There May Be One Or Two Great Big Green Flies On You...

A man (we will call him Bob) pulls into a self-serve gas station and is filling his car when a pick-up truck arrives on the other side of the pumps and a bearded man gets out and shouts at Bob, threatening him and cussing and calling him vile names.

Bob doesn't recognize the angry man and tells him that he has made a mistake. Bob then makes a mistake of his own when he turns his back on AM to attend to his car.  The stranger hits Bob on the head from behind with a sap, knocking him to his knees  And then closes in to do more damage.


Let's pause here.  It is true that Bob and AM have never met and don't know each other.  AM is well known to police, though, as a violent trouble maker and has been in and out of jail and psychiatric care.  His wife left him seven years earlier for another man and he accosts random strangers, especially when he has been drinking, and assaults them verbally and sometimes physically, accusing them of stealing her away from him.

He has now attacked Bob with a deadly weapon.  A sap or blackjack is a leather blunt impact weapon filled with lead shot.  It is a short flexible heavy night stick and like brass knuckles and switchblade knives is illegal to carry in some states.  It can crack skulls and break bones and kill.  Bob is in serious trouble.

Bob, instead of reasoning that this shouldn't be happening, should have just accepted the reality that it was, and that he was in a potentially dangerous situation.  By turning his back he allows his assailant the first strike, but Bob is not completely unprepared.  He took a defensive shooting course a year earlier and got a permit to carry a concealed pistol, which he now unholsters.  Kneeling between his car and the pumps he can sense AM behind him about to deliver another blow, so without  taking the time to turn he pushes his handgun through his armpit and fires blindly through the back of his jacket, once. The bullet hits AM in the chest and drops him, stopping the assault.

Police arrive and an ambulance carts AM away, to eventually recover.  Bob is treated for concussion and the cut on his scalp is stitched up.  End of story.

But it isn't really the end.  AM will do some harder time, now, but will eventually get out. He has obvious mental problems and is delusional and just might kill someone next time. But he will not be locked up for the rest of his life.

I'd like to address this to the people that abhor guns and argue against their use, and vote for politicians that try to pass bills to make owning and carrying firearms more difficult for the Bobs of the world. That try to ban certain types of firearms and ignore the good defensive use of firearms in saving lives and stopping and deterring crime.

I ask these people, how you would have saved Bob's life in this situation?

More Police?  More compulsory psychiatric care?  More unarmed self defense classes? More prisons?  More psychotropic drugs for AM types?  Earlier intervention for troubled teens?  More gun control laws?  Even though Angry Man did not have a gun?

All those solutions come with a Macy's parade of social workers and gendarmes and no guarantee that they will even work.  The courts and the counselors had their mitts on AM plenty of times, and yet he was still driving around looking for the guy that cuckolded him.  

"Oooops," is all they seem to say when some miscreant slips through the cracks, or is let out on parole because of overcrowding or because he is good at convincing booby-hatchers he is all better, and they never seem to lose their jobs or cushy pensions.   But some guy like Bob ends up with his brains leaking out of his busted skull when they make a boo-boo. 

Don't get me wrong.  I don't want a society where there are police on every corner, and where a brawler is locked away forever because he bit off an ear in a bar fight.  I don't want a Minority Report kind of society.   

But if you can't make me safer with all your social welfare, and drug treatment, and jails and courts and prisons---and you can't, you really can't, not 100 percent---then quit trying to take my guns away, or regulating (infringing) my rights out of existence.

Just the economics of it should persuade you.  What is cheaper?  Locking AM up at a cost of $30,000 per year, or allowing a non-felon-non-crazy citizen to carry a  $400 two-pound hunk of iron around on his hip?  Option two costs the taxpayer nothing because Bob buys his pistol and ammo with his own money and he pays for training out of his own pocket.   And...and he actually pays the county Sheriff for the privilege of packing concealed.   And...and he just so happens to be at the precise time and place of the crime and is able to save a life and punish the bad guy with a hunka-hunka-burning-lead. 

Look at it this way.  Is it cheaper to cover the town with flypaper or just let the folks, who care to, buy and carry a swatter around with them? 

I suspect you are not persuaded, though, and I don't think you are going to stop.

Nice thing about guns is, they all come with an anti-confiscation device, built right into them.