Dan Wos: Maybe I Do Need a Gun

By Dan Wos:

Does the hypocrisy of the Anti-Gun crowd make you wonder if they're actually capable of rational thought? For example, have you ever heard them say, “Nobody needs an AR-15,” or “Nobody needs a gun in their home,” or “Nobody needs to carry a gun in public.” The implication is that if you don't “need” a gun, you shouldn't have one. As if they were the ones to grant you your God given right, based on “their” interpretation of need. The Anti-Gunners say these things to sway public opinion and make gun-ownership look unreasonable. But let's look at some numbers and talk about the “need” to own a gun. Now we all know that the Founders didn't call the Constitutional Amendments, the “Bill of Needs” and although we know that gun-ownership is our right, there may be a significant argument to be made for the need to carry a gun. In our home, at the grocery store or anywhere else for that matter.

According to a study by Gary Kleck with confirming data from the CDC, there are approximately 2.5 million defensive gun uses in America every year. That means 2.5 million lives saved because people had guns in their possession when they were attacked. 46% of those were women. That doesn't necessarily mean Good Guys killing Bad Guys. It most often meant the mere presence of a gun deterred an attacker. In other words, 

“The attacker knew his potential victim had a gun, and chose not to attack.”

There are just over 300 million people in America (326,000,000 in 2017). There are just over 1 million successful violent crimes in America per year (1,248,580 in 2017 / FBI data). 300 million people|1 million attacks. That's a 1 in 300 chance that you'll be the victim of one of those attacks. I don't know about you, but I don't like those odds. The Anti-Gunners will tell you, it'll never happen to them, yet many of these same people will buy lottery tickets with a 1 in 20 million chance of winning because, “You gotta be in it to win it.” There's the hypocrisy.

Twice as many violent attacks are prevented than carried out, because the victim had a gun.

What would the result be if more people were denied their right to carry a gun?

What would the result be if more people exercised their right to carry?

Many of these Anti-Gunners will tell you that their odds of being attacked are far less likely because they don't live in the bad part of town, yet they govern those parts of town through the politicians they vote for. The thing the Anti-Gunners ignore is, if their odds of being the victim in a violent attack go down, someone else's odds have to go up because the number of people didn't change and the number of yearly attacks didn't change. They'll tell you that we need more gun-restrictions while watching innocent people die in high crime areas and gun free zones. There's more of their hypocrisy.

Rather than admit to the world that gun-ownership is a right and also a need, the gun-grabbers pretend they have no blood on their hands while using the death-toll numbers from high crime areas to push for more gun-control. They stand on the graves of those they have put in harm's way and they use anti-gun propaganda to fool people who aren't paying attention, into believing that they care. Human-violence in America is not an argument for more gun-restrictions, it's an argument for more armed-preparedness and firearms training.

The 2nd Amendment is not a privilege. It's your right.