Alarm company ads send wrong message about self-protection

February 25, 4:10 PMSeattle Gun Rights ExaminerDave Workman

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You’ve all seen those advertisements for the nationally-known alarm company that depict a homeowner suddenly surprised by some hooded thug breaking through the door or a window.

An alarm goes off, the telephone rings and the stern-voiced alarm company operator announces, “This is Brand-X home security, are you alright?”

The shaken homeowner – in the majority of these advertisements it’s a female – blurts, “Someone tried to break in.”

And the alarm company guy assures her, “Stay on the phone, I’m sending help right now.”

 Of course, in the advertisement, the bad guy has fled.

In real life, these advertisements, and the oft-repeated admonishment by police officials that private citizens should refrain from taking any direct action against criminals, but call the police instead, are an insulting myth. The advertisement scenarios, and the advice from police spokesmen, are subliminally designed to reinforce the notion that people cannot take care of themselves; that “only the professionals” can watch over us all.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with having an alarm system in your home, and people should definitely call the police in a life-threatening situation, before a confrontation if possible, and definitely afterward.

 But what happens while the victim is waiting to be rescued in real life? In too many cases, police would arrive just in time to spray a white outline around a corpse, while the alarm company guy is in another state wondering why his client has dropped the telephone.

Here is what police and alarm companies won’t discuss: When you are facing a criminal in your house or business, you’re on your own. A gun in your hand may not assure a storybook outcome, but it levels the playing field. Faced with imminent and unavoidable danger of grave bodily harm or death, sounding an alarm may work, but shooting your assailant may work better.

In my book America Fights Back: Armed Self-Defense in a Violent Age (with Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation), we looked at scores of self-defense situations where the presence of a gun was the deciding factor in the life of a would-be victim. Many if not most of the people we wrote about would not be here if they had not been armed.

Rising unemployment and a suffering economy could lead to more crime. It has been the pattern before. Add to that reports from California and elsewhere that prison populations may be thinned, and police departments will either lay off people or simply not fill vacancies because governments have run out of money. It is the recipe for disaster.

America is and always has been a nation built on self-reliance.

Contrary to sneering criticisms from editorial writers or gun prohibitionists about “taking the law into your own hands,” citizens who arm themselves and shoot criminals in self-defense are acting within existing law. They are not vigilantes.

The right to defend one’s self, and one’s family, is older than the written word. It is perhaps the first natural right, and while times have changed, the right still exists.

If police spokesmen or alarm companies suggest that we have become a nation of sheep, and that our survival depends only on their presence as shepherds, it is perhaps time to declare that we aren’t part of the flock.