Do you have the Right to Defend Yourself? Part 3 in the Right to Protect Yourself

Self-defense is a basic right.* If someone attacks you, you have the right to defend yourself. Yet strict gun control regulations interfere with that right because ordinary citizens abide by the law while criminals acquire guns illegally. That leaves honest people at a distinct disadvantage - how can the police be immediately at every scene whenever desperately needed?

Some people support gun control regulations because they believe that the average citizen is either incapable of using a gun in self-defense or may use the gun in a fit of anger over a petty matter. Those assumptions are false. The evidence on this point has grown so strong that even President Obama has chided gun control advocates to accept the proposition that “almost all gun owners in America are highly responsible.”

Disarming Law-Abiding Citizens facilitates Criminal Activity
You want what you want, and you want the freedom to have that without being coerced. The trouble comes when criminals decide they want what you have. They believe it's unfair that you should have it when they don't and the way to remedy this unfairness is to take it from you, by force if necessary.

A criminal taking what he want from you by force is far easier if you don't have a gun. Ask any woman who has been raped - or whose little girl has been raped - if she wishes she'd had a gun to deter her attacker, and most will say yes.

Yet this does not mean you have to carry a gun. The freedom to be armed just means you have the choice to defend yourself, or not, as you so wish.

Do You Have the Option to Protect Yourself?
In Kennesaw, Georgia, city leaders passed a law 30 years ago requiring that every household have at least one gun**. Yet it's entirely optional, you're automatically exempt if you're morally opposed to guns, and so is anyone who can't afford to buy one. Years ago, they were ridiculed, now they're at the next stage of violent opposition. As explained by philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer:

"All truth passes through 3 stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

Kennesaw has enjoyed a brilliantly steep drop in violent crimes since the law's passage. The crime rate has dropped 89 percent, compared to the modest 10 percent drop statewide. Kennesaw now enjoys the lowest crime rate of any comparably sized city in the country.

Yet although politicians - hopefully - understand that criminals don't obey the law, many of them pretend that more laws to disarm the law-abiding population will stop criminals. So politicians ignore what works, and advocate yet more laws to be ignored.

Governments Ignore their Failure to Protect You
Gun control advocates ignore the inability of government to even perform their most basic task of protecting its citizens: the endemic problem of government failure. When the law is broken, rather than pass yet another law to be broken, the answer is to ask: why is that law broken? Is the government trying to do too much? Is there another way? Government advocates refuse to recognize that in doing less, it could become more effective in enforcing existing laws.

Part of the problem is that ever more laws seem to be the government's answer to more or less all problems. Yet since the government can't even police the laws already on the books effectively, isn't it dangerously naïve to believe that yet more laws will do much if anything about the cause of the problem?

Why do unscrupulous politicians ignore government failure and press for yet more laws? Is there any reason other than they don't like guns in the hands of private citizens? It seems that the US government want the population disarmed. Why? Do they fear a backlash? Aren't the policies they implement entirely just?

Does disarming - or arming - citizens stop such massacres?
Most such Sandy Hook shooting sprees occur in ostensibly "gun-free zones," such as schools, and movie theaters. Yet gun-free zones are only gun-free for those who obey the law, criminals don't. So would yet more laws be obeyed?

How to stop a mentally insane criminal from initiating a shooting spree? Does anybody know? But if the teachers and staff at Sandy Hook had been armed, would the slaughter have killed so many innocents?

Can an armed citizenry stop such massacres? Yes indeed. If you wait for the police to arrive, many will already be dead. When armed citizens are around, many lives are saved. That's why the Harrold School District encourage their teachers and staff to carry guns to protect their children.

Gun control advocates rarely mention shooting sprees where numerous deaths were thwarted by citizens with guns at Shoney's Restaurant in Anniston, Ala. (1991), the Pearl, Miss. high school in 1997, the 1998 middle-school dance in Edinboro, Penn, and the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo. (2007), among others.*

© Copyright worldwide Cris Baker, www.LifeStrategies.net All rights reserved. Republishing welcomed under Creative Commons noncommercial no derivatives license preserving all links intact, so please +1 and share this widely!

Food for Thought
"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."

- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), 16th president of the U.S.A.

* This quote from the Cato Institute is at:

http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/tough-targets-when-criminal...

**Information about Kennesaw can be found in many places, including:

http://rense.com/general9/gunlaw.htm