The teacher and a campus supervisor talked a gunman into putting down his weapon after he had shot and injured one pupil at Taft Union High School.
Police said the gunman had enough ammunition to kill many people.
The injured student was taken to hospital in an air ambulance and is in a critical condition.
The drama started after 09:00 local time (17:00 GMT) when the gunman, also a student, arrived late, armed with a shotgun, at the school in the small town in California's central valley.
Students and staff telephoned police, but before officers could arrive, the suspect had shot at two people in a class in the science block. One shot missed its target.
As you can see, guns are killing & maiming innocent Americans every day. This would be a humanitarian crisis if it were AIDs.
- Is it time to ban guns?
- Is it time to ban guns from schools?
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It's a tricky subject. You either ban guns, in which case the only people that have them will be the police, the military, and the same criminals that would have had them in the first place, in which case, you effectively screw over any civilian confronted by a gun wielding criminal. Or, you have the other option, which is basically give everybody guns, to give them all an even chance, in which case it goes back to the old west. The key to solving this lies not in outright removing guns or making them free to all, but changing how society works instead. Human life is very low on the chain now in terms of society. And you can't dispute this because look at all the shootings. If these people ever thought about the consequences of their actions, killing an innocent child, removing their life from the world, how much it hurts the family involved, even the family of the shooter in most cases, the community, there wouldn't be so many shootings. And you can bring the argument in that all these people had "issues," but here's what I say to that. Maybe there would be a lot less people with "issues" had their parents raised them properly. The way a family currently works in society is flawed. The parents spend so much time working away from them that all they are left with is the media and school. There is no longer any connectivity amongst families and people in general. I ask you now to watch for something. When a shooting occurs and someone is killed, and the media is talking to family members, take note of how most of them, don't actually seem that sad. You can tell they are sad, but there's something missing. Now granted, your kid was just killed when he/she woke up in the morning and went off to school, that will have a shocking affect on people. But, even still, that's not even there to a full degree. Would you not want to kill the person that murdered your kid? Would you not practically fall over crying if something like this happened to you? The connectivity just isn't there any more, like I said, people are still sad, but they are complacent. They do nothing about it. They've been desensitized to violence, are distant from one another, so when these things happen, for the vast majority, complacency is all that ever happens. I will also add in, that at this point, we don't need guns anymore. We shouldn't be reliant on them at all. A gun's sole purpose, it's design, was made for it to kill something. When you own a gun, you can bet your ass, that at some point, the gun's purpose will be fulfilled. Maybe not by you personally, but maybe another family member down the line, or maybe someone that stole it, or maybe someone turning it on you. The problem isn't the guns folks, it's the primitive state our society is in. Were we better than we are now, we wouldn't have guns in this day and age.