It never fails. A split-second after a mass shooting occurs, grandstanders and ideologues issue statements demanding new gun controls—even if the laws already on the books failed or the laws they want would have made no difference. Case in point: the tragic incidents in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, in early August 2019.

The message is clear: Guns cause violence. Tax them, take them, ban them, regulate them. Do something, maybe anything! Such knee-jerk, emotional responses are dangerous, writes Charles W. Cooke in National Review, “for when a nation sets up a direct pipeline between its emotions and its laws, it does not keep its liberty for long.”

Guns Don’t Kill People, They Save Them

Liberty isn’t the only thing likely to be lost when gun laws are passed to appease emotions over reason, evidence, logic, and rights. Lives will most assuredly be lost, too. Lots of them.

This raises a point amplified in another context almost two centuries ago by Frederic Bastiat in his famous essay with a title that sums it up, “That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen.”

How many lives are actually saved by gun ownership? This is a supremely important question that the grandstanders and ideologues usually—and conveniently—ignore. It’s a matter that came immediately to my mind when I learned of an incident here in my own town of Newnan, Georgia, a few days ago. The headline in the Newnan Times-Herald read, “Man Hospitalized After Being Shot Outside Bar.”

A little after 1:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, August 17, police arrived at Fat Boys Bar & Grill to respond to a shooting. A customer had threatened other patrons, prompting the establishment’s security to forcibly remove him. Enraged at being kicked out, he declared he was going to get a gun “and shoot the place up.”

This very angry (and possibly intoxicated) man then busted the window out of a friend’s car in the parking lot, grabbed a .40 caliber handgun from inside the car, and began firing in the air. In the meantime, Ben McCoy, a man who witnessed all of this from inside his own vehicle, happened to have his rifle with him. Before he could use it, he was shot four times by the man wielding the .40 caliber handgun, who then fled into the woods.