The CPR Corollary.

Can gun owners be trusted when not facing grave danger? Grab a cup, this one is a little long.

Dr. Laura’s on-air mention of my book, Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns, was superb Monday, and I am most pleased and privileged to join her titles on her Reading Corner at DrLaura.com. It is very important that non-gun owners appreciate the relationship between all of our freedoms and the armed citizen, perhaps now more than ever before. The question has been whether Americans can be trusted to be armed wherever we have a right to be. Our way of thinking – 90 million gun owner adults – is that the question is not this, but how we survive in a nation where citizens cannot trust their officials. Still, I’ll answer the question with this abbreviated excerpt from Safe Streets.

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I write almost entirely for non-gun owners. Reasonable non-gun owners may feel different about becoming an armed citizen when they see a great disparity between the predictions of the gun owners and the failures of the predictions of the anti-gun owners. The comparison cannot be an even-handed one as some might wish, but frank and honest because of one reason: it’s important. The dire predictions of the anti-gun movement have never come true, while the fears and apprehensions of the liberty movement have all come true. More of these will materialize in 2009, we believe, and this alone can be a very thoughtful analysis from every adult.

One of the questions about gun ownership is whether gun owners are safe in any given community. The question has been how gun-toting citizens behave when not confronted by crime. How do they handle traffic stress? How do they manage a family discussion when they have a gun on their hip? How do they function in the workplace when armed throughout the work day?

The Virginia Tech Review Panel in turning in their narrative to the Governor reported that they could not allow guns for their adult students because some students felt uncomfortable. They presented a string of very poor reasons as their best evidence for denying a civil right and optimal safeguard of their student body. It is settled by now that disarming students didn’t work as the optimal safeguard. Naturally, to any liberty enthusiast, it goes without saying that that’s no standard for infringing a civil right, but the trustees felt that it was. It cost them $11 Million and thirty-two lives. It always costs the students and their families, and non-gun owners probably care as much as the rest of us do. The key is to place the blame where it belongs, and to remember that blame is essential to accountability. The response of V-Tech was poor and capitalized on emotion of nervous students. Still, many non-gun owners would very much like one question answered: can gun owners be trusted?

For the non-gun owner interested in exploring this, I refer you to two models which answer your question on whether the average reasonable person can be trusted throughout the day armed with a loaded handgun. The first model is, of course, our best evidence - experience - and that is the excellent record of decades of right-to-carry states who affirm not only open and concealed carry, but Castle Doctrine, and who also affirm the sovereign authority of constituents there. It is not as if their arms were twisted by some lobby, it is that some of these are frontier states who still have a deeper, proven understanding that they cannot count on bureaucrats and their absentee policies would be worthless. The key to fighting crime is not in absentee policy ["Don't do anything until we get there!"], but in presence of authority – as average reasonable persons – who do the best job of it after all. No state has ever repealed its concealed carry laws. It works.

The second model is one I first articulated as my own years ago. I call it the CPR Corollary to the armed citizen, and it is the second model of whether citizens can be trusted hour by hour and in between. Forget the incident where they may be needed, the question from non-gun owners has always been in how they fare when not needed. Can they be trusted?

The answer is Yes. Each of these operates in the absence of first responders to fill the void between authorized response and emergency. The solution is within the citizen who is present, possessed of all legal authority to act anyway, and must not be discouraged from this. It is now more than a matter of whether they can be trusted – discouraging such would run counter to established public policy and interest - it is a matter of authority and now you can add confidence to that. The Founding Fathers said that a government which will not trust its own citizens, itself, cannot be trusted; If the new administration is supportive of citizen involvement, remember that we had it first, more than forty years ago. Some say hundreds of years ago. As the originators of the concept of citizen involvement, we would be the best to consult. On the concept of citizen intervention, authority to act does not come from government, it comes from us.

Here is the comparison – the corollary - between the armed citizen and the lay administration of CPR.

1. In each case, the situation is one of grave danger, whether it is from medical emergency or violence. Cardiac arrest is generally fatal, and many crimes of violence do great bodily harm and become a fatality.

2. Each occurs in the absence of first responders, and is more life–threatening every second it evolves.

3. In each case, the citizen has full authority to act in agreement with public policy and interest.

4. In each case, the consequences of non-intervention are irrevocable and heartbreaking.

5. The very mobility and likelihood of a citizen presence improves the rapport between the government and the governed. How? Not by authorization, but by non-interference, thank you. Freedom. Call it less centralization of powers and no longer excluding the citizen from the process of a healthy and safe community.

6. Each is proven over decades of experience.

The objections to Citizen CPR in the seventies were that the situation should best be left to the professionals, such as Paramedics, that citizens would exceed the scope of their authority, that they would be sued, that they could not stay skilled and sharp because they were not career personnel.

If the new administration is so very supportive of citizen involvement, remember that we had it first. We must be the ones to consult on this.

Why not leave it to the professionals? Because brain death begins in four minutes, and in the hospital, nearly every unit has a crash cart several paces down the hall. To the perspective of bureaucrats, help is seconds away. But gun owners have their experience, too: when seconds count, police are moments away. The CPR Corollary shows that there is an identify of values between the immediacy of the armed citizen and the immediacy of volunteer CPR. In the first moments of a medical emergency or a violent crime, you are entirely on your own. This is why a good CPR course includes artificial breathing, first-aid and the Heimlich maneuver.

Have citizens been trustworthy on CPR? Yes. Have the fears of the objectors come true? No. Have gun owners – 90 million of them in 2009 – been trustworthy? Yes. Have the fears of the anti-gun movement come true? Not one.

Lay or volunteer CPR – now known as Passerby CPR – and armed citizens prove that centralization of powers is a very bad idea, and that our freedom of movement on our own authority is the better idea for everything from productivity to the health of our national spirit. How the armed citizen fares in 2009 will decide dozens of seemingly unrelated programs for the rest of the country.

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John Longenecker is author of Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns available at DrLaura.com