My opinion
To preface:
Im a college student at a university a state away from Va-tech. (UNCC, University of North Carolina at Charlotte)
The schools are of similar size (20,000 to 26,000 students UNCC to Va tech respectively). Land foot print Va tech is about twice as large as uncc (1200 acres to 2600 acres)
My thoughts:
I feel no amount of planning could have stopped this from happening. At Va tech, my school, or other public enviroment not under extreme security.
This entire incident basically grounded me and scared the crap out of me for a few days.
I guess I might be considered one of those \"gung-ho\" types as the first thought I had when this happened was if even a fraction of the people were armed, could they have stopped him?
After thinking about it more, I realized that this would have happened no matter the state of Gun laws in the US or on College campus\'.
If he took college level chemistry and had a walmart near by, he could have just made simple bombs pretty easily and 32+ people would have still died.
If handguns were banned, a short model assualt rifle like the Russian Beta Spetnaz (shortened AK-47) which is much more powerful and carries double+ the ammuntion that of a 9mm pistol. Just as easily used in building etc.
After the run through the news crews did on our campus asking people if they felt safe. And interviewing campus police etc. I realzied that the campus police aren\'t ever the same. You rarely see familar faces for long as most leave to go to city,county, or state level departments. The ones that are there just stay for job experience and then follow the others. So most are not prepared for what happened or anything similar.
Even after all of this, I have little doubt that this exact situtation could be easily repeated in any major city or university campus anywhere in US without much problem on the Attackers part.