Wouldn't you feel safer with a gun?
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The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeed generally perverse in their effects. Virginia Tech, where 32 students were shot in April, had a strict gun ban policy and only last year successfully resisted a legal challenge that would have allowed the carrying of licensed defensive weapons on campus. It is with a measure of bitter irony that we recall Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, recording the words of Cesare Beccaria: “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
Article well worth reading. And, of course, you have one of the standard replies, included in the first comment:
If the present restrictions prevent another such tragedy then they are worthwhile.
Let's say you grant that: that somehow the 'ban almost everything and license & restrict everything else' laws prevent another such horrible crime. The followup question is, How many people have been robbed/raped/tortured/crippled/murdered because they had no means of self-defense that the bad guys are afraid of?
Because every time someone pops out with that "If it saves only one life, it's worth it" line, they're in essence saying "I do not care how many people get hurt because they don't have a gun; that does not concern me." And it's too bad it doesn't bother them, because the list of victims is long and growing longer by the day.
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