In case you have been living in a bubble and have not yet heard about yesterdays shootings at Norther Illinois University, here are details from CNN:

Steven P. Kazmierczak, identified as the gunman in Thursday’s shooting rampage at Northern Illinois University, was “an outstanding student” who reportedly stopped taking medication recently and became “somewhat erratic,” the university’s police chief said Friday.

Kazmierczak of Champaign, Illinois, opened fire on a geology class Thursday, shooting 21 people before killing himself. Five people were killed in addition to the shooter.

All the victims were from Illinois. The DeKalb County coroner’s office identified four of them: Daniel Parmenter, 20, of Westchester; Catalina Garcia, 20, of Cicero; Ryanne Mace, 19, of Carpentersville; and Julianna Gehant, 32, of Meriden.

The fifth victim, Gayle Dubowski, 20, of Carol Stream, died at a hospital in Rockford and was identified by Winnebago County authorities.

University Police Chief Donald Grady said people close to Kazmierczak have told authorities he was taking medication but had stopped and had become “somewhat erratic” in the last couple of weeks.

My heart and prays go out to the families of these kids who where struck down at the peek of their potential. Life is precious, and I cannot imagine the grief of the families right now.

The paramount question on everyones mind has got to be “Why?”. Why did this happen? Why did he do this? What should we have done to prevent this?

The Brady Bunch already has their anti-gun response on there website, along with a petition you can sign. CNN has taken a more reasonable approach (shocking!) and actually asked for thoughts from there viewers and collected some of them on their website (note none of the ones I read actually said the guns where the problem).

Illinois was listed as the Brady Bunch as the state with the 9th most “complete” gun laws in the country. Yet this happened there, even where Guns are more restricted. Even School grounds where guns are strictly prohibited, even by those who have passed the screening process to carry a gun.

I will not go into the standard rhetoric about the irony of “gun free zones”, nor the fact that more and tighter guns laws just provide more unarmed victems. I have already done that here.

I will, however, point out again that it is not illegal to be crazy. Unless we want to pre-emptively lock off those who may be capable of such a thing, then the first real notice we get is when a violent crime is commited. Perhaps if we focused on minimizing the impact of these events our time would be better spent.

There are no deadly weapons or dealy martial arts, there are only deadly people. Those who fix the intent to do violence unto their fellow man into there minds will find a way to do so. We need to find a way to stop them.

Also reporting:
Stop The ACLU
Jammie Wearing Fool
Gun Toting Liberal