So, all I can say is thank God for the NRA's plan for having armed guards in every school. I was sure, as I heard the first news about the shooting at Taft Union High School in California's San Joaquin Valley, and that no one got killed, surely an armed guard was there to take the shooter out. Or. . . not?

An armed police officer is normally assigned to Taft Union High School but was not able to make it to work on Thursday because of snow on the roads [. . . ].

Oh, so surely some teacher was armed, and gunned the shooter down, unlike those chumps in Newtown? Or the little children gang-rushed the shooter like that one gun nut suggested? No? What? An administrator and a teacher talked the student into putting down his weapon.

The suspected shooter was arrested after a teacher and a school administrator who confronted him persuaded the boy to put his gun down, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood told reporters at a press conference. Students fled the class while the two adults pacified the shooter, he said.

The teacher, who has not been named, was hit in the forehead by a shotgun pellet but not seriously injured.

They used their words! What a crazy idea. If there's one thing that's been made perfectly clear since Newtown, it's that words don't work on gun-wielding whackjobs.

But words are all we have on this side of the argument. We have to keep the heat on the NRA and reject its crazy ideas at every turn.

See Charles Madigan, also, in Thursday's Chicago Tribune for more argument about how the NRA is using its own words in ways that approach the "fighting words" threshold of First Amendment rights. Not that the NRA cares about any Amendment but the Second (and only the second half of that, ignoring, always, the "well-regulated" bit).