Why liberals should get a gun permit

May 5, 2:33 PMDenver Gun Rights ExaminerDan Bidstrup

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What is a life worth?  We often hear about the thousands of people every year who kill themselves with guns, the thousands more who kill others with guns and the hundreds of lethal accidents that happen in a year with a gun.  The anti-gun crowd wring their hands over this carnage and begs America to disarm.  They believe that if we could get rid of guns, all these deaths could be avoided.  This is wishful thinking and bad logic.

Estimates I have found for the worth of a human life range from $1 million to over 7 million, depending on who is doing the figuring.  They factor in lost earnings, medical costs, and legal costs.  Using punitive and "pain and suffering" awards from juries in civil cases, they try to calculate a cost for the intangibles such as the anguish of the bereaved family.  Violent crimes not resulting in death introduce the pain and time of healing and physical therapy, and the permanent damage to the victims spirit and mind.  Whatever amount you agree with, in America we value life, and seek to avoid people getting killed needlessly.   Getting rid of guns among law abiding citizens will cause more, not less death and violence.

1.  Removing guns from the hands of law abiding citizens does not remove them from the hands of criminals.  As has been abundantly proven with drugs in America, we cannot stop the flow of anything illegal if there is enough demand for it. Criminals prefer guns as the tool of choice for their profession.

2.  Suicides and murders will be accomplished by other means if there were no guns.  The method of choice is most often a gun because they are efficient, but people have been killing themselves with knives, suffocation, drug overdose, jumping off bridges and other ways as well.  The tragedy is their deep, deep pain that drives them to take their own lives, not the method.   Murders have been committed for as long as mankind has been around, from Cain killing Able with a rock, to all the methods mentioned above.  Guns are efficient, but not necessary to the commission of murder and rape.  At best, the argument could be made here that if the most efficient tool is removed, perhaps there might be fewer successful murders and rapes.  Again, this assumes you can effectively remove guns from the wrong hands by removing them from the right hands.

3.  Guns are used by citizens to avoid murders and rapes and to stop other crimes .  Combing the news and police reports from 300 million people, you can find a hideous murder every day of the week.  The slogan of news organizations is "If it bleeds, it leads" the news show that day.  The liberal frame that the mass media puts on the news is that only the police can defend us with more cops on the beat, and better lights in the courtyards of apartment complexes will drive out the undesirable elements.  We are taught to lock down our homes and cars and hope for the best.  What is hard to find are articles where people have avoided a rape or a murder, where people have defended themselves, their homes, or perhaps someone else from depredation.  These stories don't fit the frame, and are passed over. Dr. Gary Kleck is a professor in the school of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University in Tallahassee.  In his book "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun," he states

"Guns are used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year—or about 6,850 times a day."

This information was gleaned from extensive interviews with people who turned in police reports or were victims of crimes reported by the police, and statistically extrapolated for the entire population.  Most of us in the gun community know personally someone who averted a crime with a gun, usually simply by showing that they had one. Many of us have our own experiences.  This information doesn't make it to the mainstream press.  Sites that chronicle citizen self-defense such as the Civilian Gun Defense Blog are discounted by the mass media as fictitious.

4.  Crime statistics have shown that more guns in society depress the violent crime rate.   The research of John Lott, economist and researcher at the University of Maryland, now covers 19 years worth of county by county crime statistics in the United States.  He continues to document that in areas that liberalize their gun laws and change the default from "convince me you need to carry a gun" to "unless you are a criminal, I will issue you a concealed carry permit" violent crime goes down.  Criminals at some level are realists.  If they work in Chicago, they will be relatively safer from getting killed than they will be in Dallas. Many more of those crazy Texans carry guns. Mr. Lott's research has been attacked, but successfully defended.  Now the anti-gunners simply ignore his research. He states for example that " When state concealed-handgun laws went into effect in a county, murders fell by about 8%, rapes fell by  5%, and aggravated assaults fell fell by 7%.  In 1992, the following numbers were reported : 18,469 murders, 79,272 rapes, 538,368 robberies and 861,103 aggravated assaults in counties without nondiscretionary laws." (Nondiscretionary laws means "prove to me you need one")  Applying the percentage reductions that did occur in the counties where permits were granted unless there was a good reason not to, that would mean 117 less murders, 3,963 fewer rapes, and 60,277 less aggravated assaults.  That would be a lot of human suffering and loss avoided.  I don't see a downside here.

If we truly value life and seek to avoid needless death and injury, we need to dismantle laws that remove guns from law abiding hands.  We don't need "assault weapons" banned because the good guys don't abuse them, and the bad guys will use whatever they can find, which is usually not an expensive semi-automatic rifle.  I suggest to people who don't like guns, but do want to save lives to take the classes, pass the tests and get concealed carry permits. Don't buy a gun. The simple fact that the number of people out there that might be armed has gone up will have a chilling effect on the criminal class.