By David French
Tuesday, August 06, 2019
Few things are more frustrating than watching members of
the media, politicians, and activists who often know very little about guns,
have the resources to hire security when they face threats, and don’t
understand the weapons criminals use telling me what I “need” to protect my
family. And what they invariably tell me I “need” is a weapon less powerful
than the foreseeable criminal threat.
Or, let me put it another way. My
family has been threatened by white nationalists. Why should they outgun
me?
Few things concentrate the mind more than the terrifying
knowledge that a person might want to harm or kill someone you love. It
transforms the way you interact with the world. It makes you aware of your
acute vulnerability and the practical limitations of police protection.
If you’re wealthy, you have a quick response: Hire
professionals to help. Let them worry about weapons and tactics. If you’re not
wealthy, then your mind gets practical, fast. You have to understand what you
may well face. And despite the constant refrain that semi-automatic weapons
with large-capacity magazines are “weapons of war,” if you know anything about
guns you know that what the media calls a large-capacity magazine is really standard-capacity
on millions upon millions of handguns sold in the United States.
This means it’s entirely possible that a person coming to
shoot you is carrying something like, say, a Glock 19 with a standard 15-round
magazine.
So, how do I meet that threat? Unless you’re a highly
trained professional who possesses supreme confidence in your self-defense
skills, you meet it at the very least with an equivalent weapon, and preferably
with superior firepower.
In a nutshell that’s why my first line of defense in my
home is an AR-15. One of the most ridiculous lines in yesterday’s New York
Post editorial endorsing an assault-weapons ban was the assertion that
semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15 are “regularly used only in mass
shootings.” False, false, false. I use one to protect my family.
Why? The answer is easy. As a veteran, I’ve trained to
use a similar weapon. I’m comfortable with it, it’s more powerful and more
accurate than the handgun I carry or the handgun an intruder is likely to
carry, and, while opinions vary, multiple
self-defense experts agree with me that it’s an excellent choice for
protecting one’s home.
What’s more, like the vast, vast majority of people who
own such a weapon, I use it responsibly and safely. Don’t believe me? It’s the
most popular rifle in the United States — one of the most popular weapons of
any kind, in fact — and it’s used in fewer
murders than blunt objects or hands and feet.
Here is the fundamental, quite real, problem that
gun-control advocates face when they try to persuade the gun-owning public to
support additional restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms: The burden
of every single currently popular large-scale gun-control proposal will fall
almost exclusively on law-abiding gun owners.
Even in the case of our dreadful epidemic of mass
shootings, the available evidence indicates that so-called “common sense”
gun-control proposals popular in the Democratic party (and the New York Post)
are ineffective at stopping these most committed of killers. As my colleague
Robert VerBruggen pointed out yesterday, a large-scale RAND Corporation review
“uncovered ‘no qualifying studies showing that any of the 13 policies we
investigated decreased mass shootings.’”
It’s one thing to ask millions of Americans to sacrifice
their security for the sake of the larger common good. It’s quite another to
ask for that same sacrifice in the absence of evidence that the policy will
accomplish what it is designed to accomplish.
The criminal who seeks to harm my family has already
demonstrated that he has no regard for the law. He doesn’t care about
magazine-size restrictions or rhetoric about “weapons of war.” He doesn’t care
that he evaded a background check or that he placed his girlfriend in legal
jeopardy by using her as a straw purchaser. He doesn’t care if a previous
felony conviction renders his gun possession unlawful.
By contrast, I care about the law. I want to remain
law-abiding, and I want my family to remain law-abiding. I have immense respect
for our nation’s legal system and its political processes. And so, as a person
who has that respect and who also feels the keen anxiety of real threats aimed
at the people I love the most, I’m making a simple request: Don’t give the
white nationalists an advantage. Don’t give violent criminals the edge in any
conflict with peaceful citizens.
In your well-meaning ignorance, you seek to provide
greater security at the price of liberty. In reality, you would sacrifice both
to no good end.
No comments:
Post a Comment