The Bath School Disaster occurred in 1927 and its perpertrator was, likewise, pretty clearly mentally ill (though he was not the principal of the school). Actually, the mental states and motives, irrational as they were, of the men responsible were probably not that different. (Which doesn't mean I support the gun lobby. I don't. But it was definitely no less obscene than Virginia Tech, if you've read the accounts.)

If anything, it should be a mental health issue. When I was in school, we got three free visits to the mental health center. Three. At a school that had one of the highest suicide rates among U.S. small colleges. So if you couldn't pay, you were high and dry after that. The handful of people I knew who actually did use their visits were at the crisis stage by the time they did so and either forced themselves to go or were hauled in by their parents or by academic probation. That means that either they were still rational enough to realize they had a problem or somebody was watching out for them. There were a lot of other kids who had major problems who quit or took time off. One of my classmates ate a handful of cyanide one morning before our history class; if he had been a more violent kid, he might have killed someone else, but he killed himself instead.

I don't know why this kid wasn't hauled in for serious counseling and why his parents weren't apparently contacted to back that up, but guns or no guns, if you're not in that state of mind, you don't shoot people. I'm all for better gun control, but I can't believe how many warning signs were passed over before this all came down.