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I caught a brief segment on a news program this morning (no, I don't watch the news) as I was walking through a family member's living room. I stopped to listen, as what I was hearing almost instantly caused me to 'flip the table'.

A Sandy Hook mother, who is now leading a national gun lobbying group (and probably getting rich in the process), was discussing the effectiveness of a strategy for having armed security in schools, while consolidating the number of entry points possible to the school during the school day.

She said, roughly, "There just isn't enough evidence that such measures could even be effective. We have to preempt these mass shooting events to deter them before they can begin."

I thought about this for a moment, about whether common sense would even support that idea. There is a person with a gun who is shooting people. When that happens, either the shooter kills himself, or someone else with a gun disables/kills the shooter. Either people with guns have proven effective in these scenarios, or they haven't. The pragmatic answer is: we can think about what our most useful solutions have been and continue to be. In every case, the way such a situation is solved is to call in other people with guns - that's true without exception, and no anti-gun lobbyist would even deny this.

So why would having people with guns, hired not by the police force but paid by the school itself, not act as a deterrent to these events?

The situation at Uvalde has put gun-grabbers into a corner. Police did nothing. They stood by and actively prevented the situation from being resolved, even as they forcefully stopped parents from trying to do something about removing their children form harm's way.

So the woman on the news, the lobbyist, is arguing that staffing schools with armed guards would be ineffective. Her argument consists in pointing to how cops at the scene in Uvalde failed to do anything to stop the day's events. Therefore, armed people are ineffective preemptively at stopping mass shootings.

1. Ignores the existing evidence that armed people have stopped mass shootings, and illogically ignores that, if evidence of mass shootings is the only relevant evidence, then every shooting that was prevented by the threat of armed citizens won't be counted. If the shooting has to start for you to say that armed people can't preemptively stop it, then you've excluded every piece of evidence that would falsify your conclusion.

2. The proposed solution cannot follow from her premises. The premise is that armed police were not effective at stopping the shooter, despite being on scene (for several reasons: cowardice, confusion, incompetence, anything but being ordered to stand down).

So the only solution (according to her) is to stop such shootings with laws banning ownership of semi-autos with large magazines and certain other features that make them meant 'solely for killing'.

Think about this for a moment. The argument, at root, is saying that if the most local and specific government institution for protecting you against violence is ineffective when there is violence, then what we must do is trust in the most central (federal) and distant government function to protect us. That is to say, we must trust the law to do it.

But a law is a form of legislated agreement. The entire civic premise is that a law is something on the book, a form of authority used in judgment once a crime has been identified and the assailant has been taken into the system. The law does not enforce itself, and we recognize that it is not a law that arrests people (or stops them from hurting others).

So we are being told that because we cannot trust in law enforcers to protect us, that we should place our trust in the law itself to protect us.

Because surely, if we just ban the weapons, then there will be no criminal use of those weapons.

But, haven't we universally banned murdering people? Why wouldn't that cast an even wider net? If the law is efficacious in itself, then a ban against murder is even stronger than a ban on particular instruments of murder.

It simply makes no sense, not even on a first gloss let alone a deeper analysis.

It requires an implicit premise, which is that a legal prohibition against any thing (object, substance, behavior), actually stops the production, distribution and possession of said thing or the display of said behavior. Has any such prohibition worked, ever? We could ask this lobbyist woman, is there 'sufficient evidence' that any prohibition on paper has stopped criminals from acting?

Of course not; it can't even be true in principle. The definition of a criminal is someone who breaks laws. Since many laws pertain to illegal possessions, or to acts carried out by the use of things possessed illegally, then the existence of criminality period is evidence against universal efficaciousness of prohibition.

If a person has demonstrated that they are capable of and intending to ignore the ban against murdering innocent people, it is not reasonable to think that they'd ironically honor the ban against an illegal weapon. If one is not dissuaded from murdering by his moral compass, how likely is it that he/she will be brought to heel by a rule in a book against owning the instrument-for-killing?

The only people who will be brought to heel by restrictions on gun ownership are moral people who abide by the law. Criminals, by definition, are not caught by the net cast through legislation. This is why the police force exists. If the police cannot be trusted to do their appointed function, then the only logical answer is that individuals must be prepared in all relevant manners to protect themselves. That means each mass shooting is just another piece of evidence in the pile which supports the supreme importance of the 2A.