MORE GUNS: THE CURE-ALL?

National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke is the latest right-winger to tell us that more guns would have changed everything at the offices of Charlie Hebdo:

America’s Provocateurs Are at the Mercy of the Barbarians

The most likely targets of Islamist wrath are in the cities with the most restrictive gun laws.

... Taken together, Washington, D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles host almost all of the more controversial media personalities in America; and, taken together, these cities have some of the worst self-defense laws in the country. Had Charlie Hebdo been an American publication, it would most likely have been located in Brooklyn or in Silver Lake or in Columbia Heights -- positioned, in other words, in precisely the sort of place in which attacks on its employees would have been most likely to succeed. This, as the French might say, is “absurde.”

... Certainly, things might have been different if the events had unfolded in heavily armed states such as Oklahoma or Texas -- or, for that matter, if someone in an adjacent office had been possessed of a rifle of his own....

Yeah, right, because arms in the workplace always thwart the bad guys:

The co-owner of a Shawnee {Kansas] gun store was fatally shot and three suspects were wounded during an attempted robbery Friday afternoon.

The gunfight broke out after four robbers entered She’s A Pistol, at 57th Street and Nieman Road, about 2:10 p.m., according to Shawnee police.

Jon Bieker, 44, of Gardner, who co-owned the business with his wife, Becky Bieker, died later at a hospital, police said....

In the same week the Charlie Hebdo massacre took place in surrender-monkey France, a business owner in the very red, very pro-gun state of Kansas was shot and killed in his gun shop.

Of course, this is a ridiculous argument about what appears to be a very well-planned terrorist attack -- if the people at Charlie Hebdo were heavily armed, don't you think their very determined killers would have devised a different method of murder? A bomb? A suicide belt? More gunmen? Or maybe an ambush, as happened in the recent death of a Canadian soldier (and, for that matter, two presumably armed cops in New York whose killer was an assassin if not a terrorist)?

I don't know how you prevent or thwart small but lethal assaults like this, but guns aren't the cure-all. And agenda-driven murders are rare; if you want to live in a gun-drenched society like most of America rather than a gun-control nation like France, you have to put up with a rate of gun deaths that's more than triple what it is in France. Terrorism is rare. Garden-variety shootings are more common -- and more guns, here in America, mean more of the latter, thanks to Mr. Cooke and his friends.