Many on the left have seized the tragedy at Virginia Tech as an opportunity to take away our freedoms. The same people who pull out Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote at the drop of a dime when it comes to terrorists who have no rights are themselves ready to turn over freedom for a false sense of security. Tom Plate says we should “lay down our right to bear arms”. Isn’t that what the students at Virginia Tech did?

Let me pose a simple hypothetical. How many fewer people would have died if one or two students or teachers had a concealed carry license and were allowed to defend themselves? It’s impossible to guess, but that it would have been fewer should be obvious. Not to journalist and freedom hater Tom Plate, who thinks he knows better than the Founding Fathers:

The use of guns is often the American technique of choice for all kinds of conflict resolution. Our famous Constitution, about which many of us are generally so proud, enshrines — along with the right to freedom of speech, press, religion and assembly — the right to own guns. That’s an apples and oranges list if there ever was one.

Not all of us are so proud and triumphant about the gun-guarantee clause. The right to free speech, press, religion and assembly and so on seem to be working well, but the gun part, not so much.

Let me explain. Some misguided people will focus on the fact that the 23-year-old student who killed his classmates and others at Virginia Tech was ethnically Korean. This is one of those observations that’s 99.99 percent irrelevant. What are we to make of the fact that he is Korean? Ban Ki-moon is also Korean! Our brilliant new United Nations secretary general has not only never fired a gun, it looks like he may have just put together a peace formula for civil war-wracked Sudan — a formula that escaped his predecessor.

So let’s just disregard all the hoopla about the race of the student responsible for the slayings. These students were not killed by a Korean, they were killed by a 9 mm handgun and a .22-caliber handgun.

That’s a nice slight of hand argument. First he sets up a false dichotomy. The killings either happened because he was Korean OR because he had a gun! That makes total sense. Who these mysterious people who supposedly focus on his ethnic background are, we’ll never know. We just have to trust that Mr. Plate isn’t making them up. Right. Then he destroys the strawman he disingenuously propped up and hopes you don’t realize the true difference between Ban Ki-moon and the killer is not that one had a gun, but that one was crazy. Ban Ki-moon holding a gun wouldn’t result in 32 people dead. So clearly that explanation is deficient. Logic is an amazing thing when you know how to apply it properly.

Let’s take another idiotic declaration he makes. “Far fewer guns in America would logically result in far fewer deaths from people pulling the trigger.” After the massive failure of his first attempt at logic, I worry that he may be attempting to operate at an intellectual level that is simply above him. Indeed, that appears to be the case here. Incidence of gun use does not significantly rise or fall on how many there are available - unless you could get rid of them all or even close to them all which is impossible - but by how many more criminals have than law-abiding citizens. If you outlaw guns there will be far fewer than there are now, certainly. But they will still be out there. And criminals will have the comfort of truly knowing that they are safe against running into any armed citizens willing to defend themselves, since there won’t be any such citizens left. All that will remain is a population of potential victims. This is the world Tom Plate and the anti-gun nuts on the left want you to live in, because then you’ll have yet another reason to depend on big government for protection.

Thomas Paine said it best:

The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as property. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside ? Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them.

Horrid mischief must seem a vast understatement to those at Virginia Tech.

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