During my recent trip to Delray Beach I schmoozed with a sunstroke of New Yorkers and New Jerseyites. The conversation inevitably turned to careers and thus, guns. Every mid-Atlantic merrymaker I met said they didn’t keep a gun at home. All of them had a story about someone who needed a home defense gun—and didn’t have one. “One of my neighbors woke-up with someone pointing a shotgun at them,” a woman of a certain age recounted. “He knocked the gun away and wrestled the guy to the floor. The guy stabbed him [the neighbor] in the arm and got away.” Which left me wondering: how many degrees of separation are there between any given non-gun owner and someone who needed a gun but didn’t have one? How close does violent crime have to get before a non-gun owner decides its time to tool-up?