Opinion: Gun on Gun Action

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If this were a TV show, it would still be making a fortune for all the years it’s been in syndication: the argument that more guns make a safer nation.

They’ve applied the resuscitation paddles to it again in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings; former House speaker Newt Gingrich remarked, ``There have been incidents of this kind of a killer who [was] stopped because, in fact, people who are law-abiding, who are rational and people who are responsible, had the ability to stop them.’’

Let’s say every student at Virgina Tech was permitted -- even expected -- to carry a weapon. How many students might have been saved from Seung-Hui Cho’s rampage -- and how many inadvertently wounded or killed in trying to shoot him down to stop it? For that matter, what might the campus gunplay death toll have been over the years from accidents, from suicides, from escalating arguments at beer busts, long before Seung-Hui Cho ever enrolled? How many memorial benches and fountains would have been raised up to the memories of those dead?

Ever watch a Western? In the movies, everyone seems to be packing -- and except in Main Street duels, it’s the first gunman who gets the drop on the others and gets off his shots who’s got the advantage -- probably the same advantage he’d have if his target weren’t carrying a gun at all. The likelihood of using a bullet to stop a bullet is about the same as the odds of the Reagan-era ``Star Wars’’ program to intercept the bad guys’ missile with one fired by the good guys.

Why stop at arming schools? Why not open churches and nursing homes nationwide to loaded guns, as George Bush did as Texas governor? Why not let let people pack non-concealed weapons even into the halls of Congress? Surely if there were any kind of ruckus -- as happened in 1954, when Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from a gallery and wounded five members of Congress -- then the Congressmen themselves could have drawn their own weapons and gunned down the shooters.

Surely that kind of risk is a small price to pay. Surely political leaders who think students should be able to carry guns on campus would not deny the same right to those who visit Congress -- in a city where, as Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King has declared, his wife, to take an example, is ``at far greater risk being a civilian in Washington, D.C. than the average civilian in Iraq.’’