It happened again: another school, another shooting... This time it was much smaller and apparently no one was killed. A student at Taft High School in CA went after his classmates with a shotgun. Besides the impact on the students, it put to rest two "truisms" being promoted by gun advocates. The first one is that armed guards are required to prevent these things at school. It turns out that the school did indeed have an armed guard (watch the gun nuts go after him as being incompetent). The second is that only a good person with a gun can stop a bad person with a gun. In this case, it was a teacher and a school supervisor who simply talked him into surrenduring.

Would any of the proposed gun bans currently being considered have prevented this? Probably not (unless harsher penalties are imposed on parents for not securing their firearms so their kids can't get them). The problem in this case seems to have stemmed from bullying. There's not enough information available yet to know how this was managed by the school, but it was bad enough for the boy to create a "hit list", which got him previously suspended from school. This seems like a red flag, and we'll likely find out that this was poorly handled. Children being bullied, marginalized, and shunned will incur psychological damage, and the schools need to do a better job recognizing it happening and dealing with it.

NRA President Wayne LaPierre mentioned mental health in his don't-blame-the-guns explanation of why guns aren't related to gun violence, but I don't think he mentioned bullying, which has come under scrutiny before. He also mentioned violent video games and movies, another laughable scapegoat. How many millions of people in the U.S. watch violent movies or play violent video games and don't kill people? I'd even venture that for some it's a cathartic release which prevents actual violence (The Daily Show explores this in more detail).

It's kind of funny, really. During President Obama's first term, the paranoid gun owners were exclaiming loudly that his doing nothing about gun control was PROOF that he was actually planning on pulling out all the stops in his second term. I found it quite laughable. And then - Sandy Hook happened. I think the reality of 5-7 year old children being mowed down in a hail of bullets while in school was the straw that broke the camel's back, not just for the president, but for most of America as well. We were constantly being told that a few gun deaths were the price we had to pay for our constitutional freedom. We have finally realized that the deaths of so many innocents is too high a price to pay for a small minority to enjoy their distored version of a constitutional amendment.

Since the gun "enthusiasts" were not going to regulate themselves, President Obama tasked Vice-President Joe Biden with creating a task force and coming up with regulations to help get the madness under control. Everyone assumed that assault weapons and large capacity magazines would be easy first targets. That may be a false assumption. Nonetheless, the NRA is already on the offensive against the task force and the president himself. While states like NY are enacting tougher laws than what the Executive branch is considering, other states (like WY) are trying to pre-emptively neuter any legislation.

Naturally, all of this has the idiots foaming at the mouth. Fox "News" legal analyst Judge Napolitano informs viewers that the 2nd Amendment protects "your right to shoot tyrants". This is the very definition of throwing gasoline on the fire. How many mentally unhinged viewers will take him at his word? He is essentially advocating for the assassination of the president. How is this legal?

Another group of "legal scholars" misinterpreting the text and history of the 2nd Amendment is the "Oath Keepers". They are the militia arm of conspiracy nut job Alex Jones' Prison Planet. They too are advocating for an armed revolution. They have forgotten the lessons of the Civil War, when our military was not nearly as strong nor well-equipped as they are now.

Ultimately, the real revolution may came via the pen rather than the sword. Americans have put up with the "my cold dead hands" nonsense long enough. The states' right to form a militia does not give every yahoo the right to blow shit up with a machine gun. Sorry, but our right to domestic tranquility overrides your self-perceived right to own whatever weapon you want.

Viva La Revolucion!