Reflections On Firearms

This post wasn't planned. Someone somewhere rebutted Point Something-Or-Other, saying restrictions on weapons lower crime. Here's the rebuttal of that rebuttal:
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The story begins on Halloween 2005. Well, actually, before that. Stephen has always been a rather bad person. He started off with theft and moved up to assault and animal abuse so heinous he got tossed in jail for 1.5 years. He ran a woman off the road and held her at gunpoint for nearly a day at one point. Around the time I was born, he was convicted of rape and sentenced to a very long stay in the county pen. While in prison, he writes threatening letters to his wife, claiming he's going to do some thing horrific when he gets out. In early 2005, it was determined through DNA evidence that he hadn't committed the crime after all. He is released, an innocent yet evil man. Once out of prison, Stephen buys handcuffs, leg irons, and illegally (because of his status as a felon) procures a rifle.

Enter Tereasa, a 25 year old photographer, who has, on at least one occaision, photographed Stephen's family salvage yard.~Halloween 2005, Stephen calls Tereasa's business, and using a fake name, requests that she (her specifically) take some more photos of the salvage yard. She shows up, snaps a few photos, and vanishes into thin air.Several days later, her burned and dismembered body is found in a pit in the salvage yard, her car and personal effects are found there too. DNA matches from pools of blood found around the property and in the car show a mix of his and her blood. Poor girl was a fighter. We'd be less one evil SOB and plus a young woman today if she'd been allowed to carry a gun. But on to the rest of the story. Stephen is arrested, held for murder. All seems as well as can be expected.

In February, Stephen's nephew Brendan (16yo)steps forward with new information. On Halloween afternoon, he'd come home from school, and heard screaming emenating from Stephen's house (the whole clan lives together in trailers), from a distance of one hundred yards. He walked to Stephen's house, knocked between screams, and was promptly informed by his blood-drenched uncle that he was raping and torturing Tereasa, and did he want to help? The nephew joined in the "games." Later that evening, they decided to kill her. They strangled her. She would not die. They cut her throat. She would not die. Finally they shot her with aforementioned blackmarket rifle. She died. They cut up her body, burned and buried it, and kept mementos of the incident.
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Teresa Halbach wasn't killed because Stephen Avery had a gun. She was killed because SHE did NOT have one.

You see, every year, nearly 800,000 Americans use a gun to defend themselves. They don't dramatically down the dastardly villain in every instance, else we'd be seeing an explosive growth in the undertaker business. Nope, just the presence of a gun in the hand is sufficient +90% of the time to scare away the criminal. That 800,000 number, where does it come from? Well, that's the LOWEST number reached among 9 national surveys by such groups as the Los Angeles Times and the Gallup organization. The higher numbers reached into the lower millions. And a good many of those criminals doing the threatening were armed, so the whole "If you're both armed, you're screwed" position is patently false.

Guns do not equal crime. A paucity of guns in civilian hands equals crime. Florida enacted their state-wide concealed carry law around the time I was born, and their homicide has dropped by at least 10% for the last 13 years (for a total overal of 21%), while the US homicide rate has climbed 12%. What's happened in the gun free utopia of Washington D.C.? It's been voted the murder capitol of the country for at least six of those years, and the city was just recently declared a "crime emergency." In fact, according to FBI crime statistics, you're more likely to be a victim of violent crime (by 26%) in a state where concealed carry is restricted than in a state where it is not. 49% more likely to be murdered. 58% more likely to be robbed. And 15% more likely to be a victim of an Aggravated Assault.

Meanwhile, our neighbors across the pond (in what one former UK citizen calls the "Benighted Kingdom") are experiencing skyrocketing crime rates despite the fact that all but a teeny tiny minority own anything more powerful than an airsoft pistol, and their Knife Amnesty programs have become a joke among American GUN CONTROL advocates. I believe it was a spokesperson for Handgun Control Inc that said "What's next? Pointy stick control?"

All of this talk of crime ignores, momentarily, the real reason behind the enumeration of the HUMAN (note I didn't say "American," but "HUMAN") right to keep and bear arms of military significance in the United States Constitution. The founders had just fought a long and bloody war against their fellow citizens and a handful of hired mercenaries, using privately owned rifles that were the military equivalent of those given to their enemies. They had seen government go tyrannical (tyranny then being small fry to what we have now), and knew the only way for a citizenry to reclaim lost freedom was at the point of a gun. They wrote the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution because they knew that guns in the hands of governments and criminals only meant dead innocents, and they knew we needed a cut-and-dried, in-writing guarantee of the ability to fight back.

They were right, about that dead innocents thing. In the 20th century, millions of innocent people (the estimates range from 20 to 120) were killed by their own government in genocides, ethnic cleansings, political attacks, what have you. In every example - EVERY EXAMPLE - these killings were preceded by absolute and total Victim Disarmament. Not in a handful of examples, not a few examples, not some of the examples, but every bloody time a Chinese political dissident knelt by a ditch, every time a Jew was gassed to death, every time a Russian was shipped to Siberia, every time an Armenian dropped dead on a forced march, they had been disarmed first.

That is the legacy of victim disarmament, your so-called "Gun Control." That is what happens.

Every. Single. Time.

But those people are so long dead, in countries so far away.

Very well. We have more recent examples. Tell me you'd rather I was in a gun-free house when that person came through my front door while I was home alone. Tell me you'd rather I'd been beaten to death in that parking lot rather than see a gun in my hand.

None of those incidents involved me dying though, obviously not, otherwise I wouldn't be telling you this. Tell Teresa Halbach then. Come, tell her to her face that given the choice and opportunity, you'd take a gun from her as Avery approached her car for that last time as she drove away from his trailer. Tell her to her face you'd rather see her tortured and raped for hours before being given a bloody, ugly death that was at an end to her suffering than see her armed. You can't. Because she's dead. Because she was killed, brutally. Because she didn't have a gun.

So, come tell me, to my face, what you want to tell Teresa. And stay out of arm's reach, because if you do say that to my face, I will hurt you.