Boston-area alums of that school in Florida gather to discuss how to push for gun control

The easier it is to get a gun (illegally or legally) the more likely it is someone innocent will be killed with it.

A straw man cannot be killed with a gun, silly.

The argument is that you cannot rely on the police to provide complete and total protection against the tiny core of genuinely sick people who want to or feel compelled to act violently.

Winchester isn't exactly Texas, and still the Globe article is full of stories from neighbors of this guy saying that they both kept on reporting him to the police and kept baseball bats handy in case this guy wigged out. Let me say that again: normal people in nice and quiet and liberal and peace-loving Winchester felt the need to keep a weapon handy because they were afraid of a specific violent person who acted violently.

The next point is that he used a knife, not a gun. So everyone was disarmed in terms of firearms, yet people were scared enough to sleep with baseball bats by their beds and this guy grabbed a knife and went nuts.

What's all this say?

First it says that this tragedy could have been prevented if we had stronger involuntary commitment laws on the books to be able to apprehend clearly dangerous people who've demonstrated a repeated streak of violent tendencies. Cough cough Florida shooter falls into this category too.

The second thing it says is that police can't be everywhere at once and yes it is up to ordinary people to be able to defend themselves because no one else will do it for you. Does that mean keeping a baseball bat under the car seat ("trucker's baseball league," as an old boss of mine once described it), does it mean keeping a gun in the home, does it mean getting trained and concealed-carrying? It can mean all of those things in varying amounts for different people.

The third thing it says is that gun laws have little to do with the probability of a sick person doing something awful. Yes if he'd had an AR or even a six-shooter it would have been worse but if the cops knew about him he wouldn't have gotten an LTC in Mass no matter how hard he tried. And that's good.

But what isn't good is that he couldn't get a gun, but somehow we were still comfortable as a society of letting go around terrorizing his neighbors.

There are four types of people who shouldn't have guns:
1. People who are too immature to handle once safely for reasons of age or mental incapacity. Jordan Peterson mentioned somewhere that the US Army or Canadian Forces won't take anyone with an IQ below 83 because they can't be trained. That's about one out of 8 people.

2. People who are physically disabled and can't safely handle a gun. Diminshed dexterity, visual acuity, etc.

3. People who are mentally ill or prone to violence and quite obviously so.

4. The real sociopaths like Stephen Paddock who look like everyone else and behave like everyone else but have a real evil inside them.

You can screen for 1-3. And you can even do it reliably. And that's where a lot of the failure to date lies. Gabby Giffords, Aurora CO, Florida, Texas, Navy Yard, Newtown, and now Winchester. All are item number 3.

You can never reliably screen for item 4. No system is perfect.

But nowhere in here do normal people figure. There are 10 million ARs out there. And you can count on a small number of hands the times they've been misused.

The idea of having more guns and arming teachers is the most asinine idea yet. Too many guns are manufactured here in the United States, and they're far too easily accessible, for that matter. Most of our lawmakers, both Democratic and Republican alike, are within the NRA's pockets, as well as that of Russia. It's sickening.