This article was published April 19, 2000 in the Prospector, a Yuma area paper.
Copywrite 2000 by Dean Weingarten
All rights reserved after first publication
GUNS SAVE LIVES
The fact that guns save lives is not allowed in the current debate over victim disarmament. Proponents of the latest victim disarment technique, mandatory trigger locks, are guilty of political pedophilia when they use the blood of children to justify their authoritarian schemes.
Every year two million people use guns to defend themselves and to prevent crimes. Of course not all two million exercises in civic virtue stop murders. Many of them stop rapes, or kidnappings, or robberies, or car jackings. Some of them stop savage attacks by wild animals or dogs. In the vast majority of them, no shots are fired, and no one is hurt. The mere presence of the firearm is enough to defuse the situation and stop the attack. When shots are fired, most of the time, no one is hit. When criminals are wounded, most of the time, they do not die. Because self defense is an act of civic virtue instead of a crime, the vast majority of these actions are not reported to, or recorded by, civil authorities.
The number of times that self defense shootings result in the death of the attacker and are reported, is about 1500 per year. This is the lowest reasonable estimate of lives that are saved with guns each year. The actual number is certainly much higher, because most of the people who are shot by other people are criminals. If the shooter is never found, and the circumstances never understood, the death will be listed as an unsolved homicide. It is impossible to know how many of these unsolved homicides are justifiable self defens shootings, but it is certain that some of them are. I personaly know of situations where self defense shootings occured, and the armed citizen, having escaped the attack alive and unwounded, did not report the incident to authorities. In addition, we know that many murders are deterred because the murderer knows that the intended victim is armed, or fears that they may be. Professor John Lott, who has done the best research in this area, estimates that if those states who do not currently recognize the right of citizens to use concealed weapons for self defense did so, about another 1500 lives would be saved each year.
No categorization of the lifesaving properties of guns would be complete without recognizing the effectiveness of an armed populace in preventing genocide. All genocides in the twentieth century were preceded by laws disarming the victims. The total number of people killed by their own criminal governments exceeds 54 million, dwarfing the number killed by non-governmental thugs. Registration of guns preceded the disarming of the victims in every case.
The current entusiasts for trigger locks tell us that they will prevent six year olds from shooting each other. Less than 10 children under six shoot anyone in a given year. More children under six are killed in accidents involving five gallon buckets than in accidents involving guns. Trigger locks effectively prevent the use of the gun for self defense. As much as this policy is followed, the government is condeming at leat 150 innocent men, women, and children to death, and thousands more to be victims of rape, robbery and assault for each child saved.
Guns save lives.
Dean Weingarten has been teaching fiream techniques and safety for more than 25 years. He has been both a peace officer and a military officer. He is the current lead instructor for Isher Enterprises, which offers the course necessary to obtain a concealed weapons permit in Arizona. He is certified by the State of Arizona, the State of Louisiana, and the National Rifle Association.
When you disarm your subjects, however, you offend them by showing that either from cowardliness or lack of faith, you distrust them; and either conclusion will induce them to hate you. Niccolo Machiavelli "The Prince"