Check out the full article here:the first error is taking a freakishly horrible event as a basis for anything except mourning. The carnage at Virginia Tech was as bad as gun crimes get, but it was also as rare as they get.
Nationally, your chance of being a murder victim has plunged by 44 percent since 1991. University students, as a rule, have even less cause for worry. All the colleges in the country have about 17 million students, but in an average year, they suffer fewer than 20 on-campus homicides.
In the aftermath of the killing spree in Blacksburg, the Violence Policy Center rushed to ascribe it to “the easy access to increasingly lethal firearms that make most killings possible.” But when auto fatalities occur, we don’t take them as evidence of the need to cut down on the number of people allowed to drive, or on the horsepower of cars.
Guns, like many inventions, are potent tools that have valuable as well as destructive uses. Lately, though, they are being used less and less for bad purposes. The number of gun murders has dropped by 38 percent since 1993, and the rate of nonfatal gun crimes is one-third what it was then.
