b.kocik

On July 23, 2007, two career criminals broke into the home of a prominent Connecticut doctor, intent on robbing it. When they entered, they discovered the family was at home - the doctor, his wife, and their two daughters, 11 and 17. They beat the doctor. They tied the 11-year-old girl to her bed, and raped her. They raped and strangled the wife. Then they poured gasoline on their victims, and set the house on fire with three people still alive inside. The doctor is the only survivor.¹

On December 18, 2005, a 37-year-old woman who was mother to three children answered her door, and was greeted by a man who claimed he was having car trouble, and needed to use her phone. She was later found shot and hanged to death in the basement of her home, near Culpeper, VA.

On New Year’s Day, 2006, a family of four were found beaten, stabbed, and bound in the basement of their house in Richmond, VA. The two daughters were 9 and 4 years of age. None of them survived. One of the two men who slaughtered them was the same man who had killed the woman near Culpeper. The pair went on to kill another family of three only five days later.²

Monsters are real.

I tell you this because, of late, I’ve been hearing from a lot of people who seem genuinely puzzled as to why I feel the need to own a gun. Some have made me the subject of jokes about “violent tendencies” (which I do not have, and as a matter of fact, those of you who do not possess concealed carry permits are statistically 5.5 times more likely to be arrested for a violent crime than those of us who do³). Some have even gone so far as to pay me the insult of questioning my intelligence, my background, and my mental competence. Since so many of you have been so forthright in sharing your opinions about my choice to keep a firearm, I’m going to be very blunt about one of my own:

I am completely dumbfounded that any of you seem to have to have this explained to you. I am shocked that so many of you who are otherwise sharp, intelligent, reasonable people have been so snowed by the anti-gun crowd that you appear to actually believe their myths, when the truth is so easily discovered. I am honestly disconcerted to have found that several of you are so naive as to believe that in this day and age, no one needs to possess or conceal such a weapon.

Following are some of the fallacies I have heard put forth by some that honestly causes me to question their own intelligence and mental competence.

You’re more likely to be killed with your own gun than the criminal is.

No I’m not. That simply isn’t true. I dare any of you to cite a single document that can back this claim with real data. The truth is that every single day, 550 rapes, 1,100 murders, and 5,200 various other violent crimes are prevented because the intended victim, or some samaritan nearby, had a gun. In less than 0.9% of those cases is the weapon actually fired.⁴

In Britain, where private gun ownership is almost completely forbidden, 59% of burglaries are committed against residences while the occupants are at home. In the United States, where many more law-abiding citizens are armed (and criminals know this), that rate is only 13%.⁵ The adage that “criminals prefer an unarmed public” is not just a bumper sticker slogan.

Your odds of remaining uninjured in a violent attack if you choose not to resist are 75%. WIth a knife, your chances are 60%. If you attempt some form of non-violent resistance, you have a 55% chance of coming out alright. If you use a gun to defend yourself, your odds of not only surviving the encounter, but of remaining unharmed, are 94%.⁶

You cannot convince me - nor should any sane, logical, intelligent person be convinced - that if someone enters my home with the intent to inflict harm upon myself or my family that I am somehow safer if I do not have an effective means with which to defend myself. You cannot convince me that any of the people mentioned at the top of this post (except for the criminals themselves) are better off because none of the family members was prepared to defend the home with deadly force. Imagine how different the outcome might have been if any of them had been.

You can’t have a gun in your house, you have kids!

Yes. Also I have bleach, pesticides, anti-freeze, and dozens of other chemicals and substances that are very deadly to children. Not to mention the knives we keep in our kitchen. Must I get rid of those, as well? No. What I do with them is the very same thing I do with my gun - I store it such that they cannot access it.

If you don’t believe that you’re competent enough to safely store a firearm, then don’t. And while you’re at it, get rid of all of your kitchen knives and potentially harmful substances, because you probably shouldn’t be trusted to keep your kids safe from those, either. But don’t try to tell me that I’m as incompetent as you fear you are. I assure you that I am not.

There’s one other thing I really don’t want in my home, because of the fact that they are very dangerous to children: violent criminals. But since I don’t really get a say as to whether or not they’ll be present (and don’t fool yourself into thinking that you do, either), then it would be highly irresponsible of me not to be prepared to keep my children safe from them, wouldn’t it?

What’s your excuse?

Only the police should have guns.

If there were a way to make sure that happened, that no criminal could ever gain access to a firearm, and if it could be guaranteed that an armed officer would always be around when needed, I might almost be inclined to agree. However, there are many who have guns for purposes other than self-defense (competition matches, target shooting, hunting, etc.) who would not agree, and I can think of no good reason to disarm these folks. The reality is, though, that the average duration of a violent encounter is under a minute. Unless there’s an officer standing next to you when the nightmare scenario unfolds, who is going to save you? As Tom Palmer, one of the plaintiffs in the landmark Heller vs. The District case currently before the Supreme Court says, “If someone gets into your house, which would you rather have, a handgun or a telephone? You can call the police if you want, and they’ll get there, and they’ll take a picture of your dead body. But they can’t get there in time to save your life. The first line of defense is you.”⁷

The “only the police should have guns” rhetoric is really part of a much larger, completely illogical (and yet, oddly popular) fallacy, which is that gun control somehow reduces violent crime. It has been proven over, and over, and over again that this is not at all true. Washington DC banned gun ownership in 1976, and has for many years enjoyed the status of being the murder capital of the world. In reality, it has been shown that gun control laws result in a marked increase in violent crimes in the areas in which they’re enacted, while the loosening of restrictions around firearms ownership and increased availability of concealed carry permits consistently send crime rates tumbling.

Yet, it is far easier to keep the blinders on, and repeat the mantra that “guns are bad.” Firearms are used 60 times more often to protect life than to take it.⁸ But no, we shouldn’t be allowed to have them.

Please.

Gun owners have to face these questions all the time, even though they’ve been answered very clearly by plenty of data. When tragedies like the VA Tech massacre happen, the knee-jerk reaction is inevitably a cry for more stringent gun laws. People always want to take the guns away from those of us who didn’t do it. It somehow never occurs to them to notice that these things always happen in so-called “gun-free safe zones” where it is already illegal to possess a gun. The folly is, of course, that the criminal isn’t terribly concerned as to whether or not he’s legally allowed to possess the weapon with which he’s about to slaughter random, innocent people. What he often does know, however, is that none of his targets will be armed - because it’s a gun-free safe zone. And it is, indeed, a very safe place for him.

When asked the question, “Why do you own a gun?” or “Why do you carry a gun?” the answers often given range from the whimsical (”Because I cannot carry a cop.”), to the trite, but practical (”For the same reason you wear a seatbelt when you’re in a car.”), to the ideological (”Because it is my right to do so.”) My answer is this:

Monsters are real. But the real ones are not bulletproof.

References:

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/nyregion/07slay.html
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_family_murder
3, 4. National Crime Victimization Survey, 2000, Bureau of Justice Statistics, BATF estimates on handgun supply
5. Dr. Gary Kleck, Criminologist, Florida State University (1997) and Kopel (1992 and 1999)
6. British Home Office
7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyoLuTjguJA
8. Fall 1995, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Want more truth? http://www.gunfacts.info