Nick Gillespie on Obama, Jon Stewart, Sandy Hook, and "Common-Sense" Gun Control

Vice President Joe Biden is making gun-control recommendations, President Barack Obama is pushing the need for "common-sense" gun control, and Daily Show host Jon Stewart is making heartfelt and sardonically witty pleas to do something in the wake of December's Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut.

"Once you strip away the raw emotionalism of the carnage at Sandy Hook, or the Aurora theater, or Columbine, or Luby's, or wherever," writes Nick Gillespie,

You're left with a series of inconvenient truths for gun-control advocates: Over the past 20 years or so, more guns are in circulation and violent crime is down. So is violent crime that uses guns. Murders are down, too, even as video games and movies and music and everything else are filled with more fantasy violence than ever. For god's sake, even mass shootings are not becoming more common. If ever there was a case to stand pat in terms of public policy, the state of gun control provides it (and that's without even delving into the fact that Supreme Court has recently validated a personal right to own guns in two landmark cases).