4 myths of gun control shredded

By Jay Ambrose

If Seung-Hui Cho hadn't gotten his hands on two semiautomatic pistols, he wouldn't have been able to slay 32 students and others, say some gun-control advocates who really ought to learn about Andrew Kehoe, who didn't stop at 32.

In the deadliest violence inside a school ever in America, Kehoe killed 45 people, mostly children, and guns had nothing to do with it. It was 1927 in the village of Bath, Mich.; Kehoe was a farmer whose mind apparently snapped because of financial ruin, and his weapons of choice were dynamite and an explosive called pyrotol.

The idea that guns are the only likely means of mass murder - one of four major misconceptions being trotted out in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy - is proven wrong daily by the suicide bombers in Iraq. It was proven wrong when Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people with an explosive mixture of fertilizer and racing fuel in Oklahoma City 12 years ago, and it was even proven wrong by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who murdered 12 fellow students and a teacher in 1999.

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It's true that these two did use firearms in their rampage at Columbine High School in Colorado, but they had assembled 99 bombs they might have employed if they hadn't been able to obtain guns. They in fact collected an array of firearms with apparent ease despite a long list of state and federal laws that supposedly stood in their way, which brings us to Misconception No. 2 - that still more laws on top of the hundreds of existing gun-control laws will usher gun violence off the American stage.

Laws don't prevent much of anything without means of effective enforcement, least of all redundant gun statutes in a nation that has 230 million firearms of every possible description. Given Cho's history of scary mental instability, you would think he would have encountered laws meant to keep the guns out of his hands. From what has been reported, he didn't, but even if he had, it is highly unlikely he could not have found a means of acquiring just about any kind of firearm he wished. The university's rule that the campus was a gun-free zone certainly did not give him pause.

Even if you had a successful confiscation campaign - a major infringement of the Constitution and an impossibility, politically and otherwise - you would not suddenly make America a land where violence shrinks to virtual meaninglessness. Misconception No. 3 is that the degree to which a population is armed determines the extent of killing, even though it's hardly a secret that Switzerland and Israel have very high gun-ownership rates and very low homicide rates.

Statistics provided on a pro-gun Web site back up a claim that America's rate of murdering people by means other than firearms is higher than the total rate in a number of European countries. Clearly, something is at work besides guns in determining these rates, such as relative homogeneity and all kinds of cultural and historical influences.

Misconception No. 4 is that guns do the work only of the devil, never of the good guys, never or seldom coming to the rescue of people simply trying to safeguard their own lives and property. The Internet site again provides all kinds of counter-evidence, including a report on a study in which two professors questioned 2,000 convicted felons and found that more than a third had been "scared off, shot at, wounded or captured by an armed victim." Just as guns can be the enemy, they can be a friend, and the idea that laws permitting concealed weapons will give us a Wild West show is a consequence of wild imaginings, not sound research.

Gun-control advocates snicker at what gun libertarians say - that if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns, and that it's not guns that kill people, but people who kill people. But these slogans - while obvious simplifications, as all such slogans are - have a huge advantage over the largely uninformed, morally superior rantings of many of the loudest, most-in-your-face gun-control advocates. Though leaving out some nuances and qualifications, they are fundamentally true.

Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers, is a columnist living in Colorado.