Like it or not—here in rural Missouri—we live in a deep-rooted gun culture. An auction does better when it includes firearms. Charity organizations raise money by holding raffles for guns. People collect guns.
When I was in high school—back in the late ‘70s—it was not unusual for a deer rifle to be on a pickup truck’s window rack in the parking lot.
Although I am not a gun collector, I have a gun safe in my basement. It holds two single-shot 20-gauge shotguns. One was my maternal grandfather’s, Ed Koepke. The second shotgun was given to me by him on Christmas when I was around 7 years old.
We spent many days hunting rabbits and squirrels with those two guns. Some of my favorite memories are hunting with my grandfather.
Hunting is how most children are introduced to firearms and instructed on how to handle them safely.
Over the weekend, I took photos of excited youngsters with their trophy bucks at a youth deer hunt contest. Two were six years old.
Guns are big business. Those who didn’t grow up with guns cannot understand the attraction guns hold on collectors. They become nauseous with the thought of all the guns in our society.
A Gallup poll from 2020 shows that 32 percent of US adults own a gun. In Missouri, it is almost 50 percent, 48.8, while our neighbors in Illinois only have 27.8 percent gun ownership. Montana has the highest rate of gun ownership at 66.3 percent.
It’s no surprise, but 50 percent of Republicans own a gun while only 18 percent of Democrats have a firearm in their possession.
An estimated 120.5 firearms per 100 people in the US puts the total amount of firearms in the US at 400 million. Is this good or bad?
According to John Lott, Jr.—author of More Guns Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws—it’s good.
Initially published in 1998, and now in its third edition, Lott’s book “directly challenges common perceptions about the relationship of guns, crime, and violence.”
According to Lott, when a civilian with a gun confronts a bad guy with a gun, “they’re overwhelmingly successful.”
Unfortunately, most of these instances are not reported, and when they are, they don’t make it past local news.
Almost everyone is familiar with the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., when, on June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 people and wounded 58 others.
No one remembers a shooting that also occurred in June of 2016 at a nightclub in South Carolina. That’s because a concealed carrier fired back at the shooter, putting an end to the violence. The bad guy, in this instance, had 125 rounds of ammunition when he was stopped.
On Feb. 14, 2018, Parkland High School was the scene of the deadliest mass shooting at a US high school. Later that same year in Titusville, Fla., an armed bystander—lawfully licensed to carry a gun—shot a man who opened fire at a back-to-school event.
A study, released by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) earlier this year, shows that concealed carriers do a better job of stopping active shooters than the police. In an op-ed at The Federalist, Lott said, “In non-gun-free zones, where civilians are legally able to carry guns, concealed carry permit holders stopped 51.5 percent of active shootings, compared to 44.6 percent stopped by police, CPRC found in a deep dive into active shooter scenarios between 2014 and 2023.”
There are two logical reasons why civilians succeed in stopping bad guys: First, they are already on the scene and, second, the perpetrator does not recognize them as a threat.
In his book, Lott points out that “Criminals are motivated by self-preservation, and handguns can therefore be a deterrent. The potential defensive nature of guns is further evidenced by the different rates of so-called ‘hot burglaries,’ where a resident is at home when a criminal strikes. In Canada and Britain, both with tough gun-control laws, almost half of all burglaries are ‘hot burglaries.’ In contrast, the United States, with fewer restrictions, has a ‘hot burglary’ rate of only 13 percent.”
For those who worry about those legally carrying a gun, Lott said, “Permit holders committed murder at 1/182nd the rate of the general public.”
Looks like good guys with guns save lives.
