Verm - I appreciate your post. I agree that we could go down that road as a country, but I feel like the chances of that happening are so small that to have heavy weapons so easily available to the general population is not a sensible precaution. I would personally GTFO if I had any solid evidence that we were going to shit the bed and go into a civil war ( there would be a great deal of events leading up to it ), and frankly I feel like we're only making it easy for people that actually want one to arm themselves for one. I understand that not everyone can afford to leave town, but that's an unfortunate result of poor life decisions for *most* people, barring the sick and elderly. There has to be a way to head in a direction where it's incredibly expensive or difficult for anyone to have these items that hasn't gone thru an array of background checks and/or recieved law enforcement or military training. In China weapons are incredibly expensive and you face SERIOUS time for getting caught for one if it doesn't involve youyr career, and subsequently they have a drastically lower incidence of these types of events. I do not think that this is a coincidence, and neither do a great deal of people on both sides of the debate. This incident has caused a ton of people to look at other countries and see the contrasts. We are not perfect, and it would do us well to learn from others sometimes just like in our day to day lives. We can't just give up and all it a moot point because there are already so many weapons out there. That's defeatist thinking and I don't buy it.
