“A gun makes a man comfortable. Not using them, having them. The weight, the reminding pull on the waistline, the density, the pressure of hard metal against the flesh. If you knew someone was going to try to kill you, that pressure was what let you operate. You were armed. You could fight. It was the enabler for all those who, for whatever reason, knew they would travel in violence’s way.” – Excerpt from The Third Bullet by Stephen Hunter.
“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” – 2nd Amendment of the United States Constitution
“As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking - or lack of thinking.” -- Thomas Sowell
Most of the people that I know, who have a concealed carry permit, do not carry 100% of the time. But the beauty of a concealed carry law is that criminals can never know if and when a potential victim is armed.
I used to hunt deer, and Joe Biden is right, I never had occasion to empty a ten-shot clip at a deer. In fact, my rifle didn’t hold ten shots. That’s not the point. During every deer season tens of thousands of people are armed to the teeth and walking around in the fields and forests of Wisconsin searching for their quarry. And yet, with the exception of a few accidents, there is no human carnage.
That’s because guns don’t kill people. If they did, thousands of human beings would bloody our landscape each and every hunting season.
People kill people. Guns are merely tools. If the heart is evil, there is no way to stop a murderer. And the murderer’s tool box is filled with many options. More people are murdered each year with hammers than rifles.
All this rhetoric, however, is just camouflage. What is necessary here is to understand how the right to self-protection affects our American way of life. But to do that we have to start thinking with our brains rather than our emotions.
Do gun-control laws actually reduce gun crimes?
According to Thomas Sowell, If gun-control laws save lives, there is nothing to prevent us from repealing the Second Amendment. But, if gun-control laws do not actually control guns, but instead lead to more armed robberies and higher murder rates, then gun-control laws would be a bad idea, even if the Second Amendment didn’t exist.
It’s apparent that too many people who have never fired a shot in their life insist on passing laws to limit how many bullets should be allowed in a firearm’s clip or magazine. Others assure us that no hunter needs more than ten bullets to down a deer.
They even go so far as to claim that thirty bullets in a magazine are far too many for self-defense even if they have never had to defend themselves with a gun.
There have been many factual studies regarding self-defense with a gun statistics over the years. But gun-control zealots who have made up their minds don’t want to be confused by the facts. Researchers at the Cato Institute, the libertarian Washington, D.C. think tank have released "Tough Targets: When Criminals Face Armed Resistance from Citizens.”
The report's authors argue that because only when a citizen actually shoots a criminal subject does the incident make the news, there are likely thousands of times when the mere display of a legal weapon stops a crime from happening. Most studies show no reduction in gun crimes, including murder, under gun-control laws. But a significant number of studies show higher rates of murder and other gun crimes under gun-control laws.
It might seem obvious to non-reasoning gun-control advocates that if no one had guns, there would be fewer gun crimes. It’s easy to disarm peaceful, law-abiding people, however, and nearly impossible to disarm people who are not.
According to Thomas Sowell, when it was legal to buy a shotgun in London in the middle of the 20th century, there were very few armed robberies there. But, after British gun-control zealots managed over the years to disarm virtually the entire law-abiding population, armed robberies became literally a hundred times more common. And murder rates rose.
There is one more very important point to consider, which is the reason for the 2nd Amendment in the first place. The following statements were made by various founding fathers prior to the adoption of the Second Amendment.
“The constitutions of most of our States assert, that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves, ... or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed …” – Thomas Jefferson
“Here every private person is authorized to arm himself, and on the strength of this authority, I do not deny the inhabitants had a right to arm themselves at that time, for their defense, not for offence.” – John Adams
And finally,
“Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as military forces, which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.” -- Tench Coxe, Delegate to Continental Congress, 1787.
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