Let’s get something straight.
The Second Amendment has little to do with the attraction I have for my arsenal of guns, which I keep in almost every room in my home. I don’t collect guns as a hobby. I don’t belong to the NRA or a gun club. I keep my stash of weapons and ammo for reasons most gun owners are reluctant to admit.
Please, allow my explanation.
I like guns. Guns give me a boost. I probably shouldn’t admit that I have low self-esteem, but I do. With a gun in my ankle holster, I feel elevated above my normal ordinary feelings of powerlessness.
I confess I’m a mess. I’ve always known that I am sexually inadequate, a condition I surely share with most gun owners. Having a gun, though, compensates for my shortcomings. I don’t know why. A small measure of testosterone shoots through me when I fondle a gun grip.
Ever since elementary school, my report cards have indicated that I am not very smart. So be it. Weapons are, after all, great equalizers, and as a small man with a small intellect, I need a lift to keep up with the clever people who make rules I don’t like. The eggheads who received all the good grades don’t stand a chance if I choose to act out one day. So there!
C’mon, man, you must read the newspapers. Bad guys (and gals) get the ink each day. I keep my guns ready because I fear those people, because I fantasize about unspecified bad forces overrunning the neighborhood, raping and murdering as they go door-to-door. I’m ready for them, especially those punks who shoot up our schools, those mentally unbalanced losers who blast children cowering inside coat closets and the like. The way I see it, one day when I hear pop pop pop at some school I’m passing in my Jeep Wrangler, I’ll hop to it, gun drawn, and even the score against those misfits and bottom feeders.
I know, I know, one runs a 43 times higher risk of harm if a weapon is present. (New England Journal of Medicine 1986. 314: 1557-60.) But I don’t put much faith in cockeyed science when the hard-boiled eggheads stir the pot. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, their so-called empirical evidence is nothing more than a liberal think tank political statement. Mark Twain said there are three kinds of lies. “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
I recently read this cornball statement from a left-leaning online propaganda rag. Does anyone believe this stuff? The claim took the spit right out of my mouth. “There is no country on earth that is even remotely similar to the U.S. on guns. We have five percent of the world’s population and we own nearly half of the world’s civilian guns. Our gun murder rate is 20 times higher than other developed nations.” (http://www.progressivemajorityaction.org/how_to_rebut_common_pro_gun_arguments)
The part I like most about that conclusion is that we’re pretty darn special. We have more guns than anyone else does. So be it. Let’s see how that plays out when the Chinese or the Russians or those Muslim hoards try to invade our “sea to shining sea” homeland? The claim about the murder rate embedded in that statement doesn’t bother me a bit because I’ll be the one gripping the gun when somebody tries something funny. See my point? How many of those fallen creeps actually deserved to die because they started something that they couldn’t finish?
I concede one point to the controlling crowd that wants change in gun laws. Hand grip ID tagging just might be okay. If my palm print will identify me as the only legal user of my handgun, then I am good to go when the gun thief stands there trying to pull off a couple of rounds only to find that my weapon will not fire. That will give me some time to draw another weapon from my stash and take care of business. You see, I want the control, not conceding that power to some wanker in congress or some blowhard trying to tell me what to do.
But beyond that tweak in the gun laws, just leave me alone. And don’t come calling with a goon squad to confiscate my arsenal. I know my rights.
I know how to compensate for my character weaknesses.
Go ahead, just try to stop me!
Gun death rates are 7 times higher in the states with the highest compared with the lowest household gun ownership. (Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Injury Control Research Center, 2009).
An estimated 41% of gun-related homicides and 94% of gun-related suicides would not occur under the same circumstances had no guns been present (Wiebe, p. 780).
Household gun ownership levels vary greatly by state, from 60 percent in Wyoming to 9 percent in Hawaii (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2001).