There are some people who say stupid things and, in time, you can kind of let them go. Maybe it was ignorance, or maybe they just misspoke, but we kind of give our friends a pass over time. We might still bust their chops over it, because that's what friends do, but we're not worked up over it anymore because everyone makes mistakes.
However, when someone says something so mind-bogglingly stupid in regard to our civil liberties, including how we don't actually need them, that should never be laid to rest.
And I want to thank Amy Swearer for bringing this example up at her monthly roundup of defensive gun uses at our sister site, PJ Media.
Last month, at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., a gunman opened fire in a classroom full of ROTC cadets. He killed the ROTC instructor and injured two others before several cadets subdued him — with one cadet using a knife to stab him to death.
To rational people, the shooting clearly evidenced the combined failure of gun control and soft-on-crime policies to protect innocent victims. The perpetrator, who’d been convicted of terrorism charges in 2016, was supposed to be serving an 11-year prison sentence but had been released early under a drug treatment program for which he was supposed to be ineligible. He’d then simply ignored the state’s laws regarding gun possession by felons, background checks, and carrying guns on college campuses, all on his way to ignoring laws prohibiting murder and acts of terrorism.
The responses from many anti-gun public officials were telling: in their view, the attack on disarmed college students clearly evidenced a need to further restrict the right of innocent victims to keep and bear arms in self-defense —and suggested that armed self-defense isn’t that important in the first place. After all, as one Virginia Democrat insinuated, if the cadets at Old Dominion could subdue their assailant without a gun, why can’t you?
All of it missed the point entirely.
Boy, did it.
Del. Garret McGuire may have made the dumbest anti-gun argument in history. As a refresher to his exact words:
Dem Del. @GMcGuireVA: "We know that it's not always true that you need a gun to fight back someone with a gun. Because those hero cadets didn't. Leivu Labrescu, ...didn't have a gun when he selflessly gave up his body to prevent the Virginia Tech shooter from entering his class." pic.twitter.com/k9G34CcCtS
— Virginia House GOP (@vahousegop) March 14, 2026
No one has ever claimed that a gun was needed to fight back in every case. However, McGuire's own argument backfires on itself when he notes that Leivu Labrescu was killed trying to stop the Virginia Tech killer. Labrescu didn't have a gun, and he died.
The truth of the matter is that the Old Dominion attacker picked the one classroom, possibly in the entire nation, where he wasn't able to turn the room into a kill zone. Any other classroom at Old Dominion would have, because fighting back like that requires someone with a warrior mentality that most simply don't possess. Hell, any other ROTC class might not have produced the same results here.
What we saw at Old Dominion University was the perfect storm of suck for a would-be attacker, who, as Swearer notes, should have still been in prison and was ineligible to purchase a gun lawfully. He bought it from someone who had been allowed to walk for gun trafficking charges before, too, so there's that.
McGuire's entire argument is premised on the fact that, because of one classroom, your right to keep and bear arms isn't really as important for your personal safety as you might like to believe.
That classroom contained someone who had a knife, and everyone else with enough fight in them to make it end. While I'd love to know that every classroom in the country had people with the same mentality, we don't have that. The educational establishment has spent decades trying to beat it out of our children, so when they get to college, any will to fight is long extinguished in most cases.
Those who still have it, though? Yeah, they gravitate toward things like ROTC or law enforcement-related degrees, if they don't just enlist or seek out a career in law enforcement without the degree. Or they engage in martial arts or something else that fosters that mentality.
But you're only likely to find one or two of those in any given classroom most of the time, and as you get out of the school environment, you're going to find an even lower percentage than you might otherwise see.
The idea that you can just stab your mass shooter to death without ending up as part of the body count isn't completely laughable, as it happened, but I wouldn't expect anyone to assume they'll be successful if they tried it. Hell, I have a pocket knife on me at all times, and I've studied some actual knife fighting, and do you know what I want a time like that?
A gun and as much ammo as my body can carry.
McGuire said the dumbest thing he could have, and he should never be allowed to forget it.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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