Why Anti-Gun Zealots Can’t Admit Concealed Carry Saves Lives

After a video of law enforcement officers acting like utter cowards at the Uvalde school shooting was released, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., claimed that the incident “puts to bed, forever, the question of whether the way to deal with bad guys with guns is to make sure there are more good guys with guns.”

Well, “forever” ended this weekend, when a 22-year-old fatally shot a man armed with an AR-15 who had opened fire in a mall food court in Greenwood, Indiana, killing three. We don’t know all the specifics — and we’ll never know how many lives the Good Samaritan saved — but it is clear Murphy’s assertion was incorrect on two counts: Cops who stand around while children are being slaughtered aren’t “good guys,” but real good guys with guns do exist.

Gun controllers assure us they don’t oppose the Second Amendment, they merely want to pass “common sense” gun laws that take “weapons of war” out of the hands of bad guys. Yet their policy proposals and rhetoric tell us something very different. Anti-gun zealots are so singularly focused on guns, they refuse to even acknowledge that the right to personal self-defense exists. Indeed, they can’t even concede that a person carrying a gun legally (as, it seems, the hero in Indiana did) or obtaining a concealed-carry license — and these people are less likely to engage in criminality than cops — might serve a positive use, like mitigating the tragedy of a mall shooting.