Danish guy here who works as a school (substitute teacher) and i also study security for a hobby.
As usual we got the media drooling all over, covering everything from hero teachers to police response to the personal life of the perpetrator and his family and shocked responses from affected people.
Some observations though:
1) Gun laws aren't going to help.
The gun problem in America is rooted in culture, and the fact that Mexico is a close neighbor. A potential gun law is going to be in the same boat as anti-piracy laws in that they won't work because most people who owns a gun aren't going to give a sh*t (just like most internet pirates don't give a sh*t). You can't fix this problem with law. You need to make a cultural change, which can take many decades and might be impossible. And you will still need to deal with smuggling and black market trade.
And even then, this isn't going to help against this particular problem. Simple fact: If a maniac wants weapons in America to conduct a school/movie theater/pet kitten schooting, he is going to be able to get his hands on them. Period. It doesn't matter how many gun laws you pass.
2) You can't protect yourself against this kind of attack
It's a fact. You simply can't. You can't put armed guards and metal detectors at every school/university/college in the country. It isn't going to happen. It's financially and logistically impossible to protect everything and cover every angle. And even if you could, sooner or later you would start seeing tragedies where the armed guards shot someone instead.
In addition it's also impossible to train people for this kind of stuff. Teachers are NOT soldiers. They cannot be expected to act rationally or "according to plan" once something like this happens, even if you try to train them for it.
What you CAN do, however, is provide them knowledge. They need to know the emergency exits in the school. They need to know emergency tools they can use (fire axes, hiding places, school communication/speaker system), which Windows you can make the children crawl out of etc.
3) People focus too much on prevention, too little on response.
As i mentioned, preventing this kind of attack is impossible, yet people have a complete tendency to focus on how you can prevent this kind of attack, and often this comes at the cost of how you can RESPOND to this kind of attack.
Response is important, and failure to respond properly can have fatal consequences. The problems that Oslo police encountered during the Breivik massacre last year because their response plan and preperation was poor came at the cost of everywhere between 10 and 25 lives on Utøya. Once a situation like this arises, police getting to the scene quickly and getting an overview of the situation is going to save lives.
It's my understanding that police in this case responded very rapidly. If they hadn't, this shooting might easily have had twice the body-count. Good work on their part, but unfortunately good response still doesn't prevent the first brunt of an attack.
