Same Fear, Different States- Constitutional
Carry and Letting Our Neighbors Go Armed

It is more dangerous when honest men and women face criminals barehanded, and safer when the good guys are armed. That isn't hard to understand. It is easy to calculate the additional lives we'd save each year if a state allows honest people to carry guns in public. I can explain it in a minute. I will, but the real mystery is why we're still talking about fantasy-problems while violent criminals are killing our neighbors.

We're acting as if our bad dreams were more real than the bodies with chalk marks around them. Part of that problem is political. Politicians appeal to our fantasies and we're suckers for that. Politicians also suck-up to anti-gun billionaires to get campaign contributions. Ultimately, voters like us are the problem when we hide behind sound-bite solutions. Back in the real world, disarming our neighbors costs lives.

Who disarmed the victim?

When you take even the shallowest look at violence then you notice that an armed attacker usually overpowers an unarmed victim. Criminals may break the laws but they are not stupid. They choose the tools that work. To quote one thug, 'Guns and knives make people so generous.'

Robbers sometimes threaten to shoot us even when they don't have a gun. Criminals only use guns in one-seventh of violent crimes. Unfortunately, violent criminals wait until they have an advantage in strength, in number, or in surprise. Rather than struggle with the insoluble problem of knowing if the robber's threat is real, the real solution is for good men and women to go armed.

We don't need clever calculation to know how many lives are saved when the victims are armed. We know that about 1.7 million legal gun owners use a firearm in self-defense each year. .....