When I was in college, there were a large group of extremely liberal students who insisted that we needed to consider why certain Middle-Easterners were so pissed off at America that they would carry out a massive terrorist operation like 9/11. And they had a point; considering the motivation behind an act is a better way to help make sure it never happens again. Now we find ourselves with a rash of shootings, and the solution is "just take away the guns." Well, OK, fine, but what about the root cause of this problem? What is causing the build-up of angst in our country that is causing people to go completely off the rails and shoot up public places? Why is it important that we consider the motivations of the international terrorist but not the domestic one?
Taking away guns after a school shooting is like building the TSA after 9/11; it's saying that the problem on 9/11 wasn't that there were a group of highly determined people who wanted to harm us, it was that planes weren't secure enough. You see the tragedy of a school shooting and think "hey, if he didn't have a gun, he couldn't have harmed anyone." Yes, he could have, though probably not at as effectively. The real question is "why did he want to and how can we help stop these types of actions in the future?"