Guns R Us

I made the mistake today of sitting down to eat lunch where the only newspaper available was the Ottawa Sun. In response to yesterday's shooting at Virginia Tech, there was the usual opposition to gun control, on the grounds that law-abiding citizens with guns aren't the problem, and that gun control isn't effective in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals. Several of the Sun's informed and enlightened readers went as far as to suggest that the school was at fault for banning guns from its premises. Because if the other students were armed, someone could have taken the guy down before he killed so many people.

I'm going to resist the temptation to suggest that these letter writers (and one candidate for the Republican presidential nomination) need to increase the dosage of their medication. Instead, I'll actually look at this rationally, as if these were reasonable arguments.

The first one's almost too easy to dispense with: Cho Seung-Hui was a law-abiding citizen, right up to the moment he took his legally purchased handgun, loaded with legally purchased ammunition, and started killing his fellow students with it. Criminals don't wear black hats. They're law abiding citizens before they become criminals, and they don't usually announce their intention to make the change.

To the second suggestion, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that some of the other people at the school were armed – perhaps as many as one in six. What happens when these people pull out their guns and start shooting? A fire fight, that's what. And not the pretty Hollywood kind, where the good guys hit what they aim at and the bad guys keep missing. We're talking complete fucking chaos. Everyone panicking and ODing on adrenaline. Bullets flying everywhere indiscriminately and no one even sure who the bad guys are.

Then the police arrive. They don't know who the bad guys are and who's trying to save the day. All they know is that people are shooting.

I'm willing to be large sums of money (well, hypothetical sums of money, anyway) that this results in way more than 33 dead bodies. I'm also willing to bet that it results in many otherwise law-abiding people having to live with the consequences of killing or crippling innocent bystanders in their amateur attempt to save the day.

And that's just in this extreme scenario. Never mind the day to day impact of having a fully armed population. It would make our experiences with road rage and bar brawls look like a church picnic.

Of course, we Canadians can take comfort in the fact that this is an American problem that could never happen here.

Oh, wait...