Virginia tech shooting

A nutcase shot 32 people and himself in Virginia tech. He was a loner, was obsessed with violence, and left some notes blaming "rich kids" and "debauchery" (that is, disapproved of other people having more money and getting laid more often than himself - which is a rather common human emotion, but most people don't go postal because of it).

The university is being blamed for not acting fast enough on the day of the shooting. I don't know if they should be blamed for it - I am sure an investigation will find out, one way or another - but what I would like to know is how come the university did not do anything after the guy harassed a few women and set fire to the dorm. (Maybe there is some good answer to that, too.)

The man has also written two plays that the readers found very violent and highly disturbing. Here they are. I have read them and have not found them particularly violent or disturbing: they are rather violent, but I and people I know have written worse without shooting anyone, and they are quite angry in a teenagery way, but nothing really out of ordinary. They would not have rung a warning bell with me. I wonder if that's just me being desensitized to violence, or the people did not really see anything scary about them earlier and are just having a flash of hindsight now, or do the creative writing teachers and students see warnings much more efficiently than ordinary people like myself.

There was a lot of conversation of gun control after this. I have no strong opinion on gun control one way or the other, at least as long as it does not interfere with my pistol shooting hobby (and currently in Finland it doesn't), but after seeing several people in the US point out that the gunman could have been stopped earlier if any of the students or teachers had a gun on them, and several of my friends on IRC make fun of this argument, I must say that those people in the US really do have a point:

I don't, generally speaking, believe that an armed society is a polite society. It's a tradeoff: on one hand, if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have them, on the other hand it might well be safer when only the serious outlaws have guns than when every teenage hooligan has them.

However, if we already are in a state where people are allowed to buy and carry firearms freely, banning guns from a small area like a university campus really will lead to a situation where everyone who is up to no good can have a gun, and no law-abiding citizen will. The worst of both worlds.