In dueling columns on cnn.com, Ted Nugent faces off against former LA Times editorial page editor Tom Plate.

Nugent’s sensible column speaks for itself and needs no support. Once he has pointed out that Virginia Tech actually was a “gun-free zone,” what else is left to say? But I thought that Plate’s highly disingenuous column deserved a fisking, so here goes.

The right to free speech, press, religion and assembly and so on seem to be working well, but the gun part, not so much.

Compared to what? Some alternate history without a Second Amendment, I suppose. But we don’t know what America’s past and present would look like without a Second Amendment. I’ll just point out, since comparisons to contemporary gun violence in Britain and the rest of Europe are often made in this context, that we haven’t had a North American Holocaust. We haven’t had a WWII that killed 55,000,000; a WWI that killed tens of millions; a blood- and revolution-soaked 19^th century that killed tens of millions more; or a Stalinist purge of tens of millions. We haven’t had an Armenian genocide, or a Katyn Forest Massacre. We haven’t even had the relatively low level of civil violence represented by local conflicts such as Northern Ireland or the Basque region. We haven’t had a Milosevic ethnically cleansing “undesirables” in North America within the past decade.

Could European Second Amendments have prevented some of these wars, atrocities, and crimes against humanity? Possibly. The despots in question certainly seemed to have thought so, as gun confiscation was always one of the first items on their lists. And you’ll note that the well-armed Swiss are conspicuously absent from the above roster of victims, despite their multi-lingual and multi-religious society.

Some misguided people will focus on the fact that the 23-year-old student who killed his classmates and others at Virginia Tech was ethnically Korean.

Oh, yeah? Name one. No one on the gun rights side is focusing on that at all. This is a red herring, and a lame attempt to make gun rights opponents out to be bigots. Actually, Second Amendment proponents are defending gun rights with the same arguments they used after Columbine, etc. Now I can imagine Cho’s status as a resident alien being brought up in an immigration control context, but that would be a) distinct from any gun rights context, and b) not at all the same as zeroing in on Cho’s ethnicity.

These students were not killed by a Korean, they were killed by a 9 mm handgun and a .22-caliber handgun.

Are those our only choices? He’s trying to create a false dichotomy here: if you’re not anti-gun, you must be anti-Korean. How about, the victims were killed by a person (who happened to have been born in South Korea), who used two guns. And BTW, Mr. Plate, four teachers were killed as well as 28 students.

In the nineties, the Los Angeles Times courageously endorsed an all-but-complete ban on privately owned guns, in an effort to greatly reduce their availability.

I’m assuming that that would have been during the time period when Plate himself was the editorial page editor of the LA Times. If so, I have to applaud his breathtaking lack of humility in citing his own stance so admiringly. However, what’s so “courageous” about sticking with the same leftist orthodoxy that 99% of the MSM adheres to? What truly would have been courageous would have been for Plate or the Times to express any view on any issue than ran contrary to the prevailing politically correct consensus of the day.

By the time the series of editorials had concluded, the newspaper had received more angry letters and fiery faxes from the well-armed U.S. gun lobby than on any other issue during my privileged six-year tenure as the newspaper's editorial page editor.

But the paper, by the way, also received more supportive letters than on any other issue about which it editorialized during that era. The common sense of ordinary citizens told them that whatever Americans were and are good for, carrying around guns like costume jewelry was not on our Mature List of Notable Cultural Accomplishments.

So huge amounts of pro-gun rights mail are dismissed as the efforts of the “gun lobby,” while anything anti-gun originates from “ordinary citizens.” It’s pretty easy to say the public’s overwhelmingly on your side on any issue at all when you get to toss any dissenting voices into the “lobby” pile (see Global Warming).

As for "well-armed U.S. gun lobby," what exactly is the snide implication here? That people were forced at gunpoint to right letters to the editor? Probably not even Plate wants anyone to believe that, so what does "well-armed" have to do with anything?

The dilemma that Plate or any other opponent of gun rights faces here is that their opinion is a minority one and these is powerful opposition to it. However, the “power” here comes from the collective power of 200,000,000 individually weak gun owners and those who approve of gun rights. The usual leftist trick of trying to pretend that some particular practice only benefits a tiny elite of Mayflower-descended Boston Brahmins and is therefore against the interests of the common man and woman fails laughably when it comes to self defense rights.

Far fewer guns in America would logically result in far fewer deaths from people pulling the trigger.

But that very dubious assertion is the heart of the disagreement. You can’t win an argument by restating your side of it and claiming you’ve thereby proven yourself correct. That would be begging the question!

Say there are 100 million guns in the US and that 5 million of those are illegally in the hands of criminals. Question: would getting rid of the 95 million guns legally owned by the rest of us a) increase the gun death rate, b) reduce it by a moderate amount, or c) reduce it by 95%?

You might be able to make a halfway plausible case for b) (over time), though the disastrous a) certainly seems at least as likely. As for c), it’s really the choice that Plate’s arguments tend toward, and even many gun rights opponents can see how unlikely that is.

The probability of the Virginia Tech gun massacre happening would have been greatly reduced if guns weren't so easily available to ordinary citizens.

Now he’s jumping from (misusing) logic to math. Okay, probability theory’s great if you want to calculate your odds at roulette. But does Plate really think that pure chance was the only factor at play on Monday? If his argument were that we each have an equal 0.000000001% chance of awaking and wanting to go on a major shooting spree on any given day, and that whether we do or not will be entirely controlled by the gun laws, then maybe he could gainfully invoke “probability.” But I doubt that even Plate really believes this, so why even frame the issue this way?

Last month, I was robbed at 10 in the evening in the alley behind my home. As I was carrying groceries inside, a man with a gun approached me where my car was parked. The gun he carried featured one of those red-dot laser beams, which he pointed right at my head.

Because I'm anything but a James Bond type, I quickly complied with all of his requests. Perhaps because of my rapid response (it is called surrender), he chose not to shoot me; but he just as easily could have. What was to stop him?...

A near-death experience does focus the mind. We need to get rid of our guns.

It’s depressing to realize that a mediocre thinker like this was in charge of the editorial page of one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers. I’m sure that was a terrifying experience for Plate, and I’m glad he came out of it okay, but argumentum ad anecdotum never proved anything. Yes, he didn’t have a gun, and he got out of his mugging alive. Good, but that single event is not exactly a statistic, is it?

Having a gun doesn’t obligate you to disastrously try to use it when someone already has the drop on you. That same nonviolent mugging could have gone down exactly the same way if Plate had had a gun in his pocket. The claim has never been that a gun can prevent all tragedies, but that in many circumstances a gun can increase your options. You’d think that people who have enshrined “choice” as a holy word would understand that.

Then too, most muggers don’t have much reason to want to shoot a generic victim. Mugging’s not a capital or life offense, whereas murder is. The added safety of eliminating a potential witness is more than offset by the added jeopardy of committing the much more serious crime. But certain categories of victims face other dangers than Plate wasn’t likely to face. If he’d been a 20 year-old woman instead of a 60 year-old man, his mugging might not have ended with a walk-away but with a rape. A great many rapes are crimes of opportunity that start out as muggings or burglaries. And then of course a rapist does have a stronger incentive to permanently prevent his victim from ever testifying than a garden variety mugger does.

As for James Bond, he probably wouldn’t have wandered unarmed into a dark alley at 10:00 pm in the first place. If this is your claim to being a great dispenser of wisdom, that you make a decision that no one sane would make but are then lucky enough not to pay for it, then you’ll forgive me if I look elsewhere for advice.

Does Plate think that outlawing guns could have prevented his mugging? His mugger was already willing to break the more serious law against mugging. Would he be more likely to obey a law against having a gun? The same argument applies to Cho, obviously.

Finally, although he started out talking about the Second Amendment, he never actually addressed this aspect of the whole issue. Like it or not, the Second Amendment is here to stay. Overturning it would take not only both houses of Congress, but also 38 states. That is simply never going to happen, at least not in the foreseeable future. So why even write something like this without even addressing any of the arguments on the other side?

We used to write these kinds of impotent pro-con editorials back on the junior high paper, but we had the excuse of actually being in junior high. And since we couldn’t change any laws, not even the laws that adults were allowed to vote on and not even school policies about homework, arguing over the Second Amendment was no more pointless than arguing over elections, budgets, and other issues that really are on the table (for adult voters).

Plate doesn’t have that excuse. If you’re going to seriously propose overturning the Second Amendment, don’t just regurgitate the same old reasons why; give specific ideas how.