Wednesday, August 13, 2008

No Safe Places

An elderly gentleman asked the instructor, “I live in a nice neighborhood. My wife and I go walking nearly every evening. Do you think I should take my gun with me?”

Incredibly, the instructor replied, “Well, that’s a personal decision that you will have to make for yourself.”

I wanted to scream, “Of course, you should! There are no safe places!”
What could be more obvious? Yet how many have been conditioned to render themselves defenseless when they see the right magic symbol?

My favorite rejoinder when people tell me they live in good neighborhoods: Very few of us live in better ones than Sharon Tate did.

[Via HZ]

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I pull my hair out over this one all the time. Even the people who take my handgun and self defense classes usually fail to understand (at gut level) the fact that there are NO truly safe places. So far, only those who take the concealed carry class even indicate that they plan to carry at all. They are few and far between.

I live in a small, rural town in NE Wyoming, actual crime close to zero. It is an easy mistake to make here because the chance of attack seems so remote.

But all it takes is one. Plus we have an ever increasing influx of people coming in from other areas so the criminal element would be used to finding even more helpless victims where they came from.

Your gun is like your brain... don't leave home without it. You need both to stay alive.

Kent McManigal said...

Here's a better "magic symbol":
http://i118.photobucket.com/albums/o82/dullhawk/guns/freegun.jpg

Kevin Wilmeth said...

To be truly liberty-minded, we should remember that there are two questions here:

1) Is there a such thing as a safe place?
2) Should I take my gun with me?

I think we can all agree that the answer to 1) is almost unequivocally "no" -- at least insofar as it matters. As I've heard it said, the answer to "just how often do you think people get killed around here, anyway?" is "same as anywhere...just once."

As to the other question, though, it's a free country, and I don't think any of us can honestly say we haven't made a similar decision somewhere in time, whether or not we regretted it later. Even Jeff Cooper was in Condition White on occasion.

I may not make the same decision myself, but I can only take righteous offense if someone tries to make mine for me--either way. In that sense, the instructor was right--it really is a personal decision. (The risk is simply stated: at some point, either you're caught with your gun, or you're caught without it.)

I'll always advocate for being armed whenever humanly possible, and sadly we now have another data point to bolster that opinion. But in the end, we each have to choose it, or we're no better off than we are at the hands of those who wish to forbid it.