I just love old sayings. This is one of my favorites: If guns are involved, one had better be yours.
Think about this for a minute. These words go right along with what some people call The First Rule of a Gunfight: Have a gun.
Guns, as defined by Massad Ayoob, are nothing more than pieces of emergency life-saving equipment. The one true thing about any piece of emergency life-saving equipment is that you must have it when you need it. The next true thing is that if you have a piece of emergency life-saving equipment, you had better know how to use it.
But I digress. Let’s get back to that old saying at the top of this column. There is no worse feeling in the world than to be helpless. Have you ever been in a car crash as a passenger? The next thing you know, tree branches are whipping past the windows and you just know things are going badly, but there is not a thing you can do about it. And then there is that loud crash as the grille and radiator slam into the telephone pole. From then on you just wait for the ambulance.
Now think about what it might be like to feel that fear in the pit of your stomach, reach for your pistol and find nothing. In that instant, all the complaints you ever had about carrying a concealed pistol will vanish. At that moment, the pistol is not too heavy, the holster is not uncomfortable, and the pain in your butt from sitting on Kydex or leather or some other holster material has vanished. All that is left is the empty feeling and the expletive-laced diatribe going on in your head as you berate yourself for choosing this day to leave your gun at home.
That brings me to another great old saying: You don’t pick the day. The day picks you.
I have made it very clear about when I intend to willingly give up my defensive firearm. When someone can, with 99.9 percent accuracy, predict where and when EVERY violent crime will occur, I will give up my gun. You see, if someone could accurately predict every violent crime, I could avoid those areas where violent crimes would happen and I would not need a gun. Until then, I will have a gun at my side.
There are certainly some people out there saying, “Just don’t go to bad neighborhoods.” Well, that would mean the people who live in bad neighborhoods would need guns even more than I need a gun. I can avoid a bad neighborhood. The residents of a bad neighborhood cannot. It is also true that as long as criminals have the ability to acquire cars, those criminals can go just about anywhere they want. They could even come to where I am! So that would mean my avoidance strategy would be useless!
Thus, I am brought right back to the second sentence of this column: If guns are involved, one had better be yours.
The truth is, I’m not really interested in fighting with a gun, but I absolutely do not want to be forced to fight without one.
Hey… that might be a new old saying. What do you think, should we make it into a t-shirt and call it good?
