The Philadelphia Inquirer (and probably most other dailies, as this is an AP story) has finally gotten around to reporting the details of the gun stolen by accused Atlanta killer Brian Nichols:

Authorities say that while Nichols was in the Fulton County Courthouse Feb. 11 for his rape retrial, he attacked a deputy and retrieved her gun from a lock box, then moved on to the courtroom and killed a judge and a court reporter. Authorities say he later killed a deputy and a federal agent before surrendering. (Emphasis supplied.)

Here's the reason the gun is such an important detail. Guns have a way of equalizing both size and sex differences. Once again, I'll quote the immortal words of the 19th Century Colt pistol advertisment:

The Equalizer

Be not afraid of any man,
No matter what his size.
When danger threatens, call on me
And I will equalize.

Basic animal stuff.

The ugly reality of locking up large, dangerous, male criminals is that guarding them is a job for large men who can handle the physical danger. To me, this is all a rather large "Doh!" -- and I don't think it requires rocket science intelligence to grasp.

But back to the danger. Guarding big and crazy criminals is especially dangerous -- precisely because guards cannot be allowed to carry guns. If they did, there'd always be the chance of them being overpowered (or even tripping and falling down, having a heart attack or seizure, etc.) and the gun taken away. A gun in the hands of a desperate prisoner is always bad. Hence, guards are unarmed. I hate to say it, but it's highly dangerous man to man stuff. A big guy has a much better chance of dealing with (and calming down) a big guy than does a little guy.

There's an old expression (sometimes attributed to Heinlein), "Never frighten a little man, because he'll kill you."

Well, who ever said that guarding prisoners is for everyone?

UPDATE: In the future, the work of guarding dangerous prisoners will doubtless be simplified by devices which read the brain in time to automatically activate preventive countermeasures in advance of the "false move" itself:

PASADENA, Calif. - By decoding signals coming from neurons, scientists at the California Institute of Technology have confirmed that an area of the brain known as the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vPF) is involved in the planning stages of movement, that instantaneous flicker of time when we contemplate moving a hand or other limb. The work has implications for the development of a neural prosthesis, a brain-machine interface that will give paralyzed people the ability to move and communicate simply by thinking.

By piggybacking on therapeutic work being conducted on epileptic patients, Daniel Rizzuto, a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Richard Andersen, the Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, was able to predict where a target the patient was looking at was located, and also where the patient was going to move his hand. The work currently appears in the online version of Nature Neuroscience.

(Via Slashdot.)

Unfortunately for the guards (and maybe, fortunately for the rest of us), we're not there yet.