This "what we need is more guns" notion has got to stop
Seriously, we need think tanks to dispel these ideas as fast as the right wing and NRA spews them out.
Asking ordinary citizens to take on gunmen armed with military grade weapons, and respond as fast as a police officer would (which have lots of regular training in order to draw their weapon very fast and fire accurately) is not reasonable, and even if the gunman happened to be armed with just a pistol, the gunman has the upper hand because of the element of surprise.
If more people have weapons, gunmen will at the most just wear armor (like the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout North Hollywood shooters in 1998, wore body armor over most of their body and took on around two dozen police officers in a shootout that lasted 30 minutes.) If the gunmen wear body armor, once again the gunmen will have the upper advantage unless everyone wears body armor (which is not going to happen.)
And still then, that doesn't take into account the many other murders that happen daily due to the use of a gun. If someone draws a gun on you in surprise, and if you were armed, you don't have enough time to take your gun out before the gunman would shoot back.
Putting strict gun control, as shown in Australia, would drastically lower the murder and suicide rate. That's the only way to stop this. America is still to easy for anyone to get heavily armed and the public is basically at the mercy of the sanity or the character (or in this latest shooting, the responsibility) of whoever manages to get heavily armed.
And even then, putting more guns in the hands of people (to defend against a once in a lifetime confrontation) is just disastrous, guns make immature and irresponsible people (which are aplenty in America) feel more powerful (because they have a lethal force weapon in their hands) and thus you'll have to risk it that their poor judgement wouldn't cause them to take out a gun over an argument with someone else, for instance: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/us/florida-shooting-stirs-echoes-of-trayvon-martin-case.html?_r=0
Even this thing about armed security guards, once again security guards would have to have the training of police officers (which is months and months of target practice shooting) to be able to draw a weapon fast enough and fire accurately. Even a hired police officer may not be able to draw a weapon fast enough (45 police officers died this year from gunfire so far) nevertheless even be a match for a gunman with an AR-15 and bulletproof armor.
Once again, as the North Hollywood Shootout demonstrated, even police (except for SWAT) are no match for a Gunman with body armor and military level machine guns. Seriously, how can anyone think that an individual police officer acting as a guard would be a match for this?
And if the police or armed security guards get body armor, the gunmen will simply get armor piercing bullets (as in once again the North Hollywood Shootout.)
Heck, Americans were more reasonable in the days of the Old West.
Dodge City, KS in 1879:
An excerpt from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-winkler/did-the-wild-west-have-mo_b_956035.html
"Although some in the gun community insist that more guns equals less crime, in the Wild West they discovered that gun control can work. Gun violence in these towns was far more rare than we commonly imagine. Historians who've studied the numbers have determined that frontier towns averaged less than two murders a year. Granted, the population of these towns was small. Nevertheless, these were not places where duels at high noon were commonplace. In fact, they almost never occurred.
Why is our image of the Wild West so wrong? Largely for the same reason these towns adopted gun control laws in the first place: economic development. Residents wanted limits on guns in public because they wanted to attract businesspeople and civilized folk. What prospective storeowner was going to move to Deadwood if he was likely to be robbed when he brought his daily earnings to the bank?
Once the frontier was closed, those same towns glorified a supposedly violent past in order to attract tourists and the businesses to serve them. Gunfights were extremely rare in frontier towns, but these days you can see a reenactment of the one at the OK Corral several times a day. Don't forget to buy a souvenir!"
The famous shootout in Tombstone, AZ happened when the sheriff was enforcing the no carrying of firearms in public ordinance.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/23/nation/la-na-tombstone-20110123
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