We can remember the days when the story of a woman successfully defending herself against a masked, armed attacker was considered good news. Times have apparently changed. At least they have for a certain breed of rabidly anti-gun politician and their civilian disarmament advocate allies.
A recent incident that illustrates how virulent hoplophobia can twist your sense of justice comes from Prince William County, Virginia where a woman stepped out her front door early Thursday morning and was confronted by a masked man with a gun. The un-named victim, however, was armed and she defended herself.
As the PWC Police Department described what happened in a public statement . . .
The victim, who was also armed at the time, shot the individual as they approached the front door of her residence. Officers arrived at the home and located a man near the doorway of the residence suffering from gunshot wounds. Officers also located a loaded handgun in the man’s possession.
Officers performed CPR on the man until rescue personnel arrived. The man was transported to an area hospital where he later died as a result of his injuries. The victim was not injured.
This is what we like to call a Defensive Gun Use of the Day. Yet another example of an armed citizen using a firearm to defend herself or her family. The CDC cites a report that reckons defensive gun uses happen anywhere for 60,000 to 2.5 million times a year, depending on who’s doing the counting.
In this case, a 20-year-old, ironically named Azhar Laurent Smart, discovered the hard way that an increasing number of Americans now take their personal defense in their own hands. They know that even in the best of times, cops can’t be everywhere and a lot of bad things can happen while you wait after dialing 911.
Those of us on the pro-gun rights side highlight defensive gun uses because the Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex — the gun control industry, politicians, and the media — conveniently avoid talking about the positive sides of gun ownership, including the number of robberies, assaults, rapes, and murders that are prevented thanks to citizens who are free to own firearms.
The more these things happen and are publicized, the more opportunistic criminals with think twice about victimizing others. That could even result in less overall criminal activity We’re sure someone has analyzed this phenomenon, but we can’t seem to remember it at the moment.
Which brings us to our friends at the NRA. The incident in question happened right in their northern Virginia backyard and they spotlighted it with a(n arguably clumsy) tweet. A tweet that outraged a Colorado state representative.
OK, maybe the NRA’s social media intern expressed a little too much glee at the news of the dead attacker. But we’re sorry to inform you, Rep. Woodrow, that the story of what happened in Prince William County is very much “a win.”
This is a textbook case of a justifiable homicide. An armed masked man targeted a woman who was alone late at night outside her own front door. That woman had the foresight to arm herself and the willingness to use her weapon against her attacker.
That’s a happy ending to us and to most who are reading this, but the fact is, far too many people are actually disturbed by stories like this.
We are governed by an uncomfortably large number of politicians and bureaucrats who think what that unidentified woman in Virginia did was wrong. They believe she should have given the armed thug what he wanted and let him wriggle off into the night (no doubt to target some other victim).
People like Rep. Steve Woodrow would much rather that she remain a helpless, unarmed crime victim than hear that she successfully defended herself with a gun. That’s because the very idea of armed civilians violates one of their primary political principles. Stories like the one from PWC counter their anti-gun narrative and make the job of disarming Americans more difficult.
That’s why Rep. Woodrow was triggered by the NRA’s tweet. In his view, that woman shouldn’t have been armed in the first place. If that means she would have been beaten, raped, or murdered, so be it.
The noxious Rep. Woodrow — who has the nerve to criticize those who cheer on crime victims who defend themselves as “morally bankrupt” — is hardly alone. He was just stupid or impulsive enough to bang out a tweet and expose how nauseatingly twisted his own values are.
He’d rather take a shot at the NRA (and there are plenty of valid reasons to do so these days) than support a woman who stopped a criminal and may have saved her own life in the process.
These are the kinds of people who populate the civilian disarmament movement. Certainly not all of them are as broken and, well, morally bankrupt as Colorado’s Steve Woodrow. But a significant percentage of them are. And those of us who support the Second Amendment and civilian gun rights would do well to remind ourselves of that every single day.