Shotgun Susie and friends

A friend of mine told me this story a while back.

She was home alone one night when two men started banging on her door. She looked out and didn't recognize them. They were obviously drug or alcohol impaired so she yelled that she was calling the police. The strangers tried her door, then went around the house to her carport and started trying to gain access to her car. She called 911 then yelled for the men to leave. When they didn't, she carefully opened her front door, stuck her shotgun out, pointed it in a safe direction, and fired off a shot. The two erstwhile car thieves elected to vacate the premises and were picked up by the police a few miles away.

Gun control advocates would have us believe that no one needs a gun for self defense and that all you have to do is call 911 and the police will magically appear exactly where they are needed before anything bad happens.

I have several friends and relatives who are police officers, firemen, etcetera and I have the utmost respect for emergency personnel but, the fact of the matter is, once you become aware of an emergency requiring police intervention, there is a good chance it will be over before they can get there.

Let's say you live in town, a few blocks from the police station. It's 2 a.m. and you are awakened by someone trying to break into your house. First you have to decide if it is a member of the family who somehow got locked out, then get to a phone and dial 911 (try it sometime in the dark, but don't actually call 911). The person who answers your call asks your location and the nature of your emergency. They decide whether you need the city police, the county sheriff, or the highway patrol and route your call accordingly. The person who takes your call there asks more questions and checks to see which of their officers would be best to respond to your situation. When they contact that officer, they relay the pertinent information. The responding officer then has to find his way to your house.

Think carefully. From the moment you first became aware of something going on until the police officer made it to your house probably took ten minutes or more. As reported by the Women's Self-Defense Institute, "According to American Police Beat, the average response time for an emergency call is 10 minutes. Atlanta has the worst response time with 11 to 12 minutes and Nashville comes in at a lightning speed of nine minutes. The Department of Justice, with their statistical prowess, reports that the best response time is 4 minutes and the worst over 1 hour." Don't forget, the officer is not just out there waiting to help you; she may be already responding to another call when yours comes through. I've even heard of city dwellers who have called 911, and been put on HOLD!

Now, try an experiment. Go outside and lock your door. Then unlock it and go back in. Depending on how your door is made and secured, it is probably quicker to kick it open than to unlock it. There is a good chance that your door being kicked in would be the first idea you had that something was wrong. The Women's Self-Defense Institute reported that, "the average interaction time between a criminal and his victim is 90 seconds." In ten minutes an experienced criminal could easily locate you, get what he wants from you, and make his escape... if you're lucky. Experienced criminals know that a dependable way to slow the responding officer from pursuing them is to kill you. If you are dead, you can't describe them and the officer has to make sure whether you are dead and try to keep you alive if he can.

If you live more than a couple blocks away from the nearest police officer, response time can increase drastically. Remember my friend? The two men she ran off with her shotgun were caught several miles away. How long do you think it took them to run/walk that far? How far could they have gotten if they had been in a motor vehicle?

So make guns illegal and criminals won't have them, then you can use the karate you learned as a kid and beat the criminal into submission, right? Ma-a-a-a-aybe. Maybe not. Criminals like to stack the deck in their favor. They'll bring a knife or a baseball bat, and they'll bring a friend, or two.,, or three.

Not to mention that the definition of a criminal is someone who breaks the law. Pass a law that you can't own guns and only law abiding citizens will surrender theirs; criminals won't.

States like Illinois and New York have some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, and have some of the worst rates of violent crime in the nation.

Chicago continues to enact some of the most restrictive gun laws in America. At last check, you were more likely to be killed by violence in Chicago than if you were serving in the war in Afghanistan. In a little over eleven years, 2166 people were killed in the war, while, in only eight years, 4265 people had been killed in Chicago, with over 3000 of them being shot. None of the weapons used in those Chicago shootings were registered to the person who did the shooting.

During his life, Senator Ted Kennedy was a staunch proponent of gun control, yet on January 15, 1986, one of his bodyguards was arrested at the U.S. Capitol building for carrying unlicensed weapons, including two submachine guns and ammunition. More recently, a bodyguard for filmmaker Michael Moore, who also advocates strongly for gun control, was arrested for carrying an unlicensed weapon in New York's JFK airport. I find it interesting that those two thought their lives were important enough to be protected by guns, but ours are not. I fail to see how their lives could be more threatened than, say, a resident of East St. Louis. I also fail to see how their lives are more valuable than those residents' lives, or yours, or mine.

Gun control proponents point out gun death statistics indicating your chances of being killed by a gun, insinuating that guns are out there just waiting to kill innocent people. Actually, the stats they tout are highly misleading as they lump all gun deaths together. In other words, they include gang violence, police shootings, and law abiding citizens protecting themselves and their loved ones. What the anti gun folks don't tell you is the number of crimes, including murders, which are prevented every year by legal gun owners, like my friend.

I am NOT proposing that everybody keep a gun. If you don't want to, don't. But don't tell me I can't own one.

As a final note, if you do decide to keep a gun, PLEASE make sure every member of your family knows how and when to use it. My friend did.