Carrying concealed as a normal part of life

A twenty-five-year-old Coloradan, who is a Christian, explains to The Thinking Housewife why he carries a gun at all times and in all places where it is lawful, and how the young ladies he goes out with react to this. They’re uncomfortable with it. They like it when an unarmed man sacrifices himself to protect his woman, as three men did in the Aurora movie theater on the night of the Dark Knight massacre, but not when an armed man uses force to protect his woman.

The commenter, Ben J., also explains why there were no armed men in the audience that night:

The majority of armed citizens I know are at home and long asleep by the time the clock strikes midnight. We are usually up before the sun, to earn our living and provide for ourselves or our families. Staying up until the wee hours of the morning to watch a violent film is something most of us aren’t interested in.

Also, in a refreshing change from Universal Mandated Liberal-Speak, Ben J. refers to the event not as “the tragedy in Aurora,” but as “the rampage in Aurora.”

UPDATE, July 29: The thread at The Thinking Housewife continues with several excellent comments, particularly on the question of women’s attitudes toward guns.

- end of initial entry -

James N. writes:

Like Laura’s correspondent, I carry a loaded gun every day, everywhere it’s legal.

Also like her correspondent, I wouldn’t be caught dead in a movie at midnight. Perhaps there is a correlation between civic responsibility (and concealed carry is, at its root, an act of civic responsibility) and going to bed at an hour that permits getting up for work.

LA replies:

Given that you live in a rural, low crime state, I’m surprised to hear that you carry all the time.

Also, you must be a real rarity—a physician who carries.

As for going to after-midnight movies, I think the issue is not whether one has to get up early in the morning to go to work (after all, even working people don’t work every day), but simply whether one is the type of person who goes to a movie theater after midnight, especially for a high-violence movie. As you yourself said, you wouldn’t be caught dead in a movie after midnight.

James N. replies:

Low crime, true—but the rural environment cuts two ways. The odds of something bad go down, but the odds of help arriving quickly do, too.

My town is ten miles square, and after Labor Day there’s a single patrol car covering that 100 square miles.

Besides, once a Scout, always a Scout—Be Prepared.

Buck writes:

Just seconds before opening VFR to this entry, I sent this to my cousin, after a discussion of a previous VFR entry:

I imagined a number of scenarios that day. All of them required a weapon. There are a growing number, it seems, of increasingly cold blooded savages preying on white men. Odds are, it will happen again. There are no half measures. I would rather suffer a conviction, ala Bernie Goetz, for the illegal possession of a hand gun, than a conviction on 2nd degree murder because a jury is convinced by a rabid prosecutor of aggravated stalking, which is, I early-on feared, the tactic that may send an innocent George Zimmerman to prison. I’m not left with any good choices if I stay in Maryland.

Of the three friends of mine who are federal agents, and a fourth who is a county cop, all have said essentially the same thing: that they would not go into most of Washington D.C. or anywhere in Prince Georges County, Maryland without a weapon, legal or not.

Ferg writes:

I too go armed on a daily basis despite living in a very safe, low crime area. Why do I bother carrying that extra weight around with me all the time? Because if I knew there was going to be trouble at some place I was going, I wouldn’t go there. Simple as that. The weapon is for the unexpected, not for the expected. Nice day, nice area, broad daylight? Go armed. No law that says assault only happens on dark gloomy nights or rainy days.

July 29

Nik S. writes:

Samson writes (at Laura Wood’s site):

“Finally, when you get into one of these discussions with a young woman, don’t try and have a rational argument with her. That will not work. Instead, offer to take her shooting. If she accepts, odds are good you’ll make a convert, since in spite of what they may, many or most women find the actual act of firing a gun to be exhilarating and thrilling.”

My high school sweetheart, Carla, was a quintessential liberal, and hated guns. Until she fired one. Carla herself admitted how surprised she was to find so much joy in the act of firing a gun.

Which basically just shows: liberals, more than being evil, are just plain ignorant. They don’t fire guns. They don’t live near black people. They are ignorant hippycrits.

KO writes:

I can understand why a liberal woman would prefer that her man sacrifice his life for her rather than use force to protect her. In the former case she gets to survive, in the latter she faces the stress of having to stand by her man in the face of a revenge attack, however remote the possibility, or prosecution by the state for “second-degree murder.” It is a good litmus test of whether she is worth it.

Laura Wood writes:

KO’s comment is hateful and ludicrous. When a liberal woman expresses abhorrence of guns, which by the way is normal for most women, she is typically guilty of denying danger, not making some furtive calculation to prefer a friend’s death over his criminal trial. KO’s implication, in light of the discussion of men who lost their lives at the Aurora theater while shielding their girlfriends, is obscene.

Paul T. writes:

I understand Laura Wood’s saying that KO’s hypothesis is implausible, and clearly it’s speculative. But I don’t understand what is “hateful” or “obscene” about it. If we can agree (as Laura surely does) that liberalism is evil, what is morally wrong with ascribing evil motives to liberals, women as well as men? KO may be wrong in fact, nothing worse than that.

Laura Wood replies:

Okay, so if someone said most Jews are scoundrels and liars who wouldn’t mind if the Christians they knew were murdered, would that be mere speculation, a theory to be proved or disproved, or would it be, by virtue of its attribution of great evil to a large group of people, hateful?

KO’s point was that the average liberal woman who balks at the sight of a friend’s gun would rather see this male friend dead than see him use his gun. What can I say? That is an obscene and hateful view of liberal women.

July 30

KO writes:

Re Laura Wood’s responses to my comment on the above:

My definition of a “liberal woman” is a woman who believes in liberalism as it is (rightly) condemned on this site. Such a woman cares so little for her man that she would assert (and possibly carry out) her legal right to murder their unborn child even against his protests. She would be appalled if he lost his job for defending his Christian beliefs regarding traditional marriage.

Who is this mythical liberal woman who would make even the tiniest sacrifice to work with her husband as a modern pioneering couple defending the living of a Christian life against its eradication—by liberalism itself?

Laura says my point is, “that the average liberal woman who balks at the sight of a friend’s gun would rather see this male friend dead than see him use his gun.” My point is that all liberals, male and female, as a matter of practical reality would indeed rather see innocent people dead than have them take logical measures to defend themselves, which no one has the right to prevent them from doing.

I made no reference to the individuals in Aurora, and I consider Laura’s use of them in criticism of my point to be unfair.

Laura Wood writes:

In response to KO, I brought up the Aurora shooting because that was what inspired this discussion. The reader whom Mr. Auster mentioned at the top of this entry was responding to comments about the men who died in the theater and the fact that no one used guns defensively that night. Perhaps KO might follow the discussion as it evolved.

I don’t see that it was unfair for me to point out that those women in the theater were probably the type of women KO was referring to, that they too probably would have been naive and in denial as so many women are and would not have wanted their boyfriends to have guns. To infer from their likely fear of guns that they would have preferred their friends’ deaths to possible criminal charges or retaliation, or that they would have been relieved that they survived instead of their friends, is something that in my opinion has no basis in reality, and is not part of the psychology of most liberal women, even those who are so sinful as to approve of abortion.

KO writes:

My point is that all liberals, male and female, as a matter of practical reality would indeed rather see innocent people dead than have them take logical measures to defend themselves, which no one has the right to prevent them from doing.

In the abstract, yes, but not when it comes to their friends, and that was what this discussion was about. Most liberal women also do not do much to protect themselves from the people who might rape and murder them and yet they often freely move about with no men to use as human shields. It’s not that they would rather die than defend themselves. It’s that they deny that obvious dangers even exist.

August 1

KO writes:

In reply to Laura Wood:

If I follow the link to Laura’s site, rather than following the continuous discussion at VFR as I did (I am not going through all of Laura’s links as I do not read her site), I have to question why she has been so rattled by what I wrote, given that the guest poster she opens with used more vivid language, such as: “Do they want a man to protect them? Or merely a shield to absorb the stabs of a mugger, or the bullets of a lunatic? Is this what modern society has decided protection means? A man is reduced by rules and societal pressures to the role of a bullet proof vest?”

Do women play no part in these “societal pressures” that turn a man into a disposable object? Why no comment from Laura at this point? The only difference I can think of is my reference to men judging whether a particular woman is “worth it.” Is Laura objecting to the idea that a man should be able to judge a woman? I believe one of the pressing problems of Western civilization is the failure of men to do so other than on the trivializing basis of attractiveness.

Which is more compatible with equal suffrage—to suggest that women are just naive about “obvious dangers,” or to hold them accountable for their political viewpoints on guns and capital punishment? This is not a hypothetical student debate. Women’s informed opinions have consequences for legislation, executive policy and judicial precedent. I for one would not assume that when Miss USA contestant Carrie Prejean nervously and courageously expressed her views on traditional marriage that she was, as “Perez Hilton” infamously put it, a “dumb bitch.”

KO writes:

Actually, re Laura’s second reply to me on the above, I would appreciate the opportunity to address her repeated reference to the individuals at Aurora in criticism of my opinion. I do so as follows:

I have no authority (or desire) to judge the individuals at Aurora any more than I have to judge James Holmes. Only a jury can judge the latter’s intentions, and only God can judge anyone’s soul. I disagree, however, with the implication that liberals do not have known opinions concerning self-defense merely because people in general have different attitudes to guns (i.e. some simply may not think of arming, some might not like a gun in a house with children, etc.).

Liberals’ worldview is most apparent when they publicly argue in favor of outlawing the carrying of weapons in self-defense. This, however, is not mere “abstract” theorizing. It is the deliberate choice to disarm every man and woman in every public place—including their own friends on their nights out. (As consistent adults, I would expect them to argue forcefully in the latter scenario even if concealed carrying were legal.)

Just as liberals must be morally accountable for their (obviously wholehearted) support for abortion, so too must they be accountable for their contribution to, as Ben J. originally put it on Laura’s site, without criticism: the societal pressures by which a man is reduced “to the role of a bullet proof vest.”

August 2

Laura Wood writes:

Buck forwarded to me a few days ago his comments in response to KO that he had sent to you, which were not posted. (He was sharing his thoughts on the subject with me, not objecting to the fact that they had not been posted

I think Buck makes good points in response to KO’s latest, even though those points were made before KO’s comments. In the last paragraph below, he makes an important distinction between what Ben J. said and KO’s comments.

Here are Buck’s comments to you:

KO either lost track of what he said, or he confused himself too. He writes, right out of the chute (so to speak), that

“I can understand why a liberal woman would prefer that her man sacrifice his life for her rather than use force to protect her.” That is the first thing KO said in response to an entry that says: “as three men did in the Aurora movie theater on the night of the Dark Knight massacre, but not when an armed man uses force to protect his woman”; an entry that was yet another entry written about the fact that men died shielding their women, not protecting and certainly not defending them. KO finishes by saying: “I made no reference to the individuals in Aurora, and I consider Laura’s use of them in criticism of my point to be unfair.”

“Confusing,” is to say nothing.

I’ll speculate that KO meant to say something along the lines of; the typical modern liberal woman effectively causes the death of her passive man by ignorantly and unrealistically prohibiting him from using a weapon (a deadly force is required to get to his “second-degree murder”) for self-defense, if his aim is to remain with her. I can’t imagine that KO means that their men can’t even fight back. I can’t imagine that he meant to be sounding like he is saying that a modern liberal woman will intentionally choose the death of her man; would rather see him dead, than to tolerate him resisting an assault. At least, I hope not. That would be hateful and ludicrous and morally depraved. Moral depravity and indifference is one of the elements necessary for a “second-degree murder” conviction.

….

I don’t think that Ben J. claims to be certain that women desire that their men die rather than put up a fight, but that to him it seems that way based on the way that they react to guns and to gun possession. I don’t think that if a woman’s man produced a gun in time to shoot dead an assailant that the woman and her man were both certain was about to shoot and kill her, that she would object before or after. I simply don’t think that she would rather that she or he, or they both be dead as proof of her sincerity. I’m sure that she would rather that her man make this big-time unprincipled exception. The relationship may end, or she may never trust him again, but she will now know for certain that she can rely on him for protection. I think that even a cold-hearted modern liberal woman, in her heart of hearts, would secretly thank one of her gods that her man had that gun. I think that the three women in the theater, if they were asked, would rather that the men who shielded them could have lived by firing first. If they have said otherwise, then I give up. Even a modern liberal, at the moment of truth, would surely choose to live to lie another day.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 28, 2012 05:59 PM | Send