I only heard of the Virginia Tech murders late yesterday, having been in planning meetings most of the day. I was struck by how erratic the reporting of the incident was. It makes you wonder how much worse the reporting from Iraq is. Confederate Yankee notes that ABC's Brian Ross flat-out lied in his blotter blog.

As I noted yesterday, the ABC News blog did not get so much as a single fact in their blog entry correct.

The Ross entry states that high-capacity magazines "became widely available for sale when Congress failed to renew a law that banned assault weapons." This is a patently false statement, containing no truth at all.

High-capacity magazines have been around for more than half a century, and the sale of high-capacity magazines was not impacted whatsoever by the 1994 Crime Bill. These magazines were freely and commercially available, both in retail stores and online, without interruption, for the 10-year life of the ban, the decades preceding it, and afterward.

Ross implies that high-capacity magazines are now for sale on Web sites as a result of the ban expiring. Again, this is a deceptive, inaccurate statement.

The fact of the matter is that high-capacity magazines were always available for purchase (as noted above) both online, and in retail stores, without interruption.

After the Democrats finally figured out that gun control was a major loser for them, they relented in their efforts to disarm Americans. On the mistaken assumption that the whole country has completely changed their opinions on everything, so-called progressives are resurrecting all their favorite issues; building a bridge back to the 1960s. It is not surprise then to find gun-control editorials popping up like dandelions in May in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting.

At this writing, we do not know if yesterday's crazed shooter had his guns legally registered to him or not. That's hardly even the point now.

The point is that more than 30 random innocents are dead and lots more are badly shot up, in one of the worst mass slaughters in the nation's history, because this guy was carrying firepower that was readily available to him.

This is insanity, and this must stop.

We agree, frankly, that if guns are outlawed, as they say, only outlaws will have guns.

There will not soon come a time when private ownership of firearms is prohibited in this country. That will not happen. Those who want guns will surely continue to find them, somewhere or another.

But we can sure make it a lot tougher for them to do that, and we can sure bring down the number of guns freely circulating in every hamlet and valley of the land. Stricter paperwork oversight alone would keep a good many folks from ever buying a gun in the first place. Add on hard-as-nails local gun laws and stern penalties for violating them. It's got to start happening.

Fine, guns don't kill people. People with guns kill people. But if people who want to shoot people don't have guns to shoot those people with, then those are people who don't get shot.

New York City has some of the strictest gun control in the world. So does Canada, Britain has practically banned all weapons outright. Somehow criminals still manage to get guns as do homicidal maniacs (not to mention explosives, which are virtually impossible to get when compared to firearms...)

Frankly, I've become convinced that what we need is not more gun control, but more guns. Only a few months ago, a young Muslim in Salt Lake City went to a nearby mall armed with a shotgun, a handgun and a backpack full of ammunition. He killed five people and wounded four others.

That's a lot of casualties, but considering that he went to the mall to kill as many people as possible, it can be reasonably stated that he failed.

He failed because someone, in this case an off-duty police officer on a date with his wife, was armed and responded to the commotion in the mall. What easily could have surpassed the Virginia Tech tragedy was quickly curtailed (by the gun fire of the officer) and then resolved (by the death of the shooter).

The simple reality of the Virginia Tech situation was that no one could respond to the shooter, so he simply continued to shoot people until finally he claimed himself as his last victim. Had someone been armed, the death toll would have been much, much smaller.

Like many campuses, even in "shall issue" states, Virginia Tech didn't allow guns on campus. That didn't deter Cho Seung-Hui, but it did deter anyone and everyone who could have responded to Cho's outrage and perhaps saved lives.

Professor Liviu Librescu died blocking the door so his students could escape out the window. Would it have been so terrible if he had been armed? How many more lives could he have saved? Could his own life have been saved?

The gun controllers have blood on their hands.