Every time a horrendous shooting tragedy in a school gets slapped across all the national news broadcasts, I think back to my athletics class in seventh grade. Athletics was where all of the football and basketball players got credit for being football and basketball players. I was a scrawny kid, but I thought I was quick enough to be considered athletic. I wasn't, but that's not the point.

The thing I remember vividly is that a fistfight broke out every week in the locker room for the first two months of school. Sometimes, two or three would occur. Winning the fights brought no glory as it surely meant someone else would challenge you until everyone understood the power structure. I never got in any fights because I didn't want to fight anyone and they didn't want to fight a scrawny kid. It wouldn't have proved anything.

Of course, it never did prove anything. Some guys had to walk around with black eyes. One kid was so mad, he got in a fight with himself and broke his hand punching a mirror. But these were football players, so it was easy to play off visible injuries. Nobody went ballistic, nobody went home crying to their parents, and nobody even went to the principal's office. For every fight, the coaches just made all the kids in athletics run more and more and more and more.

But there were no guns, no knives, and no crowbars. There were no Trenchcoat Mafias, Lug Bug Thugs, or Nobody Likes Me So Everyone Should Die Punks. Just a bunch of hormonally-confused kids playing out their animal side of evolution. I sure hope we came from monkeys because that at least gives us some excuse for our ridiculous behavior.

The guys with guns in Colorado are in every town. They are in every school. Most of them have the good sense just to despise everyone and continue their malevolent ways in private. Most of them get teased by the jocks, and the preps, and the nerds, and the freaks, and the brains, and every other faction that exists in high school. Every group teases the others because they are not like themselves. It's a way to feel self-important by demeaning others. If you don't believe me, there are a slew of teen flicks to back me up (and movies are the windows to our souls, right?).

I hear talk about putting in metal detectors, armed guards and emergency transporters in every school, but that's not going to make the situation better. I had enough problems feeling trapped in high school without all of the "protection."

The shooting in Littleton is about as probable as a plane crash. Every day, millions of kids go to and from school. Every day, millions of people get on an airplane to get to a destination. Everyone rightfully expects to make it back okay, but every now and again, something freaky happens. Sometimes the engine blows, and sometimes a kid freaks out.

If anything legal should come out of this tragedy, it should be that we need some sort of serious regulation on guns. I don't care if the drug dealers will still be able to get semi-automatics easily off the black market, or if Jimmy Joe can't get his elephant gun the first day he lays his eyes on it, or that you have to obtain a gun license before you can get a shopping cart full of explosives at the gun show. Make people go through same tediousness to obtain a killing device.

It's far too easy for not-so-bright kids to have access to guns. I've been mad enough to shoot people before (especially as I was a kid and responsibility was just a six syllable word), but I didn't for one simple reason--I didn't have a gun.

I don't know what ultimately happened to those guys who felt the need to beat the crap out of each other in my athletics class, but I do know one thing. None of them got shot while they were in junior high or high school.

Chris Jungle retired from his career in fist fights with a record of 2-1.