An editorial in today’s New York Sun nicely outlines the way in which bans on gun possession actually act to make mass murders more likely:

Only weeks before the shooting, Virginia’s legislature "shot down," according to a January 31 report on the Web site of the Roanoke Times, a bill that, as the paper put it, "would have given college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus." The story reported that a spokesman for Virginia Tech, Larry Hincker, was happy to hear the bill was defeated. "I’m sure," the paper quoted Mr. Hincker as saying, "the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."

Today, however, the question hanging over this tragedy is whether the legislature acted wisely or whether, in fact, the campus would have been safer had the students and others been permitted to keep and bear arms in the dorms and on the greenswards. It’s not a theoretical question. In 2002, according to a report on CNSNews.com, a disgruntled student at the Appalachian Law School, Peter Odighizuwa, allegedly shot and killed the school’s dean, a professor, and a student on campus. He was subdued, CNSNews.comreported, only when two students reportedly ran to their cars to fetch their own guns and returned to confront the killer, who surrendered.

This led the president of the Second Amendment group at another school, George Mason University, to start looking into reforming bans on weapons on campus. That issue, already alive on campuses across the country, will grow only larger in the wake of the tragedy at Virginia Tech. It will be an important debate. We don’t believe any public policy will be able to expunge from society the kind of insanity or evil that leads to the kinds of acts witnessed yesterday. But we do believe that Americans have the capacity to reason out their own choices about how to defend themselves. And to reach out in their thoughts and prayers to the families who lost loved ones on the campus of Virginia Tech.

Look at the last sentence in paragraph one of the quote and note that there is a big difference between feeling safe and being safe.

Wouldn’t you prefer that you and your loved ones actually were safer from such attacks instead of merely being deluded into thinking they are? This is an empirical matter, and the evidence appears to be strongly against those who want, however benevolently, to ban law-abiding people from having guns.