I can only assume—based on the gun nut logic sloshing around the Internet over the last week—that the police in Kansas are unarmed. I haven't read the story, just going from the headline. I'm assuming that the police in Kansas are unarmed because if the police in Kansas had guns then they could've taken the bad guy out, right? I mean, the gun nuts keep insisting that one armed teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary could've taken out a madman with two handguns and a high-powered rifle. If that's true, well, then surely a cop with a gun—two cops with guns—could've taken out one guy with one gun in Kansas.

That's how it works, right?


Or maybe not.

UPDATE: Neil Steinberg's lastest column for the Chicago Sun-Times:

Twenty children shot down. As horrifying as it was, our fellow Americans buffed the horror to a hallucinatory sheen. The shootings are an Obama conspiracy to push gun control! This illustrates the urgent need to end gun-free zones! If only those teachers were armed...

Shades of the offensive fantasy that—since I’m Jewish—gun nuts feel obligated to send to me, floating the notion that had only the Jews of Europe been armed before World War II then, golly, the Holocaust would never have happened. Pretty to think so. But the Polish Army was armed. The French Army was armed too. Didn’t help them much. Guns have their uses, but if they were the magic totems of protection that gun advocates seem to believe they are, then we’d all live in a very, very safe country.

And, obviously, we don’t.

There could have a been a police officers’ convention at the Sandy Hook School and those kids would still be dead. Police officers, if you haven’t noticed, are shot and killed too, despite their training, despite their guns.