Category: Safety

You don’t say

Explosion of concealed handguns means someone nearby is carrying

If You Want Peace, Prepare For War: Why All Should Be Armed

A lot of people get armed for a lot of reasons. Those reasons generally don’t matter all that much because we don’t have to provide a reason why we want to exercise our Second Amendment rights, but those reasons exist and are varied.

People who live in high-crime areas tend to prefer not to become a victim. Some people recognize bad things can happen at any time and place. Still others figure they’ll never need it, but are armed simply because they have the God-given right to be armed.

Yet the flip side is that a lot of people refuse to carry a firearm. They believe the world should be better than it is and that there’s no reason for any of us to have a gun.

My friend Yehuda Remer, aka The Pew Pew Jew, had an interesting post over at his site that I think we should talk a bit about. It starts with a story from the Old Testament. Jacob and his family, with all their riches, are on the road to meet his brother, Eisav, who sanctioned his murder 20 years prior and who thinks Jacob is already dead.

To prepare for this meeting, Jacob does three things. The first is to send an offering to Eisav to hopefully make peace. The second was to pray. It’s the third thing that leads to why I’m writing this.

Lastly, and the real reason I am writing this blog, is that Jacob prepared for war. He split his family into two different camps to spare one if Eisav decided to attack. Of course, he would be willing to fight but still ensured some of his family would live.

Why is this important? Why is the preparation for war so integral to Jacob even though he had God’s ear? What can we learn?

I am a Jew who carries a firearm. I write about guns. I use firearms regularly. I train people on firearms and educate them on their Second Amendment rights. Unfortunately, Jews get a bad rap because so many of them are anti-gun and anti-2A, which is true. I know many Jews from all walks of life who hate firearms and believe that guns have no place in society. Well, my question to them is, if guns don’t have a place in society, how do we explain the fact that Jacob prepared for war? How is exercising my Second Amendment and carrying a firearm on my person to ensure my family is protected any different than what Jacob did?

The answer is that there is no difference.

“Si vis Pacem, Para Bellum.” If you want peace, prepare for war.

Exactly.

Look, I’d love to live in a world where there was absolutely zero chance I’d ever need my gun for anything but recreational shooting. We don’t live in that world, we live in this one.

As such, I can and should take all the steps one can think of to prevent myself from becoming a victim and, as a society, we should take all the steps we can to make it so crime disappears forever.

Those of us who are the praying sort should do that as well, pray that those who would become violent criminals and those who already have find another way forward with their lives.

But we shouldn’t rest exclusively on those.

We should want peace, but we should prepare for war. At least in a manner of speaking, anyway.

Violence can and will come for some of us. We can and should do everything we can to mitigate the risk of that, but some of us won’t be fortunate enough to escape that.

So, we should be prepared to meet that violence with the threat of force and a willingness to use violence in the defense of ourselves or others if need be.

Where Did New Gun Owners Come From and Where are They Going?

Our society is changing. Those changes caused many of us to buy a firearm. We see that crime is rising around us. We notice that criminals are no longer routinely caught by police and prosecuted in the courts. We consider moving to a safer location. (examples from California and New York) We decided that we need a gun to be safe. That chain of events might sound like mere speculation but a number of recent surveys have confirmed it. Almost 14 million of us bought a gun for the first time in 2020 and 2021. The increase in gun ownership will not lead to a significant change in political affiliation.

Personal protection is the main reason we buy a gun today. By a two-to-one margin, more of us think crime is getting worse rather than getting better. The margin increases to three-to-one when we consider crime in our inner cities. Those opinions come from a Harvard-Harris poll conducted only a few weeks ago in mid-November of 2023. Democrats think the increase in crime is because of a worsening economy while republicans think it is because criminals are not prosecuted for their crimes. Most republicans think that the police are afraid to do their job while most democrats disagree. By a four-to-one margin, voters in both parties think that laws about minor crimes like shoplifting should be rigorously enforced. Except for democrats, a majority of us blame woke democrat politicians and district attorneys who won’t prosecute crimes. Most of us think that the US justice department is focused on politics rather than stopping gangs and crime syndicates.

A majority of voters from both parties now think that it is necessary to own a gun for personal protection. Including independent voters, 63-percent of us now believe it is necessary to own a gun to prevent criminal attacks.

We acted on those personal motivations and gun ownership has grown over time. We’ve seen record gun sales for the last 50 months. We also have mixed data on the number of new gun owners. A Pew research poll from August said that 41 percent of us live in a household with a firearm. That estimate may be on the low side since a Gallup poll put the number at 44 percent. A recent NBC poll put the number at 52% of us who live with a gun in our home. The variance between different polling organizations are significant, but the trend of increased gun ownership is consistent.

We have to be skeptical about these polling numbers. A recent research report said that many of us don’t tell the truth to strangers on the phone when the strangers ask if we own firearms. The research report estimated that as many as 60 percent of adults might own a gun as compared to 30 percent reported earlier.

That is another part of our changing society. It now makes sense that we are reluctant to tell strangers whether we do or do not own firearms. Gun owners don’t want to be targeted and have their guns taken. Households without a gun feel more vulnerable if they admit they are disarmed. All of us have become more concerned about having our personal information gathered and sold. In addition, the precise details of the polling question are critically important.

Let me give a practical example to prove my point. My first auto accident was a dented fender on my parent’s car. My worst auto accident was as a passenger. I wouldn’t mention either of those accidents if you asked me about accidents where I was driving my car. The same situation applies to gun owners as applied to drivers. Many older teenagers and younger adults depend on using someone else’s firearm for protection when they are at home. Likewise, a husband or wife might carry a gun that is actually owned by their spouse.

It is undeniably true that the face of gun ownership is changing. The stereotypical gun owner used to be an old, white, rural male. That face is now a young, urban female minority. In short, gun ownership now represents the population at large. The older stereotype of gun owners was that they were politically conservative. It does not follow that new gun owners will follow suit and vote republican.

Gun ownership is unlikely to change voting patterns. Party affiliation is a stronger predictor of attitude towards firearm regulation than is gun ownership. In general, republicans who don’t own a gun are slightly closer to democrats. Democrats who own a gun are slightly closer to republicans. That said, the difference between the political parties is larger than the difference between gun owners and non-gun owners within the parties.

Owning a firearm is only one of many cultural differences that separate liberal politics from conservative politics. Given the Democrat party’s recent adoption of firearms prohibition, most liberal gun owners ignore their party’s position on guns and vote for liberal candidates anyway.

As usual, change happens at the margin. A centrist democrat who recently bought a gun may now see the Democrat party’s gun prohibitions as the issue that changed his vote.

Harvard Poll: 6 in 10 Voters Say Owning a Gun is a Necessary Part of Self-Defense Against Crime

A Harvard/Harris poll conducted November 15-16, 2023, shows six in ten voters believe owning a gun is a necessary part of protecting themselves from criminals.

Poll researchers asked: “Do you think crime and safety in your community is getting better, worse, or staying about the same?”

Forty-two percent of voters said “worse,” versus 21 percent who said better. (Forty-nine percent of independents were among those who said crime is worsening.)

Researchers asked, “Do you think you need to have a gun today in case you are attacked by criminals, or do you think owning a gun is unnecessary?”

A majority of voters across the board–whether Democrat, Republican, or independent–answered in the affirmative.

Broken down by party affiliation, 54 percent of Democrats said owning a gun is necessary, 77 percent of Republicans, and 56 percent of independents.

Moreover, a majority of American voters believe “woke politicians” are a driving force behind crime in the United States.

Fifty-five percent of voters concurred that “Woke politicians are to blame for rising crime,” while 45 percent disagreed. An even larger majority of voters–67 percent–support “removing DA’s who are soft on crime.”

Of Course Gun-Control Fails in Practice, but Does it Work in Theory?

The murderer who attacked children in a Nashville Christian school wrote a diary. Parts of it were published and then taken down. This murderer hoped that she was the only one with a gun and that her victims were unprotected. Many people want the same thing.

In theory, disarming honest citizens makes your country safer. Last month, Israelis again confirmed that gun-control is a failure. Gun-prohibition assumes that murderers and terrorists will obey the law, that they will only buy a firearm through legal channels. In practice, disarming your neighbors gives you all the vulnerability of disarmed victims with none of the benefits of actually disarming murderers. Despite those repeated failures both in the US and abroad, anti-rights politicians want ordinary citizens disarmed. So do academics in both the US and in Israel.

Palestinians killed about 1,200 Israelis during their attack on October 7th. That would be proportional in size to Mexican drug gangs entering the US and murdering everyone in Galveston, Texas. The Palestinian attackers deliberately targeted schools and youth centers.

The real and undeniable advantage of armed citizens is that they are there when the attack happens. They can respond immediately. They also have local knowledge of who the innocent victims are and who are the bad guys that don’t belong. In practice, a government response that takes hours to protect unarmed victims is a unilateral surrender to murderers and terrorists.

Israel asked to import 24 thousand rifles from the United States. Biden said no precisely because some of those rifles might end up in the hands of Israeli civilians. We wouldn’t want civilians to be able to stop terrorists, now would we. Biden also stopped the export of all US civilian firearms for 90 days. I suspect that the Israelis forgot to include another “10-percent for the big guy.”

Please note that this is the same Biden administration that abandoned 83-billion dollars of military equipment in Afghanistan. I’d bet that some of that equipment is now in the hands of Hamas terrorists who are fighting Israel.

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