If mediation is the triumph of hope over experience, GOOD FOR US!

This, from today's New York Times (full article here):

With anxiety running high in classrooms across the nation after the Virginia Tech attacks, the authorities in Sacramento [California] arrested four secondary school students on Thursday, including one carrying a loaded gun. . . .

[A] 14-year old . . . had photographs of two female McClatchy [High School] students.  The police said they believed that the boys were planning to shoot them. . .

School counselors had been working on [a] problem [among four female McClatchy students] and planned to mediate the dispute on Thursday . . .

The police said they believed that the two boys [with the gun] . . . were enroute to the mediation, possibly to shoot their targets before or after the meeting."

We're hoping that if the police had not intervened, a shooting wouldn't have occurred after the mediation.

I'm also hoping mediators won't have to begin frisking their disputants before joint sessions, at least not here in Second Amendment land where we are packing 65 million hand guns!