IT isn’t just women who should be able to pack heat, any law abiding citizen should have something close to hand in the event that a non-law abiding scumbag decides he wants something that doesn’t belong to him. The Supreme Court recently declared that Washington D.C. had violated the Second Amendment with their hard-line gun laws. That decision has reached all parts of the country and has made an impact on the way ordinary people view weapons. It is now legal to carry a licensed firearm in a national park, with the proper permits. The park rangers didn’t like it because it put guns in the hands of those very people they are sworn to protect but seldom don’t or can’t because of time and distance.
Yes, we’re protected by the Second Amendment but sometimes it can backfire. First, a little background information. Using the new Homeland Security and and ravaged federal laws, law enforcement agencies can use them to raid a home on the flimiest of excuses, often inaccurate. They can perform an early morning, no-knock raid on innocent citizens, often using deadly force. In one recent early morning raid, a S.W.A.T team broke in the front door of a woman home with her two young daughters. Thinking the cops were intruders, they swore under oath that they announced themselves, she used her licensed firearm to shoot one of the cops from the top of her stairs. All she saw were dark-clothed men waving weapons around and fearing for her life, and those of her daughters, she opened fire. Now she is waiting trial on murder charges. It doesn’t matter that all the cops were yelling at the same time, making it next to impossible for her to understand what was being yelled. According to her attorney, her defense will be self-defense and her neighbors are supporting her.
In Boulder, Colorado, another ‘firearms are evil” town, there has been a rash of sexual assaults on college women. The Boulder City Counsil continues to vote against conceal-carry permits for fear that their town will turn into another Dodge City. If I had a daughter attending that college, I’d sure want her to have something on her hip with which to defend herself because the cops are always minutes late and then can only take a report. A piece of paper doesn’t prevent crime, an armed citizen does. I learned a long time ago that guns in the hands of criminals kill innocent citizens, guns in the hands of innocent citizens kill criminals, or at least give them pause to think, “Do I want to get shot?”
I once had a cop tell me that he wasn’t on the streets to protect citizens but to uphold the law and until a law was broken, he was powerless to do anything. A cime must be in progress before he can do anything. If that’s the case, then why was he carrying a gun and wearing a badge? A woman would know when a crime is about to be committed against her and should have the power to prevent it. A bullet into the sex perverts groin and all thoughts of violent sexual activity disappears. Now that is justice.
Working at a state park with a shooting center, I’ve seen more and more women learning to use their weapons and shooting straight. I’m all for it. The shooting center has a program that teaches high school kids, with their parents permission, the proper way to safely use a firearm and have overcome their fear of a gun taught to them by their teachers. The teachers are scared of firearms, the students aren’t and now many of them can defend themselves if they are home alone and someone tries to break in. Perhaps if there were more weapons in schools, there would ber less mass killings, like Columbine.