After more than a decade of exploding gun ownership -- and the accompanying and indisputable plunge in violent crime, including those committed with guns that accompanied it -- the formula "more guns equals less crime" -- has been proven.  Only liberals dwelling in the parts of America that still preach and practice strict gun control, where "fewer guns equals more crime," continue to argue the contrary.

In the years since the Supreme Court, in the 2008 case District of Columbia vs. Heller, overturned Washington, D.C.'s notoriously strict gun ban, not only has the skyrocketing murder rates the liberals predicted failed to materialize, but homicide rates have declined and are now below 100 annually -- a rate not seen since 1963.  One reasonably can look forward to similar results now that an appeals court has overturned Chicago's equally draconian concealed-weapons ban.

Yet liberals, against all evidence to the contrary -- and all evidence is to the contrary -- are not above exploiting the recent tragedy at the Sandy Hook Elementary School to argue, once again, that the appropriate defense against deranged shooters is to make their task easier by reducing the likelihood that the next Adam Lanza will face a law-abiding citizen possessing the means -- i.e., a gun -- to subdue him.

As we recall in passing that Timothy McVeigh needed only a truckload of fertilizer to murder more than six times as many innocents as Adam Lanza did, let us lament that liberals will never admit what is so obvious to the rest of us: that no amount of gun control legislation will prevent a mass murderer from obtaining a gun.  The only defense against such a person is a law-abiding person, also with a gun.

That certainly was the case at Sandy Hook, where Adam Lanza shot to death 26 people, 20 of them children -- right up until the very moment that "Lanza shot himself when he heard police coming" (emphasis mine).

And the same thing happened in the Columbine shooting, where (emphasis mine) "[t]he killers committed suicide around the time the makeshift elite team finally entered."  As at Sandy Hook, the instant the shooters became aware of the presence of good men, with guns, not only did the carnage stop, but the perpetrators took their own lives, essentially saving the communities the trouble and expense of trying them.

All well and good, but there's a more important point to be made here:

Authorities said they found multiple 30-round magazines and hundreds of bullets at the school, enough ammunition on him to carry out significant additional carnage.

Imagine how many more lives would have been lost had the good men with their guns arrived five minutes later.

And imagine how many fewer lives would have been lost had the good men with their guns arrived five minutes sooner.

But most of all, imagine how many lives -- perhaps even all of them -- would have been saved if Vicki Soto, the heroic 27-year-old teacher, who lost her life when she placed her body between the muzzle of the madman's gun and her young students, had had a gun.  Imagine what would, and would not, have happened had any of the adults who found themselves in the same room with Adam Lanza on Friday been armed.

Of course, we can never know for sure, but given the denouements at Columbine and Sandy Hook, and at a similar occurrence, coincidentally, at an Oregon mall on the same day as the Sandy Hook shooting, the odds would seem very good that most and perhaps even all of Adam Lanza's 26 victims would be alive, and Lanza would be dead, most likely by his own hand.

And while I'm asking questions, let me close with another: we have read much about Nancy Lanza, Adam's mother and, sadly, his first victim.  But where was Peter Lanza, this troubled and mentally ill boy's father?  He was nowhere, having divorced Nancy in 2009 and since remarried.

Adam Lanza, a psychologically damaged young man, raised from age 17 in a single-parent home, without a father.

Liberals seeking the "root cause" of the tragedy at Sandy Hook are encouraged to begin their search there.  And after they've done that, they might talk to the ACLU, which was instrumental in overturning a Connecticut law that would have mandated the treatment that Adam Lanza so desperately, and obviously, needed.

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