By Rob Morse
I confess this bothers me. So much for being an objective chronicler of the facts, but a majority of Democrat Attorneys General told the court that you need to be disarmed. Once again, they said it’s vitally important that the state disarm honest citizens who obey the law.
Let me underscore that so there’s no misunderstanding. Government elites demand the right to put you and your family at greater risk. This bothers me a lot because law-abiding gun owners save so many lives. These hoplophobic Democrats are ivory tower elitists who don’t live in our world.
In every state, we know which citizens applied for and were given a permit to carry a personal firearm in public. We’ve studied them, and these concealed carriers are the most law-abiding group that sociologists can identify. No one is less violent and more law-abiding no matter where you looked.
That said, the Democrats AGs told the court that these honest citizens need to be barred from most public places. “Sensitive” places. They also need to be barred from all private places unless they receive advanced permission to enter. That would be comically absurd, except the results are written in the blood of innocent victims.
You and your neighbors use personal firearms to legally defend yourselves over 7-thousand times a day. Time after time, night after night, you defend yourselves and stop criminals from assaulting, raping, and murdering. You had to do that because you were the first person at the scene of the attack.
Stopping those crimes has made all of us safer, even those who don’t carry a gun. Honest gun owners prevented tens of thousands of murders, hundreds of thousands of sexual assaults, and millions of robberies and aggravated assaults every year. You’ve done that year after year. You’ve stopped far more crimes than the police do. When you were allowed to, you’ve even stopped most mass murders last year. Despite your immense competence and virtue, anti-gun Democrats want to see you and your neighbors disarmed.
As I said, that bothers me as I suspect it bothers you, too. More good people get hurt when they’re disarmed. Like you, I wish that criminals would stop attacking innocent victims, but criminals don’t care what we want. That’s why good guys still have to defend themselves.
There may be a few places where the state is providing such strict security that it’s justified in disarming honest citizens. For example, the defendant is disarmed when he is being held in a court of law. Visitors are disarmed in the courthouse for the safety of the defendant. The government disarms them and assumes responsibility for protecting and defending them. Except for those few places, the government has expressly stated that we are on our own virtually everywhere else.
The world is full of broken political promises. We’re told that our children were safe in schools because we had gun control laws to disarm the killers. That was a lie, and mass-murderers deliberately hunt our kids in “gun-free” zones.
We were told that law enforcement officers would protect our students at school. Sometimes they did, and sometimes the officers never even tried. We were told that criminals would never attack our churches, our synagogues, our mosques, or our temples because those are designated “gun-free” zones. The government has never taken the blame when those sites were attacked. Instead, Democrats blamed you when it happened and wanted you disarmed.
We have over 23,000 firearms regulations on the books today. Disarming the good guys with the guns clearly works for Democrat elites. They have their personal security details. Their children have armed guards protecting them. They care far more about their own protection than they do about yours. They demand the right of the government to put you, your children, and your neighbors at greater risk. It’s evil for them to demand that our kids go undefended simply so they can feel better.
Think about that for a minute. Gun-hating Democrat elites don’t walk through the mall or down the street late at night unprotected. You and your family do that, sometimes by choice, and sometimes by necessity. Looking across the US, about one-in-12 adults go legally armed in public today. I thank you for protecting yourselves everywhere you can. That has made all of us safer despite what the Democrat elites say.
What are the Democrat Attorneys’ General and Democrat-appointed judges really telling us when they demand that you be disarmed? They’re telling us about the rarified world in which they live. Places where they feel perfectly safe while violence increases in big blue cities from coast to coast. The evidence is clear that they really don’t know very much about making us safer and don’t really care.
Take a look to see if the laws the anti-gun Democrat elites pass for us actually affect them. Listen for their lies the next time they talk about disarming you. Because you can bet they’ve ensured their own safety while making sure you’re at the mercy of armed criminals.
This article originally appeared at Slow Facts Blog and is reprinted here with permission.
