guns in schools?

At all public universities in Utah, students and professors alike are permitted by law to carry firearms to class. Despite opinions of fellow peers, many students carry guns as a safety precaution, so as not to become victims of shootouts. Interviewees claim they feel less safe, but laws allowing guns at schools prevail.
This is one of the most absurd laws of which I have ever heard. As a student, would you really feel safer knowing that the stranger next to you has a fully loaded gun under his shirt, even though you might as well? This reminds me of a short story I read in high school by Nadine Gordimer.
The story is called "Once Upon a Time." Choosing this title and continuously using the phrase "happily ever after", Gordimer proposes the idea of a fairy tale, but as one reads the story it becomes evident that it is anything but. The anecdote begins by introducing a somewhat nuclear family living in a somewhat stable pleasant suburb. Although the family was almost completely convinced of there safety, an ominous warning was constantly given to them by "the witch," not to let people in off the streets. The wife convinces the husband to purchase an alarm system. After the system was installed, the witch gives another warning. Accordingly, the family orders bars on all the doors and windows of their house. So from every window and door in the house where they were living happily ever after they now saw the trees and sky through bars, and when the little boy's pet cat tried to climb in by the fanlight to keep him company in his little bed at night, as it customarily had done, it set off the alarm keening through the house. Again the witch gives a warning, and word of robberies flooded the neighborhood so the family built a wall with an electric gate around their house. When the man and wife and little boy took the pet dog for its walk round the neighborhood streets they no longer paused to admire this show of roses or that perfect lawn; these were hidden behind an array of different varieties of security fences, walls and devices. The man, wife, little boy and dog passed a remarkable choice: there was the low-cost option of pieces of broken glass embedded in cement along the top of walls, there were iron grilles ending in lance-points, there were attempts at reconciling the aesthetics of prison architecture with the Spanish Villa style (spikes painted pink) and with the plaster urns of neoclassical facades (twelve-inch pikes finned like zigzags of lightning and painted pure white). The family chose the most practical suggestion. It consisted of a continuous coil of stiff and shining metal serrated into jagged blades, so that there would be no way of climbing over it and no way through its tunnel without getting entangled in its fangs. There would be no way out, only a struggle getting bloodier and bloodier, a deeper and sharper hooking and tearing of flesh. The wife shuddered to look at it. You're right, said the husband, anyone would think twice...
One evening, the mother read the little boy to sleep with a fairy story from the book the wise old witch had given him at Christmas. Next day he pretended to be the Prince who braves the terrible thicket of thorns to enter the palace and kiss the Sleeping Beauty back to life: he dragged a ladder to the wall, the shining coiled tunnel was just wide enough for his little body to creep in, and with the first fixing of its razor-teeth in his knees and hands and head he screamed and struggled deeper into its tangle. The trusted housemaid and the itinerant gardener, whose "day" it was, came running, the first to see and to scream with him, and the itinerant gardener tore his hands trying to get at the little boy. Then the man and his wife burst wildly into the garden and for some reason (the cat, probably) the alarm set up wailing against the screams while the bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out of the security coil with saws, wire-cutters, choppers, and they carried it—the man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid and the weeping gardener—into the house.

The message of the story is clear. Do we really lead better lives if we protect ourselves entirely from all the potential dangers of the world, or do we become caged, imprisoned by our own fears? The lawful presence of firearms in universities, not only presents more opportunities for incidents to occur such as the one at Virignia Tech, but it creates an entirely different atmosphere on campus and in the classroom.