Love and Gun-Control in the Time of Covid :: 10/01/2023

I hope you’ve fallen in love. It is an exciting time when your new partner is simply beautiful and the world is full of possibilities. Eventually, the honeymoon ends and you find out that all relationships take work. Now that you see your partner’s flaws, you wonder how you overlooked them before.

The theory of gun-control might be beautiful, but the reality of disarming the good guys is heart-breakingly ugly. The theory is that we can make criminals harmless by regulating the people who obey the law. When that doesn’t work, the gun-control idealists say we need more and more laws to reach their utopia. Eventually, we realize that the honeymoon is over and that the 23-thousand firearms regulations we have today have made us less safe. It is more than a cliché to say that a pro-gun activist is a liberal who was mugged. I’ve met them and heard their stories. I want all of us to learn from them.

In theory, we can regulate honest people so extensively that we disarm the bad guys. We’ve never seen that happen anywhere or at any time. Prohibition is a beautiful theory until you look closely.

For a moment, let’s give the gun-prohibitionists the benefit of the doubt. Suppose we made their theory a reality and we disarmed society today. All the guns are gone, but guns are easy to make. They are even easier to transport. Criminals would have guns by tomorrow. Now, the criminals are armed while you and your neighbors are disarmed. The scheme that sounds like a good plan in theory is a disaster in practice. If there are only a few guns in society, then the criminals who break the law will have them. It doesn’t take many guns in the wrong hands to leave us with shocking levels of violence night after night. I give you Washington DC as a glaring example. Prohibition fails, and not even the police states of China and North Korea are safe.

Far be it from me to tell you that your new love is imperfect.
You will see it yourself when you open your eyes and leave the land of dreams.

Let me turn that entire fantasy scheme on its head for a minute. Today, lots of us own guns. Numbers range from 40-percent to 60-percent of us live in a home where someone owns a firearm. Suppose we increased those numbers so that everyone was armed, even the criminals. Would crime go up or go down? I think the criminals would learn their lesson in a hurry. The thugs would hang out at the bars and swimming pools where they know that only the designated driver was armed.

This is more than a theory. We saw crime go up in Washington DC and in San Francisco where honest citizens are disarmed and the thugs have the gangs and the guns. I think that crime would go down if the criminal expected that his victim was armed. We have some history to back that up.

Today, armed citizens stop more violent crime than the police do. That sounds violent, but it is actually great news since the good guys almost never have to press the trigger. Night after night, the bad guys run away when they discover that they chose an armed victim. It is also good news that in those rare cases when we did have to press the trigger, the bad guy usually lived. Sadly, a few hundred violent attackers die each year during legal self-defense incidents.

That comes out to a little more than one bad guy a day. Each act of armed defense is closely examined by law enforcement. When all is said and done, honest citizens kill a few more bad guys each year in legal self-defense than the police do.

That is from nationwide FBI data, but I almost forgot that we’ve conducted this experiment time after time on a smaller scale. The crime rate drops in city after city when 30 to 40-thousand armed citizens come to town for an NRA convention.

A world of dreams isn’t real. A handful of bad guys with guns gives us Washington DC, or Baltimore, or Chicago. In contrast, 100-million gun owners aren’t a problem to anyone.. unless you kick down their door in the middle of the night.

A society that depends on angels isn’t very practical. I hate it when the angels get hurt. Please take care of you and the people you love.

https://slowfacts.wordpress.com/2023/09/25/love-and-gun-control-in-the-time-of-covid/