Cho Seung-huiKillers like Cho Seung-hui aren't made in heaven or hell. They are ordinary people who face ordinary social crisis like abandonment of girlfriends. In any college or society at large you will find some loners, introverts who cannot adjust themselves well with the scoiety after rebuffed by it at some stage in their life. Most often, given enough time, they will integrate again with society down the road. In their moment of serious crisis and mental anguish if you add to this potentially dangerous mix the easy availability of firearms then you are looking for trouble, serious trouble.

While it is true that firearms don't kill (humans do), easy availaibility of firearms make it extremely easy for anyone with even the slightest of mental anguish to take their rage upon others.

Making it easier for teachers or other students to have firearms too isn't going to solve the problem as some dimwits suggested on the internet, it will increase it. In any school or college often there are serious altercations, having a firearm with you isn't going to help the situation. So you stole my gf/bf…bang, you won the race…%$#$…bang, you got better grades…my life is ruined…bang; you get the picture. Teenagers aren't often associated with making mature decisions about their own lives, let alone that of others. Making it easy for them to obtain firearms will make teaching or even being a student the most dangerous professions imaginable.

Overall I think the solution to reducing such horrors is to strongly restrict availability of firearms not to mention high capacity magazines. Any school should also aggresively identify and treat loners with expressed desire to kill or harm themselves or others. Virginia tech should have listened to the warnings of the creative writing teacher who was concerned about Cho's veiled reference to death.
BTW: Have you ever wondered why such school shootings are so common in US and not in any other countries?

My heart-felt condolences are for the murdered students, teachers and for their relatives. I hope that this would be the last straw before the gun control act is amended in USA. It is a cautionary note to the rest of the world too what easy availability of firearms can do to your children.