“A dwindling few voices in the press wonder whether better gun laws might not be a good idea,” Tim Kreider over at huffington.com writes. “And the gun lobby laments aloud that no one was carrying a concealed firearm at the scene of the crime.” Just a quick point here. Did Kreider take five seconds to wonder if any of the relatives of the 13 people murdered in the Midnight Movie Massacre wish that their loved one had been armed on that horrific night? And what of the survivors?
If they suffer from regret, do they wish society had “tighter” gun control laws—as does Virginia Tech survivor Colin Goddard? Or do they wonder what if . . . I’d been armed? OK. Back to Kreider’s complete dismissal of concealed carry . . .
It’s this last talking point that always amazes me. It’s so nakedly adolescent, a wish fulfillment so obviously cribbed from the payback scenes of action movies, that I can’t believe that any grown up is unselfconscious enough to voice it out loud. It reminds me of those pro-torture arguments that posit a hypothetical scenario where we have a terrorist in captivity who knows there’s a nuclear bomb set to detonate in Times Square in just 20 minutes — ! This is not something that is ever going to happen in real life; this is something that happens on 24. What happens when you have a heavily-armed citizenry vigilantly on the lookout for dangerous criminals is not the climax of a Charles Bronson film — it’s Trayvon Martin.
Surprisingly, Mr. Kreider’s been the victim of a burglary and a stabbing (neglecting to mention the fact that the knife attack happened in Crete). Neither experience is any reason to have a gun because . . .
A) ” . . . murdering someone over a piece of merchandise worth about a thousand dollars retail is insane.” (Agreed. Murder is bad)
B) ” . . . real-life violence is almost always messy and unexpected and comes out of nowhere, inconveniently hard to plan around. The perfect moment for making your stand somehow never comes.”
Unless, of course, it does. How hard would it be for Mr. Kreider to Google search “defensive gun use”? It’s this willfully ignorant “it’s all about me” perspective that informs so much of the pro-gun control rhetoric.
What of rape Mr. Kreider? Have you ever been raped? Would you have wanted to carry a concealed firearm to fight back and hopefully prevent that soul-damaging indignity?
No. No he wouldn’t.
The unmarketable truth is that there’s nothing much you can do to protect yourself or the people you love, not buying a gun or moving to a gated community or building a survival shelter. Bad things can happen any time. But mostly they don’t.
Until, of course, they do. And that is the real lesson of the tragedy in Aurora. Isn’t it?