WAVE OF THE FUTURE.

LAS VEGAS - Assailants shot six young people Tuesday who had stepped off a bus coming from a high school in a midday attack just blocks from two elementary schools, authorities said.

Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie said the incident appeared to have been sparked by a fight at a high school earlier in the day. The fight, which is believed to involve a girlfriend, resulted in three arrests at Mohave High School, he said.

Following current conservative thinking, it's clearly time to allow schoolchildren to bring guns to school. Or, better yet, make it mandatory. Expect Giuliani to get out in front on this issue.

UPDATE. The Rising Jurist says in comments, "No, no; school children aren't old enough to lawfully own handguns. It is the teachers who should be allowed to carry."

School children not old enough to lawfully own handguns? In America?

When the Founders were the same age as these brats, they worked from sunup to sundown, drank a jug of hard cider every morning, had fathered at least three children, and kilt injuns. And how did they kilt those injuns? With guns, that's what.

It says something about our nation's moral decline that even a prominent rightwing buffoon cannot think this thing through to its logical end: arming the teachers merely increases the power of the Nanny State, leaving our teenagers soft, weak, and prey to hip-hop and baggy jeans. We need to start instilling a sense of personal responsibility in these young people, and fast.

Children who are not left on hillsides to die should start shooting squirrels by age seven at the latest. Those who haven't killed a man -- preferably in a duel or episode of vigilante justice -- by age twelve should be sent into the woods to live on their wits.

I say: old enough for purity balls, old enough to lock and load. If we're going to have this gun suffrage thing at last, let's have it full force and all at once. The ensuing carnage should depopulate enough southern states to ensure a long string of Democratic victories after the next Census.