How does personal responsibility or the threat of prosecution deter a person who intends to culminate his act by killing himself?
That's the million dollar question. We find an effective way to stop these horrific acts without descending into mental or social "re-programming" or "thought police" and much of the current violence in the world goes away.
A person who commits this kind of act is severely disturbed; they feel overwhelming pain and they are determined to share it before ending it. If all they wanted to do was end their pain, they could eat a bullet anyday and save the other 14. Or, they're simply sadistic; they get pleasure out of seeing others suffer, and want to "go out with a bang", ending their lives on a high note.
In either case, such people are clearly not of sound mind. A person who kills simply to kill is insane, no matter the legal definition of being able to tell right from wrong.
I've said this, maybe in other forums, but there quite simply is no solution for a person with no prior documented criminal or mental history who walks into a gun store, buys a gun, a few mags and a couple hundred bullets, and 15 minutes later is surrounded by dead and wounded with a bullet in his head. Someone determined to do this is going to find a way, and the only means of attacking the problem are at the source and not conducive to a free society (ideas such as "pre-crime", "thought police", eugenics/genetic cleansing, etc.).
If they don't use a gun, it'll be a knife, an explosive (ring any bells? Suicide bombers in the Middle East were thought up largely because civilians started shooting back at gunmen), a chemical or biological agent (quite a few cases of HIV-positive rapists over the past years), or even radiological (buy a couple dozen smoke detectors posing as a contractor, tear em apart, add motor oil and fertilizer and you have yourself a dirty bomb). A gun is preferred because even for a criminal it is easy to get, requires few if any brains to use (simple "point and click" interface), and deals death both efficiently and selectively; you get to watch your target die up close and personal, and yet it is more impersonally used than a knife or other close-in weapon.
An armed populace is only part of the solution. Like I said, a gun becomes a far less preferable weapon when others start shooting back. Arm citizens and criminals will use bombs. It really is not difficult at all to make one; grind up mothballs, mix styrofoam and gasoline, motor oil and ammonium nitrate fertilizer, soap-making a la Fight Club for glycerin (the movie doesn't have all the steps, but instructions on the web for soap or biodiesel do and the final transformation of glycerin to nitroglycerin is also easily found), or even rust and aluminium filings. You can't regulate most of those products; they're too useful to society or can be made from scratch without buying out-of-the-ordinary quantities of anything.
I think if you were going to stop these acts, the solution would have to be social. People need to recognize warning signs and not say "it isn't my problem", and notify proper authorities. Then you need intelligent people making the call whether a tip is worth following; a lot of school shootings were known about beforehand, and the person was reported to authorities who dismissed the suspicions. Of course hindsight is always 20/20; after every one of these acts one of the first questions is "how could this have been planned right under the noses of parents/teachers/police?", and when enough investigation is done it's suddenly obvious he was going off the deep end, but it's so obvious because the police and authorities focused attention on one guy and collected hundreds of disparate pieces of information that any one person wouldn't have had beforehand.
In summary, if you're serious about stopping people, you have to catch them BEFORE they commit their heinous acts. Reaction simply cannot work long-term, because the weapons will change to make that difficult or impossible. How you're going to do that without turning this country into something out of '1984', I have no clue.
Why aren't you suggesting to restrict the press? I think it would be a far more useful means of discouraging these murders. Rather than trying to stop them from murdering with guns when they can do it with bombs or fire, let's just frustrate their goals.
Brilliant; you're shredding the First Amendment to protect the Second. The First Amendment is the reason you have the Second in the first place; if you can't protect your right to free speech (and other rights), you will inevitably lose it. So too, if you are unwilling to protect it, or even worse, freely willing to give it up. If they can regulate the press, they can regulate editorials, then blogs, then what you write in a letter or e-mail, then what you say to your friends and family.
Infringement of the First OR Second Amendments are not going to stop this kind of thing. Even if a gunman somehow knew he'd never make national headlines, he'd still want to take as many as he could with him; the guys he left alive will certainly never forget him, and for a guy who feels invisible and worthless that's enough of a mark.
