An eight year old with a loaded handgun. Big deal. The six year old in Newport News didn’t just smuggle in a loaded handgun — he shot his teacher with it! Maybe Grand Rapids is eyeing the forty million dollar lawsuit she’s filed against the N.N. school district; maybe Grand Rapids figures if it’s caught four handguns it’s almost certainly failed to catch another twenty or so.

Whatever. It has made the right call by banning backpacks: As UD has been saying, our public schools are currently living in a fool’s paradise, and until they look like armed camps they’re asking for a bloodbath. Guns are all over the schools; and of course they’re all over the schools’ surrounding communities. Inside and out, everyone’s a target, and as the wee Nashville massacrist demonstrated (using the same technique as the wee Sandy Hook guy), all you have to do is shoot out windows to get into a locked building. Which means the schools might want to take a look, first of all, at their windows. The safest schools won’t have windows at all (don’t laugh: did you think we’d see the end of backpacks?) but will look like the medieval fortresses they now need to be. Adding to the pre-modern feel will be a general arming of teachers and administrators, all of whom will now be able to solve work squabbles via shootouts.

And you know what? We’re going to see a large rise in home schooling — motivated not by any particular ideology, but simply by a desire to see your kid not be eviscerated by an AR-15. I mean, broadly speaking, the saturation of public life by guns means the end of public life – public schools, public shopping malls, public libraries – too dangerous. America is already overrun by gated communities with extensive private security. Get ready to see much, much more of that.