With respect to a NY Times editorial calling for stonger controls to prevent Virginia Tech like murders, Prof. Volokh asks:

What stronger controls over weapons would likely have stopped him from committing the murders, or even led him to kill fewer people?

Note that I'm not asking what controls would have prohibited him from doing something. Murder law, and for that matter the gun control law that banned firearms from campus, already prohibited him from committing mass murder. That didn't seem to help. I'm curious what "stronger controls" would likely have stopped a would-be mass murderer from killing, or at least killing as many.

(The comment thread should be good. The Volokh Conspiracy, to which I often link, usually elicits some very intelligent comments and debates.)

It is the same question that was flowing around the firm and the courts yesterday. There were the immediate comments on American gun culture, but they were quickly tempered by the question of what gun law could have prevented this shooting. Look at Dawson College in Montreal where the shooter complied with the very strict Canadian laws. Fewer people died, but not from a lack of effort: the shooter hit 20 people.

Remember the genocide in Rawanda- it was carried out by machete.

UPDATE: David Frum is kind of asking the same question (via Peaktalk):

America will try to learn lessons from this latest tragedy too. But there is no escaping the hardest lesson: that death lies waiting around the corner for us all. No public policy can rescue us from that grim human fact - or the equally fearful obligation to walk with courage under the burden of the reality of evil.