New Gun Anxiety

 Yesterday, Mike McDaniel posted a story at the American Thinker about a Reddit user who had New Gun Anxiety after making the entirely rational decision to obtain a shotgun for home defense. Remember that God is not a pacifist, and He expects us to defend our lives, the lives of our families and our neighbors against those who would unjustifiably take their lives. Yet anyone who pays attention to the mainstream news will have qualms about having a gun, so pervasive are the anti-gun narratives constantly blasted into the home.

To go armed or not to go armed? That is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows… OK, enough paraphrased Shakespeare. It’s common knowledge that more and more Americans, including Democrats, are becoming first-time gun owners. Federal background checks have numbered more than a million per month for more than five years. Since each check can encompass more than one gun, and they don’t account for private transactions, we can be sure Americans are buying more than a million guns every month.

There are signs the pace of gun buying is slowing, as one might expect with Donald Trump’s reelection. Americans not worried about federal agents busting down their doors at 3 AM, another “Summer of Love,” or relentless and potentially successful attempts to obliterate the Second Amendment tend to relax a bit. Whether he’ll be able to convince Congress to do much to restore and expand Americans’ Second Amendment rights is an open question. During Trump’s first term, when Republicans held the Congress, they decided the time just wasn’t right to affirm that portion of the Constitution.

Even so, gun ownership and daily carry are rational and emotional issues. Rational because there can be no doubt that evil exists and can confront anyone anywhere at any time. There are very few police officers, and they’re virtually never there when and where they're needed. They love to catch bad guys in the act and save the day, but they just can’t be held legally liable for failing to protect anyone. We really are on our own.

You can read Awkward_Dragon25's Reddit post for yourself. He questions whether he has made the right choice. McDaniel reponds that, yes, he has made the right choice.

Obviously, we’re speaking not about someone carrying a handgun for self-defense, an inherently rational choice. “Awkward” has made a home defense choice, but buying a gun safe suggests more than a little emotion overcoming reason. There’s certainly nothing wrong with leaving a shotgun loaded with an empty chamber, but hopefully Awkward will be able to get to that shotgun more or less instantly when it’s needed, and hopefully, it will never be needed in that way.

No, Awkward, you’re not doing anything wrong. You’ve made a rational, responsible choice, and you’ve made at least the beginning steps toward ability and confidence. You’ll need to continue regular and correct practice, dry and live fire, to maintain and build that ability and confidence.

McDaniel goes on to report that the utilitarian statistics back up his claims. But of course, the principle of an armed society being necessary, though not sufficient, to maintain freedom is in back of McDaniel's post. One must not only have the tools, one must also have the skill and the will to use them.  For additional reading on this, one cannot find a more thoughtful analysis than Jeffrey Snyder in A Nation of Cowards.