The High Price Of Gun Control

[Despoiler]

The High Price Of Gun Control
by Maggie Gallagher


A friend of mine once heard screams from the rooftop of his New York City building. Grabbing his gun, he interrupted a rape in progress with a few well-timed shots at the intruder's legs and buttocks. The criminal fled; the woman was grateful. When the police arrived after the fact, as they usually do, they told my friend he was a hero. They also told him he was under arrest.

Eugene Assencao was luckier. As an ex-cop, he was legally allowed to carry the gun he used [in August] when he peered into the window of a Brooklyn 7-Eleven and saw three men pointing a gun at store workers. According to the New York Post, Assencao pulled over, called the cops, then watched as one of the thugs angrily threw a frightened clerk to the ground. Assencao shot one of the criminals in the stomach, while two others fled.

Assencao is just one of literally hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Americans who use a gun they own to protect themselves or others from crime-- the number is somewhere between three-quarters of a million to 3 million people each year, depending on which national poll you believe, as University of Chicago criminologist John R. Lott Jr. reports in his fascinating book, "More Guns, Less Crime."

Sharon Stone has just dramatically announced she's renouncing her guns, even though she once brandished one to turn back an intruder. I hope she's luckier than Alan Berg, the liberal Denver talk-show host who was murdered by members of the Aryan Nations after the police turned down his permit request. Or the less famous James Edward Scott, who in 1995 shot and wounded an intruder in the back yard of his West Baltimore home. The authorities took away his 22-caliber rifle. Less than a year later, another intruder broke into his row house. This time the 83-year-old man was strangled.

Men and women with guns protect not only themselves; they protect the rest of us. Especially, it turns out, women. Guns are a women's issue, but not in the way that most people (including Elizabeth Dole) think. "Murder rates decline when either more women or more men carry concealed handguns, but the effect is especially pronounced for women," reports Lott. Every women who carries a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women "by about three to four times more" than one additional armed man reduces the male homicide rate. The effects are indirect as well as direct. Guns are the great equalizer. When some women carry guns, criminals begin to look at all women with, shall we say, new respect.

While opponents of concealed carry laws argue they would lead to gun battles over fender benders, the reality is, as Lott points out, "There exists only one recorded incident of a permitted, concealed handgun being used in a shooting following a traffic accident, and that involved self-defense." No permit holder has ever shot a police officer, but several have used their guns to save police officers' lives. In a rational world, George W. Bush shouldn't fear his strong support for law-abiding citizens' right to bear arms. More children are killed each year by bicycles than guns.

So why the new push for gun control? Fear is driving this debate. Fear and the fantasy that we can just turn over the task of protecting ourselves to the police, trusting the professionals (as we once trusted our parents) to make us feel safe. The reality is that as adults, we make our own safety in a hundred different ways, from fleeing to gated communities to building neighborhoods where people know (and are willing to defend) one another; from reporting minor crimes to the police to, yes, arming ourselves with the knowledge and ability to use a gun safely.

[colt45]

very well writen

[Rave]

Dam PC weinies think renouncing ther gun is a sign of courasge and will bring acceptance among their "friends" in the liberal Hollywood crowd,pathetic imho.

[Rufus Rhastus J]

Rave, well put. But, until those folks who denounce guns, have a taste of crime, preferable two, they will never see the light and continue to parrot thier handlers.