's also the issue of the complete lack of complexity involved in manufacturing rudimentary firearms. Anyone with even a slight amount of mechanical aptitude and access to simple tools can smith a functional rudimentary semi-autmoatic in a day. The reductio ad absurdum argument against gun control is fairly compelling. Crazy ******** will make bombs instead. Unless you ban brass and springs and stock iron, millions of people will be able to manufacture completely unregulated largely untraceable weapons with increasing levels of sophistication as they acquire skills and proficiencies they didn't care about when they buy a Glock at Wal Mart.
None of that happened anywhere gun control was enacted, but none of those places are really very demographically similar to the US.
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