First, here in reality, a good friend is moving and asked me to store his firearms until he gets a safe set up in his new home. That seems to me to be a good hook to use to remind everyone who owns guns that you are responsible for your firearms. Leaving them lying around the house unsecured means that your child, a visitors child, or the local teenage burglar could wind up with it – with consequences you really don’t want to think about. Years ago, I had a handgun stolen from my car by parking valets, and while I called the police on the spot, it was never recovered. To this day, I worry about what happened to it, and what it was used for. And I no longer have weapons that are not under my direct personal control or behind a meaningful lock. <\/p>\n
There are rapid-access safes for handguns and long guns that make your firearm as easy to get to as pulling it from a drawer. There’s really no excuse not to secure firearms<\/p>\n
I take this tack because I believe that owning firearms here in the U.S. is a right – but like all rights, it comes inextricably bound with responsibilities. You can’t have one – a right – without the other – a responsibility, and yet for some reason I keep running into people who believe that you can. Let me make my position on this perfectly clear. I know what the law says about self-defense on one’s property, and as far as I’m concerned, the law is an ass. <\/p>\n \nIf a goblin invades your property, he should be fair game, whether he’s coming or going. End of story. I don’t care if he “no longer poses a threat” or similar bleeding-heart bullshit.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Sorry, Kim, that’s equally bullshit. This is an endless topic of discussion within the gun community, with a substantial group taking Kim’s position – Shoot, Shovel, Shut Up – and a larger group, I believe taking mine. <\/p>\n I come to my position very simply; I’ve talked and trained with a number of people who have Seen The Elephant; who have shot others as a LEO or soldier. These range from situations in which they were SWAT snipers, who shot hostage-takers in a bank robbery to sudden, brutal street shootouts. <\/p>\n Not one of them – not a single one – would take Kim’s position. None of them are twitching psych basket cases, paralyzed by post-traumatic stress. None of them would hesitate to do it again, if called on. But every one of them wishes it had worked out another way. It’s simple, not one of them would shoot a burglar holding his VCR simply for being in his home. <\/p>\n So in a question of moral, rather than practical, judgment, I’ll go with the people who have experience.<\/p>\n Note that there’s an interesting distinction to draw between what I think is OK for states to do and what I don’t think it’s OK for individuals within a state to do. A later post…<\/p>\n Now, remember that I’m the guy<\/a> who thinks that owning weapons isn’t only a right, but a bit of a moral imperative.<\/p>\n 2) It is moral. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that people who eat meat and have never killed anything are morally suspect. Some creature gave its life for the chicken Andouille sausages in the pasta sauce I made tonight. Pork chops and salmon don’t start out wrapped in plastic on the grocery shelf. I have hunted deer, wild pigs, and birds, and I can say with certainty (and I imagine anyone else who hunts can say) that it fundamentally changed the way I look both at my food and at animals in the world. I respect the death that made my dinner possible in a way I never would have had an animal not died at my own hand.<\/p>\n \nWhen I have a gun in my possession, I am suddenly both more aware of my environment, and more careful and responsible for my actions in it. People who I know who carry guns daily talk about how well-behaved they are how polite they suddenly become. Heinlein wrote that “an armed society is a polite society”, and while in truth I cannot make a causal connection, when you look at societies where the codes of manners were complex and strong, from medieval Europe or Japan to Edwardian England, there was a wide distribution of weapons.<\/p>\n \nI know several people who are either highly skilled martial artists or highly skilled firearms trainers, and in both groups there is an interesting correlation between competence (hence dangerousness) and a kind of calm civility … the opposite of the “armed brute” image that some would attempt to use to portray a dangerous man or woman.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n And in light of that, I’ll echo Kim’s endorsement<\/a> of Aaron The Liberal Slayer<\/a>‘s (not this<\/b> liberal, buddy…) suggestion that April 15 be termed ‘Buy A Gun Day’. Note that unlike Kim, I’m not asking for donations to buy a different gun – I’m all handgunned up (I shoot Glocks these days), and am a firm believer in Jeff Cooper’s adage ‘Beware the man who owns only one gun…he can probably use it.<\/i>‘<\/p>\n And if you can’t buy a gun, let me suggest ‘Take An Unarmed Liberal Shooting Day<\/i>‘ as a fallback. Either one ought to sufficiently get Michael Moore’s baggy drawers in a knot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" First, here in reality, a good friend is moving and asked me to store his firearms until he gets a safe set up in his new home. That seems to me to be a good hook to use to remind everyone who owns guns that you are responsible for your firearms. Leaving them lying around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nOne responsibility those who own weapons have is to use them responsibly. The recent case cited by Instapundit<\/a> and Kim du Toit<\/a>, among others, in which a British citizen was jailed for killing a home-invader with a sword is a good one to start with. It turns out that the stabber was a drug dealer and stabbed the stabee in the back. Kim thinks this is righteous. <\/p>\n