Self Defense & Guns

He grabs his loaded AR-like weapon and begins to slink along a wall toward the living room where they think the sound came from. He hears something behind him. Finger on the trigger, he swings his weapon around in the dark, knocking a hole in the drywall with the barrel. He sees a blurry image at the end of the hall and just before he pumps about ten rounds down the hallway toward the intruder, his wife chirps, "Do you see anyone, honey?". The Exterminator almost shits himself when he realizes how close he came to blowing his wife away. His heart is pumping wildly in his chest as he moves toward the living room again. Another sound, this time to his right. He drops into a crouch; his calf cramps like a son-of-a-bitch and he immediately stands back up, readying his gun for action. His ten-year-old daughter sticks her head out the door. "What's going on, Daddy?" Machine Gun Kelly takes another deep breath.

The living room explodes in a cacophony of yelps and growls and furniture being knocked over. Their dog, Max, a spirited spaniel-mix is barking and growling; glass breaks, and the sounds of a struggle waft down the hallway. Dirty Harry, gun at the ready, scrambles down the hall in his boxers and peers around the door jam in time to see a raccoon rump disappearing through the doggie door and onto the dark of night with Max in hot pursuit.

The good news? Marshall Dillon didn't kill his wife, his daughter, or their dog. Truth be told, he was scared shitless and was more than happy to discover it was just a raccoon. He holds his weapon pointed upward and fumbles trying to engage the safety. He slips and fires a round through the ceiling that, wouldn't you know it, severs a wire laying in the crawl space. There's a brief shower of sparks, a wisp of smoke, and the lights go out in half the house.

Between 2009 and 2017, the United States recorded an average of nearly 85,700 ER visits a year for nonfatal firearm injuries and an annual average of more than 34,500 deaths. The fact of the matter is that damn few of us have any business with a gun, we aren't trained in urban combat, and no one needs a military-style weapon to shop for groceries. If you truly believe you need a weapon for your protection at home, there are better and less-lethal options.

Get a pistol; buy it legally. Make sure you know how to use it properly; get some training if necessary. Keep it in a fingerprint-locked gun safe. These safes can only be opened by the person whose fingerprint is registered on the safe. These are typically small boxes, so be sure to put them up high if you have kids; kids are nosy and while I don't think they can accidentally open the safe, they will probably try if they can get to it; better safe than sorry. You can Google fingerprint gun safes and get a ton of options.

Another company, Biofire https://biofire.io/, is working on a pistol that will only fire for its owner; they promise it will be available soon. I'm not versed in how it works, I think it's a palm print or something like that, but it shows promise. I have no doubt there will be others in the near future offering safer and safer guns for those who think they must have one.

Personally, I want a sword. You know, the big curvy kind that they use in Arabia. I told my wife that I'd oil my body, sleep naked, and if someone broke in, I grab my sword and run screaming like a banshee straight at the intruder with the moonlight reflecting off my shiny fat body and a large sword waving in the air; I'm pretty sure he beat feet away from that scene.

And, finally, don't take the damn gun out of the house. You don't need to be strapped to go shopping or to buy gas for the car. The more guns that are carried by the public, in public, the greater the chance that people will be hurt or die by gunfire. If you want to go to the shooting range, have the gun unloaded and in one pocket with ammo in another pocket until you're in position at the range; never move around with a loaded gun. When you're finished, unload it, use two pockets, and take the damn thing back home. The same is true for going hunting. Oh, and stop shooting game from the fucking car, you wimps.

One last thought on carrying guns in public places. If you are a cop and you get a call to a bar for a drunken disturbance, and you walk into that bar knowing that perhaps half the patrons in there might be armed, you have no way of knowing which ones they are; you are going to enter that bar cautiously and probably already triggered to expect trouble. Cops have no way of telling the good guys from the bad guys no matter what color ball cap you're wearing. Let's say the drunk becomes belligerent and starts resisting arrest.

A patron in the bar has a gun in his windbreaker pocket and sees what he thinks might be the drunk pulling a gun. The "good guy with a gun" pulls his gun to help the cops. The cop's partner sees "good guy" pull a gun and that cop draws down on "good guy" and drops him with one shot.

The cops have no way of knowing who has a gun or what their intent is. Pulling a gun out around a cop is a recipe for a disaster. For cops, there is no such thing as a good guy with a gun; if you have a gun, you are a threat to the cops and everyone around you, period.

Now, let's assume we have a law that says you can't carry a weapon in public places unless you're licensed to have a gun, maybe you're a diamond courier or some such thing. The only people who can lawfully carry a gun in a bar, grocery store, or any other public place are those licensed to carry for their jobs, not because they like guns; that is going to be a very small percentage of people. You, on the other hand, can personally have ten guns at home, but they are at home, not on your person, and not walking around the city.

The cops get called to that same bar for drunk and disorderly situations with no guns in public. Now they walk in knowing that half the bar is not strapped; virtually no one has a gun. They can focus on the fool that's causing a problem and not have to worry that someone else in the bar will draw down on them. They are a lot less on edge in the bar and in their job in general. You get the idea, right? The same thing is true for a cop walking a beat in downtown Seattle or any other city. They don't have to worry about every other person carrying a gun on the street or who is going to go off half-cocked because they are pissed at their spouse or drunk or high and begin shooting up the place. Yes, it's true that the bad guys might still have a gun, but the people on the street who have guns no longer outnumber the cops by ten or twenty to one; the cop's job just became a lot easier and they can concentrate on the bad guys.

The majority of people follow laws that make sense to them. We do it all the time when we drive, wait the "Walk" signal to cross the street, queue up in lines at the market or in the banks; we follow rules all the time because we understand they make our society more civilized and user friendly. Will a few people refuse to follow the law? Of course; just look at the COVID mask pissing contest, but the majority of people do follow the rules and that lets the cops focus on the bad guys; don't be a bad guy.

It's time we put some common sense into our approach to owning guns in this country.

Outside, we have eight combat-ready Marines, armed with the M27 IAR, a gas-operated automatic weapon firing standard NATO 5.56x45 mm ammunition and fed from a 30-round magazine of which each marine has about ten magazines. The rifle has a 700 - 850 rpm cyclic rate of fire and a practical rate of fire of 40 - 100 rpm; eight Marines can pump somewhere between 320 and 800 rounds per minute through the drywall of their house. Each Marine is personally protected with a Modular Tactical Vest (MTV) and Scalable Plate Carrier and helmet, of course. This is a combat force you're taking on, Jethro.