How to sound like an Idiot

Original: April 24, 2007
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"Our famous Constitution, about which many of us are generally so proud, enshrines -- along with the right to freedom of speech, press, religion and assembly -- the right to own guns. That's an apples and oranges list if there ever was one. Not all of us are so proud and triumphant about the gun-guarantee clause. The right to free speech, press, religion and assembly and so on seem to be working well, but the gun part, not so much... [The students at Virginia Tech] were not killed by a Korean, they were killed by a 9 mm handgun and a.22-caliber handgun…" And the victims of the World Trade Center tragedy weren't killed by Islamic jihadists, they were killed by airplanes. Idiot.

He continues…"Far fewer guns in America would logically result in far fewer deaths from people pulling the trigger. The probability of the Virginia Tech gun massacre happening would have been greatly reduced if guns weren't so easily available to ordinary citizens..." -- Tom Plate, former editor of the editorial pages of The Los Angeles Times. Cho Seung-Hui was not an ordinary citizen. He was a deranged individual who methodically planned the destruction of 32 ordinary citizens.

If you can get past the sarcastic disdain he shows for the document that guarantees his right to sound like an idiot in public, he still sounds like an idiot.

In a study of multiple-victim public shootings in the U.S. from 1977 to 1999, Dr. John Lott and Bill Landes (University of Chicago law school) showed that when states passed right-to-carry laws, the rate of multiple victim public shootings fell by 60 percent. Deaths and injuries from multiple victim public shootings fell even further, on average by 78 percent.

Those are real numbers. Plate and those like him cannot give real numbers that would support taking away guns from law abiding ordinary citizens. There's no question that there are too many guns out there in the hands of the wrong people. There are also too many automobiles out there being driven by criminals and the just plain stupid. And they kill thousands of people each year. Does that mean we should pass laws that would take cars away from everyone who drives the speed limit and wears their seatbelt?