Originally Posted by Carl in Tampa

I spent a significant portion of my working life administering security at the White House. I also set up temporary security measures for the President when he traveled. One of my associates was selected to design security measures at the Capitol. My organization provided the first Sky Marshals. I have spent my life working on physical security issues.

With that background, I state confidently that there is no conceivable gun control law that will prevent mass shootings or shootings in schools.

Even in the Secret Service, with physical barriers, video cameras with motion detectors, metal detectors, smoke detectors, nuclear radiation detectors, and door and window alarms, the final defense against intruders and attackers was a trained, armed person.

Thus it must be with schools. They must be enclosed by physical barriers, with access limited to identified people, who go through metal detectors. The access point must be attended by armed security personnel. Other armed personnel must be distributed through the school; they would best be school administrators and teachers who have undergone firearms training and want to be armed. Doing these things is called "hardening the target."

Even this is no guarantee against attacks. Even the White House is periodically assaulted. I have been to the scene where White House Police Officers have had to kill armed intruders.

No gun ban can be fully effective. There are too many guns of all types already in circulation to think that they can all be retrieved and destroyed. Ban a gun and its price goes up on the Black Market.

Quit thinking that a ban on high capacity magazines would help. You can argue back and forth that fewer people would be killed if the shooter had to reload more often, but keep this in mind: Sgt. York killed 25 armed German soldiers in one encounter with a bolt action rifle. And the rifle had to be reloaded after every five rounds.

Forget Australia as a model. We have about three hundred million more people than Australia, and many of those people have multiple guns. You will never get all the guns confiscated.

Don't get hung up on the AR-15. The gun used in the worst mass murder in a school in America was a Glock handgun, with multiple ordinary magazines.

In summary: Harden the target.