for a semi-automatic pistol. you knew what I meant.

your suggestion is a crack dealer? oh great. well next time I am buying crack, I will ask my guy for a referral. come on. you think a lot of crack dealers are going to sell a gun to a 32 year old white guy in a brooks brothers polo shirt they don't know? how quickly you think I'd be pegged as a narc in Anacostia, 5 minutes or 3? which means I'd have to start asking around, which exponentially inproves the odds of someone finding out I am up to no good. can you really see a guy like Cho, too reticent to talk to his roommate, walking down a dark alley to buy a gun, not once, but twice? not really. if Cho was a student at GW, or Georgetown, or Catholic, or American, and a resident of DC, these shooting don't happen. you can't argue that. he would not have had access to the weapons he had access to as easily. it is a LOT harder to do this kind of spree killing in a jurisdiction with strict gun control.

and yes, explosives are much more frightening, but then they also take much more expertise and access to equipment. it's not that easy to build a bomb that weill kill 32 people, even in a classroom. plus, you don't get to have the catharsis of rage, bombings are cold and calculated, when effective, not raging. look at the three effective bombings done by civilians in the US in the last 20 years (Oklahoma City, Olympic Park/clinics (Rudolph), Kazinscki) one took two people and a year of planning (and would be harder to duplicate now, especially by a 22 year old), Olympic Park, despite going off in a crowd of spectators, managed to kill one person (plus a heart attack victim) and the Unabomber had a Ph.D in mathematics. it's not easy to kill large numbers of people with bombs in places where explosives are hard to come by (which explains that despite almost daily car bombs in Iraq, you don't hear about them in places without active and well funded terrorist or insurgent groups (the IRA, for instance, was a big user of car bombs)

there are two real issues here: the first, as you point out, is the failure of the social system. the second is that once the system fails, it was all too easy for Cho to get his hands on weapons capable of killing large numbers of people. both need to be addressed to help prevent future occurences.