That led to a pair of Supreme Court decisions in 2003, striking down the school's undergraduate admissions formula, which gave an automatic boost to minority applicants, while upholding its law-school admissions criteria, which administrators said used race as a flexible "plus factor" for certain candidates.
For his new book Gun Guys: A Road Trip, Mr Baum travelled across the US and met a variety of gun owners, from those blasting automatic weapons in the desert to a school teacher hunting pigs.
Once again a deranged man has walked into an American school armed with powerful semi-automatic weapons and left a trail of death and heartache in his wake.