This hits pretty close-to-home for me, in a way. I dropped my daughter off this past Sunday for a week at horse camp. On the doorway to the dining hall where we checked in was a "No Guns" sign. It always ticks me off when I see those on private property in Ohio -- putting one up is purely voluntary, and they carry the force of law in Ohio, but all it ensures is that honest, law-abiding people won't have guns there.What happened on Utoya island was that the murderer, dressed as a policeman and heavily armed, took a boat to the island, ordered teenagers to assemble around him, and started shooting. His rampage continued, as I understand it, until a SWAT team apparently dispatched from Oslo arrived on the island and shot him. In the meantime, he murdered at least 80 kids.
Many facts are still unknown, but at this point it appears that a key ingredient in the tragedy was the fact that the killer had the only gun on the island. It is, really, one of the ultimate horror scenarios: hundreds of kids, accompanied by a relative handful of adults, isolated on an island with a crazed killer. The outcome might have been very different if some of those adults had been armed.
Do they even stop to consider that someone legitimately dangerous won't care one bit about that sign?
Who is protecting my daughter from a deranged gunman at that camp if all the honest people are disarmed?
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