Aquila89 wrote:Well, yeah, I wrote about that, they want to die. But before that, they want to kill people; if they just wanted to die, they'd simply shoot themselves. So if schools became heavily guarded fortresses, that might deter them, because they'd think that they'd get shot before getting to kill anyone.
You mean something like
a military base?
School shootings are almost always perpetrated by students of the school, usually a current student. You can't categorically keep students out of a school the way you can keep enemies out of a fortress in wartime, by barring the gates and/or shooting anyone who tries to gain entry. Fortification is designed to defend a position from external attack, not an attack from within.
You could try implementing stringent screening processes, with metal detectors and the like at strategic checkpoints, but then the shooter is given the obvious option of simply attacking the checkpoint. Any rigorous security screening is going to involve delays. Delays mean lines, and lines mean targets hanging around outside the secured perimeter.
As for them picking a different target, that that's not how school shooters and workplace shooters generally work. Some are revenge shooters after a specific person or people, and most of the remainder are rampage shooters who are looking to send a message to an institution that they believe acted unconscionably toward them. In both cases the target is central to their reasoning for the crime. They're not likely to just pick a different target because their preferred one is dangerous, any more than Captain Ahab would have just picked a smaller and gentler whale to hunt down because the white whale was dangerous.
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn