Well, I'll tip my hat to most of JU, at least, for maintaining rational thinking in the wake of the VA Tech school shooting. I wish, however, that that was the case on all of the forums I frequent.

But on many forums, there's a general panic, a general rush to ban anything that's projectile flies faster or further than a compound bow with a 65 pound draw. and that rush is, of course, misguided.

When Columbine occurred, I was working as a representative for our area homeschool group. Not in a professional capacity, but in a public capacity, where I did field calls and questions. For the next several months (it died down when school started in September), there was little reprieve from the calls and the questions about the homeschool laws in our state. Parents wanted to homeschool because they wanted to shelter their children from the violence in the schools, violence they felt would spread over from the faraway state of Colorado.

My response was pretty standard. I would ask parents why they wanted to homeschool. As is always the case, many had good reasons: religious values, they wanted the closeness and sense of family that homeschooling offers not only within the homeschooling family, but in the extended homeschool network, or they felt their child would thrive with the individualized attention. But in the wake of Columbine, many of the responses had to deal with protecting their children from violence in the schools.

My belief then, as it is now, is that removing your children from school because of the possibility of violence is not the best reason to homeschool. Children will grow up in a world where they must deal with violence as a reality, and hiding your head in the sand isn't the best way to respond. In my experience, I have found that parents who homeschool in reaction to headlines also have the highest dropout rate: once the stories are out of the headlines, once they've realized the very daunting challenges that are also part and parcel of the homeschool experience, their children return to public school and that is the end of it.

In the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting, the response has been similarly irrational. Disarm our citizens, they demand, and this violence will cease immediately. They ignore the fact that, had the system worked properly and the rules in place been followed, the shooter would never have been able to purchase a gun in the first place. They ignore the fact that not one bank robber has stopped and considered a city's handgun ordinance before robbing a bank. Gun control simply does not work on the target population, as they are, well, criminals, and not inclined to follow the law in the first place. It only works to prevent law abiding citizens from owning weapons, a restriction the Second Amendment was designed to prevent.

Stricter gun control will almost certainly be the result of the shooting, at least in some municipalities. At least for awhile. But expecting that stricter gun control to make us safer is delusional thinking; something that has never worked in the past is unlikely to work in the future.