My brother-in-law lives in Iowa, small town, small community of about 5,000 people, mostly rural. A coupe of weeks ago, a 12 year old walks up to his teacher, points a gun at her and pulls the trigger. Luckily, the student was not smart enough to remove the safety, and the gun did not go off. Teacher knocked the gun out of his hands, the class immediately jumped on top of the kid and held him down until the cops/and or other help arrived on the scene. What would have happened had that gun went off is anyone's guess. Would he have started shooting students, would he have turned the gun on himself? Thankfully, we'll never know. That teacher though, how do you come back from that? She absolutely could be dead. I'm assuming they have an ALICE plan in their school which promotes FIGHT if necessary. That would explain the other students in the room jumping the shooter. I don't know if the teacher told them to jump him, or if they did it on their own. Either way, it's impressive that they acted so quickly. This can happen anyplace, anytime in our nation's schools. There is no way outside of metal detectors and body searches to stop it. Even then, kids can wait outside after school or before school and start picking other kids and staff off with rifles, assault guns, pistols, pipe bombs, whatever... Being a high school teacher, this touches me pretty deeply as I know that on any given day, this can happen at my school. There are no schools that are exempt from this danger, none. Every school has a certain population of kids that could do it, it's just a matter of will they make that decision someday, or won't they. If they make that decision, will other kids in the know report it before it happens? It's scary.