When seconds count . . .

The gun nuts are fond of saying that when seconds count, the police are minutes away. This is supposed to justify walking around armed all the time, because you just never know. But is this correct? Is forewarned both armed and forearmed? What if the police are right there? What if they know trouble is coming? Is carrying heat the best protection? Not if what happened in Fremont, Ohio, is any guide. Read it and weep, but it looks as if a cop in a bar (presumably armed no matter what the gun carrying laws are for other people in Ohio) knew an angry guy was making trouble, but that was no protection for him, since Angry Guy just opened a side door and started shooting. "Thoughtless reaction" -- as advocated by gun nut Cory Trapp (see "Equal Time for Gun Nuts," March 1) -- doesn't work if you are being assassinated from ambush, as it appears happened to Officer Chavez -- and to two other people. If you add up all the people saved by gun mania and subtract all those, like Officer Chavez, killed by it, you get a pile of the slain, millions of them. But the gun nuts are safe from argument. My father, a Catholic, used to use a term from the medieval church about people like that -- invincible ignorance. In the view of theologians, invincible ignorance is a get-out-of-hell-free card in the sin business. Kinda cold comfort up here, though, if you are among the holocaust of the slain (or merely maimed) sacrificed to the Moloch of the Second Amendment.