Welcome to an imperfect, unsafe world. The only real solution would be my real-ultimate idea for an elite ninja team to lie in wait in every public school to react quickly and with silent efficiency to developing and immediate threats.

Barring that, as quality ninja are getting somewhat difficult to find, we should love our friends and families every day like it could be the last we have together, because it could be.

I'm going to throw myself out there and just suggest that perhaps this incident shows us that our disaster-prevention tactics are working...

What I mean is: what can we do, if not 1) make the punishment so severe it deters most criminals from action and 2) act quickly to prevent the deaths of as many as we can once a crisis starts?

On our severe punishments #1: It seems Cho was convinced he was in deep sh** for doing what he did, and opted to blow his brains out.

On our swift response #2: Police were on site, actively looking for Cho when the second shooting started, and caught up to him within minutes.

We'll never stop someone committed enough to take his life. But this tragedy convinces me we're closer to limiting the # of occurrences to the most determined/insane. And that's a comfort.

My prayers to the families...

The schools in this town just put in all these damn cameras in the past few years. What's that going to do? ?Give us a scary movie to watch when something does happen!

There should be security guards by all doors that are unlocked during the daytime! But the truth is the school district's budget can't afford it! So, it's like waiting for the shoe to drop.

Anyways, an administrator informed me that security guards at the high school were not trained to intervene during altercations between classmates. So I guess they definitely wouldn't be trained to stop ARMED gunmen!

Well, I guess we could always fortify every pre-school, grade school, high school, and college in America with watch towers, motion detectors, metal detectors, hundreds of cameras, maybe a helicopter with an infra-red motion detector attached to it....and perhaps we could have some sort of howitzer canon or maybe even a tank parked in the parking lot.......that might do the trick (as far as making our nation's schools as safe as they can be)! Oh!, and I almost forgot!.....obviously there would have to be dozens of body-armoured foot soldiers walking about here and there (with their guns at the ready), as well!

But golly!, that sure would cost the American taxpayers a ton of money....wouldn't it?

Oh, well! I guess if we go that route.....we can all forget about that "return trip to the moon" that was promised!

Do you think public schools have become safer since the Columbine shootings?

Was this question someone's idea of a joke? Can anyone remember the number of shootings SINCE Columbine? That's a better question.

You weren't safe then, you're not safe now. There's a split second between feeling safe and not being safe at all. If you had asked V Tech students at 6:30 that morning, they would have responded in the positive too.

One answer, I believe, are groups like Watch D.O.G.S. (Dads of Great Students). Here is how the organization got started:

"WATCH D.O.G.S. Across Americ® started after a 1998 middle-school shooting in Jonesboro, Ark., prompted one father, WATCH D.O.G.S. founder Jim Moore, to get involved. He wanted to help prevent such violence from occurring at his child's school or at any school. Moore could easily see that fathers were the missing element at his child's school. He suggested to the principal a way to involve fathers, help create a safer, stronger school setting and provide positive male role models for students."

I am attempting to start up a Watch Dog group in the school my children attend.

Read up on it: http://www.watchdogs.net/Default.aspx?tabid=224

We as a culture have neutered fathers. We've raised an entire generation of kids in single parent households where the kids visit dad every other weekend and one week a year or if he is in the home he's glued to the internet or NASCAR. The family unit is in shambles and we wonder why kids flip out and destroy the lives of countless others in incidents like the VT killings. We dad's have become wusses, weak inefficient shadows of our fathers and grandfathers. We have let this thing happen to us and this is the result. How many of these slayings did you see in the 40's or 50's when the family unit was strong and your dad was a figure of power and strength in your life?

It's not gun control or sending every kid with a bad thought through a battery of pyshological tests or turning our schools into Fort Knox. If you want the answer to the problem look no further than your front door. The only question you need to be asking is "Where's Dad?".

First, it should be noted that Cho and both the killers at Columbine came from intact two parent families.

As for the question at hand, yes, overall, I think the schools have become safer at least here in Lawrence. As stated above, most schools lock their doors after classes commence and visitors have to go through the office.

However, Lawrence was safe to begin with. The average school in the U.S. was safe to begin with. There have been less than a dozen of these incidents in recent history. Compare that to the number of schools in the U.S. and you have a very small percentage of schools affected.

It should also be noted that the U.S. is not the only country where there have been school shootings. Qatar, the Netherlands and Australia have all had recent school shootings.

Dena