This story makes me proud of my home state. A Wisconsin lawmaker has suggested allowing teachers and principals to carry guns. Given the screenings teachers already go through (a friend of mine was fingerprinted and background-checked before she could teach in New York), and presuming training courses are required, this would prevent more violence than it would enable.

The gun control issue often turns into a logic contest — “criminals break laws anyway, so they’ll break gun laws” vs. “if they couldn’t get guns they couldn’t kill people with them.” Then there are the make-up-a-scenario debates, with “what if someone tries to rob you?” vs. “what if you accidentally shoot your son?”

But the fact of the matter is that the 50 states have tried a whole variety of gun laws, so it’s an empirical issue, not a hypothetical one, whether regulation works. Various scholarly analyses have revealed that, at best, gun control can’t be shown to work and, at worst, disarming law-abiding citizens actually causes more crime.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.

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