As the nation tries to make some sense of the senseless death of 28 people in Connecticut — 20 of them elementary school children — one thing seems clear to me: easy access to guns is at least partially to blame.
Adam Lanza carried two handguns and an assault rifle into the school. They were legally registered, and opened fire. It was quick and efficient and deadly.
The scene, as described by The New York Times:
A 20-year-old man wearing combat gear and armed with semiautomatic pistols and a semiautomatic rifle killed 26 people — 20 of them children — in an attack in an elementary school in central Connecticut on Friday. Witnesses and officials described a horrific scene as the gunman, with brutal efficiency, chose his victims in two classrooms while other students dove under desks and hid in closets.
Hundreds of terrified parents arrived as their sobbing children were led out of the Sandy Hook Elementary School in a wooded corner of Newtown, Conn. By then, all of the victims had been shot and most were dead, and the gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, had committed suicide. The children killed were said to be 5 to 10 years old.
He entered the school with some serious firepower:
Law enforcement officials said the weapons used by the gunman were a Sig Sauer and a Glock, both handguns. The police also found a Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine.
The shooting, which comes on the heals of another mass shooting in Oregon earlier in the week, is the second deadliest in the United States. It should be a wake-up call to those who refuse to view guns as a main reason that gun violence is so bloody.
Lanza, who apparently had serious mental health problems, is solely to blame — he hatched his plan, marched himself to the school and pulled the triggers. But what if he did not have access to such powerful weapons. What if — to engage in a thought experiment — he had access only to a baseball bat or knife? Can we truly say that yesterday’s tragedy would have been as deadly?
Some will say — and have, this is not a straw man argument — that what happened yesterday could have been prevented or at least tempered had someone else in the school been carrying a gun. This is absurd. Lanza was heavily armed and on a suicide mission; it’s possible our theoretical gun-toting staffer might have gotten off a kill shot to prevent what happened, but more likely the staffer would have been gunned down quickly and mercilessly. A single police officer on site might have helped, but again not likely. The only way for the arm-everyone logic to work would be to have an armed cadre of trained officers on site at all times — something our taxpaying public would never go for.
We still do not know the specifics on how the guns were purchased — as I said, they were legally registered — or why Lanza’s mother felt it necessary to possess a semi-automatic rifle and two automatic pistols that, when taken together, could unleash such a barrage of death in so short a time. Personally, I’m having great difficulty understanding why anyone would need such firepower.
Melissa Harris-Perry, a columnist for The Nation and host of the Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC, put it rather plainly yesterday on Now with Alex Wagner.
What I would caution–and I think it’s part of the lesson we learn as parents, and that we also have to learn as a country, vis-á-vis our children–is that we cannot make them safe at all times. And so we have to be careful about the reaction being, ‘Let’s build a moat, and a wall, and a metal detector around our whole worlds.’ We can, however, change the structural realities in which they exist that make them safer because there would be fewer available guns… we can’t exclusively lead with our hearts. We must also lead with our heads as we start thinking about reasonable reactions to this.
Serious and reasonable changes to the “structural realities” must include a re-evaluation of the national gun culture. Despite what the NRA says, guns do kill people.
Hank Kalet 
According to NBC news and relatives who knew Lanza's mother, she purchased the guns legally because she was a woman living alone and wanted some security. Isn't that the NRA rationale for having guns everywhere at all times, for protection. Great, she had the guns for protection and then her demented son used her guns to kill her and 26 innocent people most of whom were very young innocent kids. Fat lot of good her guns did to give her protection. At this point, I'm ready for banning all hand guns, I am fed up with the weekly slaughters. The NRA can rot in hell forever.