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Enough.
As I write this, thousands of people are participating in “The March For Our Lives” demonstrations in our nation’s capitol and in other cities across the country. The marches are a response to the horrific shooting in Parkland, Florida. The students who are participating in this march are scared of the violence that happens all too frequently in our neighborhoods.
I understand and share in that fear. In 2006, when my wife and I lived in Phoenix, there was a violent home invasion in the Arcadia district and a three-year-old boy was kidnapped. Our oldest son was three years old at the time, and it had a profound effect on how my wife and I perceived our personal safety.
“I want a home alarm system,” she said. “We’ll get one,” I said. “I also want a gun.”
So I went to my local shooting range, rented every 9mm pistol they had available, bought a gun, learned how to shoot and started carrying a gun whenever and wherever it was legal to do so.
Those two adorable boys are the reason why I started carrying a gun. I’m not going to march in the streets and I’m not going to ask anyone else to make me safe: I’m going to do everything in my power to make myself and my family safe. Realizing that the world is a scary place is a good thing, but hoping that someone will make the scary things go away is not going to solve the problem, because no matter how much you want someone else to meet your need to feel safe, they will fall short of that goal. Taking charge of your safety and becoming your own first responder is the only way you can be sure there will be someone who is trained and able to respond to a life-threatening emergency in your vicinity.
Enough. Take charge of your own security today. Don’t wait for the government. The life you save could be your own.
Published in Guns
Sorry, that wasn’t my intention.
Asking more along the lines of: most people don’t agree with you, or they’d be acting and voting that way. Telling them we disapprove is not persuasive – they don’t care what we think. Now what?
Well, one suggestion might be to, for example, not provide taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood or require insurance companies or employers to pay for birth control.
Not to subsidize/incentivize out-of-wedlock motherhood with welfare payments.
This is an appallingly ignorant statement. How, pray tell, am I supposed to defend myself against assailants who are almost certainly bigger, stronger, younger, and in greater numbers than I am, without effective weapons?
“Assault weapon” is a garbage political term made up by statists who want to disarm the American people so that they can institute their totalitarian, Marxist regime. That is reality. The statists hate us, and they want to kill us, and they will, if we are so stupid as to give them the chance. They want us defenseless so that they can take our property and our lives, because it is very difficult to oppress an armed populace.
There should not be any restrictions on the kinds of firearms available to law-abiding citizens. As it is, there are now places in the United States where cartel mercenaries have automatic weapons, and the citizens they prey upon do not. If you are against me having effective weapons, you are against me protecting myself, my family and property, you are against the Second Amendment. There is no middle ground.
We are not a “gun-crazed country,” and that is a deeply insulting thing to write. Any commercial dealer who sells a gun has to submit the buyer’s name and information to the NICS system. If you buy a gun online, it has to be shipped to a Federal Firearms License (FFL) holder, who submits your information to the NICs system. Gun owners and the merchants who serve us are responsible, honorable people, and I am sick to death of ignorant people equating us with violent criminals who do not obey the law.
The United States was born in revolution, and we have preserved our freedom with firearms for more than two centuries. There is no middle ground. You are either for liberty, or you are for statist oppression. The fact that the statists have induced a bunch of ignorant teenagers to make fuss should have no effect on any intelligent person.
Works every doggone time and we’ve known that for 100s maybe millions of years, yet the Ruling Class does it anyway. Maybe they have a plan?
A plan to create millions of unhappy, unstable families, and bored, angry, fatherless young men? Perhaps.
Or, to be charitable, people just don’t want the kids to starve. Which I get—when I work with families like these, it is difficult to imagine turning off the tap and letting the grown-ups sink or swim…because those little kids are going to drown.
And, of course, there is now a whole raft of government jobs dependent on the present system. One of my other thoughts was that government benefits, like SSI for disabled people, could demand a fairly stringent qualification process but, once the disability is validated, the checks could be distributed by a computer without any more follow-up or fiddling. If you have Down’s Syndrome, Schizophrenia, Paraplegia, Lupus or any of the other qualifying afflictions, the money shows up every month, you can use it for whatever you wish, and you can let us know when you don’t need it any more. Or we’ll take it out of your taxes, should you be cured and start earning money. Surely this would be cheaper in the long run than having all these wretched bureaucrats auditing sick and disabled people, demanding paperwork, issuing modifications and directives and, worst of all, punishing any movement toward health and independence with a diminution of benefits. In other words, “we want you to stay as sick, helpless and impoverished as possible.”
Thanks. You could be right, I don’t think I want to let Hillary Clinton or Michael Bloomberg have an A-10, or artillery. But for the rest of us, anything should go. In the case of Mrs. Clinton, she is not a law-abiding citizen, so she’s out.
I wouldn’t do it overnight but the obesity rate in America makes me think that when one can get more “gibs” from Obama’s stash than the average worker earns in one year then radically changing the welfare system back to something pre-Great Society (name borrowed from the title of a 1914 socialist tract by British political scientist Graham Wallas, fyi) might be worth another try.
How would you persuade people to vote for this in critical mass?
“London has more murders than New York.”
Also,
“Five years in prison for acting in self defence.”
Cultivate a culture of victimhood, expect to have more victims.
Or you could just import a few million military aged male (MAM) muslims. They seem to be perfectly willing and able to up the number of victims of a multitude of crimes. Good thing about it though is that they are no burden to the taxpayers because they never go to prison.
It also is true that right now, various new legislative acts are sailing through the various states’ legislatures under the pretext of limiting the types of guns and who may own the weapons. Perhaps the scariest part of these new legal measures is in the wording with regards to creating a state “Mental Health Registry.” And even above and beyond that concept, there is wording in some of these new regs that allow for any officials who wish to decide on a citizen’s mental state to refer to the person’s on line social media posts to determine the person’s sanity. For us to the Right of liberal Cra Cra here in CA, I can say for certain that none of us want a Jerry Brown bot to decide on our mental health.
@katebraestrup, your essay on the “4 strikes” is excellent! I wish, like Luther’s Theses, it could be nailed to the door of Congress, and every public building in the U.S.
We know what works, and you have defined it elegantly. Yet we do everything but what DOES work.
Sometimes I think that the only thing that will change the direction of our society will be catastrophic: total economic collapse or a plague akin to the Black Death. The social Darwinism that follows will then point the way back to a capitalistic society where education, industry, social cohesion and family stability are recognized as the pillars that they are. I hope that we can change directions short of that, but lack confidence that we will.
It has long been my fear that the Left, through regs like this, will eliminate vets and former law enforcement types, etc., because of “mental issues” and whatnot in order to take the guns out of a certain type of older male conservative’s hands.
Not sure how asking a question about something that is clearly not a reality rates on the logical fallacy charts…
However: your life time chances of dying in a mass shooting are something like one in 1,345.
Meanwhile, every day, 104 Americans are killed in highway fatalities. Sixteen of those fatalities are caused by teenagers who are using devices or distracted by their friends.
Raise the age of getting a driver’s license. Then, additionally, have installed in cars driven by teens the already patented and available devices that turn off phones and electronics when the car is going more than 15 mph.
I share your fear.
Some five yrs ago, the state of Calif already apportioned some three to five million bucks to have various officials go out and confiscate guns from people with mental illnesses. Since PTSD is prevalent in the veteran population, I can only imagine that those vets were among the first to be visited by said officials.
Yep, cannot have the guys who fought for our nation armed.
This does not seem correct. If you figure that the U.S. has a population of roughly 320 million people today, that would mean that about 238,000 of us will meet our ends as victims of mass shootings. Total (non-suicide) gun deaths, sure, but mass shootings? That seems pretty high.
Conveniently defined/treated as only psycho-physiological – rather than as the soul/moral wound, which brings wisdom – that it also is…Truly disgraceful, disheartening, and disgusting, on both counts….Grrr!
No, don’t. Young people need to learn to drive and gain experience while still under the thumb of a parent. Raising the age just delays them getting the driving experience they need to be safe drivers, and makes them get that experience while also having adult transportation needs. States that have raised their license age have obviously reduced their accident rates for minors, but not their overall rates. They just moved the accidents due to inexperience to unsupervised young adults.
Just like gun control, raising the driving age does not do what proponents claim.
The Left and her minions know that most (I suspect nearly 99.99% in the officer corps) vets are conservative. I don’t believe for one second that this would ‘be a thing’ if the majority of vets were liberal.
Serious question: Is it that the diagnosis/labeling of PTSD in vets would be less of a “marker” if the majority of vets were liberal/progressives? Or that the government wouldn’t concern itself with vets as a ‘threat’ in general, as liberals/progressives? Or both?
Wasn’t that one of the primary objectives of LBJ’s plan? Well, at least for the first 200 years or so.