Knowingly or unknowingly, the liberal writer Marc Ambinder makes the case for laws that allow people who pass security checks and have appropriate training to obtain licenses to carry concealed weapons. "Guns are not going to disappear," he writes, because there is no realistic or constitutional way to confiscate them — which one suspects is his preferred solution. He decries, as so many liberals do, "the NRA's stranglehold on politics," without noting that the NRA's strength comes from its mass membership and funding from large numbers of small contributions — things liberals usually think are a good thing for an organization to have.

So to reduce the number of innocent lives lost — a goal Ambinder shares with every decent person — he proposes the following:



Ordinary people who volunteer to carry guns, who would receive significant and regular training from the government, might be in a position to intervene. I've always wondered why this suggestion is immediately ridiculed; properly trained citizens can serve as a deterrent if bad guys know that they might encounter them, and in some circumstances they might also be able to subdue or kill the attackers before they can kill dozens of people at will.

This sounds a lot like the concealed weapons laws that have been passed in every state. One difference: Ambinder wants license holders to "receive significant and regular training from the government." State laws, so far as I know, don't require government training; they require applicants to give the government evidence they have had training. Ambinder like many liberals evidently thinks government can do a better job of training, which strikes many of us as dubious. Would he like to have his laptop and tablet and cellphone designed by the people who have us healthcare.gov and the VA hospital system?

He lists what he considers reasonable objections to his idea. "There will be accidents. Innocents might get caught in the crossfire ... Police need to be able to distinguish between armed civilians and bad guys." These were things I worried about when Florida passed its concealed weapons law in 1987. The almost total absence since then of stories of such incidents in a press, most of whose members would like to discredit gun ownership, suggests these are not major problems. Responsible people can be trusted to handle guns responsibly.

In the ellipsis in the quotation above he presents another objection. "More guns in one place induces a measure of disgust." Won't they be the same kind of people who drive SUVs, munch on nachos and cheese in chain restaurants, throng to theme parks and gambling casinos? Icky. Won't most of them be white married Christians? Yuck. Who wants to be around those kinds of people?

The answer is that Marc Ambinder wants those kinds of people to be around when a mass killer starts shooting, so that those of them who are carrying guns and know how to use them can shoot the killer before he kills more. He just doesn't seem to realize that he has made the case for concealed weapons laws and also the case against "gun-free" zones. Maybe the National Rifle Association should send him a free membership.