FORMER US HEADMASTER Bill Bond was all set, last Friday, to board the next flight from his Kentucky home to Colorado, where two days earlier an armed vagrant had killed a female student before committing suicide at a suburban secondary school, when news broke of another deadly school shooting, this time in Wisconsin. He switched travel plans at the last moment, heading north instead to the midwestern state, where a 15-year-old boy had just snapped and fatally shot his principal.
Mr Bond is a roving emissary for the US headteachers' union, the National Association of Secondary School Principals. 'When you hear about a shooting, I'm usually on my way to an airport within hours,' he said.
Mr Bond was on the scene, offering advice to shaken staff in the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine secondary school massacre in Colorado, America's deadliest school shooting in which 14 students - including the two gunmen - and a teacher lost their lives, and last year's tragedy at Minnesota's Red Lake secondary school, where Jeff Weise, 16, murdered his guardians then mowed down five of his classmates and two staff before turning the gun on himself.
He understands better than most what survivors of the latest school shootings must be going through. Mr Bond was principal of Heath secondary school in West Paducah, Kentucky, when Michael Carneal, 14, gunned down three of his peers in 1997.
There hasn't been enough of him to go around over the last week.
On Monday, a delivery driver barricaded himself in an Amish school in Pennsylvania with 12 female students. He was armed with enough supplies to see him through a lengthy standoff. It never came to that. Bristling at the police encirclement after a teacher alerted authorities, Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, opened fire, killing three girls outright and critically injuring several more before shooting himself as officers stormed the building.