The Virginia Tech shootings have been pounced upon by some as an opportunity to push gun control. The people who do this are worse than idiots. Idiocy in the sense of mental incapacitation would provide an excuse for dumb behavior. Gun control nuts advocate their cause without a good excuse to justify the stance taken.

You see, the thing that proponents of gun control don’t want to admit is that gun control does nothing to stop those who are committed to doing evil. Despite universal prohibitions on gun ownership in many nations around the world, gun violence persists in those nations. This would seem to indicate that gun control doesn’t really work, no matter the form. European nations serve as a good example of the true costs of gun control – having recently instituted strict bans on gun ownership, England in specific has shown dramatically increasing incidences of gun violence. Brilliant!

The only people that gun control laws are good for are the people who won’t be following the laws anyway.

The LA Times (shockingly enough) published a concise editorial on this topic.

Back to Virginia Tech. Is it reasonable to assume, given what we now know of the killer, that gun control would have dissuaded him from murdering people? I don’t think so.

Gun control is pointed to by political opportunists as the panacea that will end violent crime. The truth is, gun control is the lazy politician’s cause celeb. There are many areas that could benefit from our national attentions, including poverty and education issues which feed into our cultural/generational cycles of violence. Just as gun control didn’t make the people of Southwest DC less desperate or less poor and just as it wouldn’t have stopped the Virginia Tech killer from killing, gun control won’t make the lot of us any safer from people dedicated to evil. We as a nation have to understand that it’s not access to guns that makes our criminals do evil – it’s their criminal hearts that make our criminals do evil. Guns can serve the law abiding as a means to confront evil, just as guns serve to enable evil. Prohibit lawful gun ownership and we’ll be left with guns in the hands of evil doers and nobody else.