Guns

        It’s wrong to equate guns with violence. In almost all cases of lawful civilian use (2.5 million each year), guns are used to prevent violence. Only criminals use guns to commit violence, and it has always been illegal for criminals to possess guns. There are already more than 20,000 gun laws on the books, and yet the government wants to pass more!

        The fact is, you are much safer if there are normal citizens around who have guns and are trained in their safe use. Armed civilians prevent far more crimes than police do. Several books have been written about heroic citizens who have prevented robbery, rape, and even mass murders because they were armed, yet you only hear about the cases in which no one was around to prevent the crime. In every study ever conducted, crime decreased when more law abiding citizens were allowed to carry concealed weapons. Not convinced? Need proof? Read some of the citations below, check my Recommended Reading list, or contact me directly. The single misconception that guns cause violence is behind all anti-self-defense sentiment in everyone I’ve talked to who opposes firearms.

        Sometimes we gun owners ourselves allow these fallacies to propagate by not voicing our opinion except to each other. Not long ago I had a telephone conversation with Sam Paredes, Deputy Director of the Gun Owners of California (GOC). He told me that their biggest problem was getting gun owners to register to vote and to join an organized pro rights group such as the NRA or GOC. He said that most gun owners will contribute money, but they won’t make the effort to vote or to defend their own rights. Although I’m a life member of the NRA, at the time I wasn’t registered to vote because I hoped it would help avoid jury duty, but I was incredulous at his statement that most gun owners weren’t registered to vote, and even more so that most weren’t members of the NRA. He said to ask a few friends whether or not they belonged to the NRA (or GOC, etc), so I did. I was shocked. One friend who is an avid ‘‘gun nut’’, and even carries one illegally in his car, said he was not a member of the NRA because he was afraid to have his name listed in a database as a gun owner because the police could use the list to come and confiscate his weapons. If that does come to pass, he himself will have contributed to it because of his failure to publicly support gun ownership. Another friend says he is not a member of the NRA because it is too ‘‘radical.’’ That is one of the most asinine statements I’ve ever heard. The NRA is the least radical gun group I know of, and not nearly as radical as I would like them to be.

        So if you haven’t already done so, get off your butts, register to vote (voter registration cards are available at all U.S. Post Offices), and join the NRA, the GOA, and join your state and local pro gun rights organizations. In California those are the CRPA and the GOC. In the words of gun rights activist Bob Buffa, ‘‘stand up and be counted or line up to be numbered!’’