The 0.22 caliber solution, not great but best.

The horrendous shooting in Tucson has some lessons, one perhaps counterintuitive. After shooting 19 people, the gunman was incapacitated by three heroes. A 61-year old woman grabbed his empty magazine and also the full one he was trying to reload. Another bystander tackled the gunman, joined by a third person who heard the commotion and ran over to help (toward the sound of gunfire rather than the perhaps more circumspect direction away). The last hero was armed ( covered carry being legal in Arizona ) and said that he would have shot the gunman had it been necessary but was happy that it wasn't since he was able to assist in the takedown.

Of course, there are the reflexive calls from the kneejerk Left for banning guns. There are several responses to this: 1) the gunman was known in some quarters to be mentally unstable and should have been prevented from purchasing a handgun, let alone the extended magazine, under PRESENT Federal law. 2) No law is going to suffice to keep guns away from criminals. Gun laws only suffice to keep guns away from ordinary citizens, usually the victims. 3) While Arizona has liberal gun laws ( and Congresswoman Giffords was a proponent of the Second Amendment ), no-one in the immediate crowd was armed.

Rather than limit gun ownership, it should be encouraged in the following way. Every citizen volunteer who can pass a legitimate and rigorous background check (possibly involving some quasi-deputization )should be encouraged to carry a small 0.22 caliber weapon after appropriate training. It's hard for a single person to do multiple lethal damage with such a weapon. A hail of bullets from several such weapons, however, should be enough to bring down an illegitimate gunman once he has identified himself as such. While this suggestion is not a panacea and wouldn't in all likelihood have prevented the "first-strike" shooting of Cong. Giffords, it likely would have prevented, or at least ameliorated, the shooting of 18 other people.Knowledge of the likely certainty of such a result might even provide an extra deterrent for even a first striker.

Mass public killings are fortunately rare but in many such cases, the extent of the killings would dramatically have been palliated by this policy. In the Virginia Tech shootings, also done by known loon who should never have been allowed to purchase a gun under PRESENT law, one of the bystanders had a weapon in his car but couldn't reach it in time since the school policy was to ban weapons from the campus, a stricture obviously not likely to be followed by either a crazy person or a criminal.In the V-Tech case, the shooter wasn't even stopped at the crime scene and had to be apprehended later. Without distance weapons, it takes extraordinary heroism to stop such a shooter before armed security people can arrive.