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Time magazine reports today that "a year after the deadliest shooting in America, when a sad and angry English major killed 32 people and himself at the Blacksburg campus of Virginia Tech, only modest changes have been made to the country's gun control laws." Is that so wrong? Maybe gun control is a phony solution -- a bandaid -- to the much deeper and unsolvable problem of evil.

Memorializing the victims is appropriate. Ensuring that such a tragedy does not repeat defies simple solutions. But I'm partial to letting people defend themselves.

For some, however, the lesson of Virginia Tech is that self-defense is somehow immoral. How strange. And the New York Times has a series of pieces on other foolish lessons we seem to have learned. Instead of taking sensible steps to let students, staff and faculty defend themselves, America's institutions of higher learning are overreacting in the most absurd ways imaginable.

Alice Mathias, a film student at the University of Southern California, describes the hoops a student must jump through in order to use a fake gun in a movie production. "Joe Wallenstein, who oversees film production by students, explained that using fake weapons could be misperceived by passers-by, and misunderstanding could lead to calamity," Mathias writes. "Just days ago, the faculty banned all guns in first-semester student films and mandated that higher-level students attend a police firearms training session before using fake guns, and under many circumstances pay a police officer $450 to oversee their productions."

I'm reminded of the steps that the Denver school board took after the Columbine massacre. The two killers were wearing trenchcoats when they carried out their shooting spree so, naturally, officials banned trenchcoats. Better safe than sorry, right? The fact that Virginia Tech and virtually every other college campus across the country is a "gun-free zone" offers only an illusion of safety.

Some officials have gone to the opposite extreme: Terrorizing students in the name of protecting them. James Alan Fox recounts a February incident at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina, in which a man carrying a fake assault weapon burst into an American foreign policy class and held the professor and seven students hostage.

Writes Fox: "The class survived because the gunman was a volunteer, part of an exercise intended to test the university’s system for responding to a possible campus attack. The university had alerted its students and faculty with e-mail and text messages, but not everyone read them. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the simulation -- at least physically."

Yes. Thank goodness none of those students was armed!