The mainstream media wont report stories of children who have successfully used guns in self-defense to save their lives.
We all know what can happen when kids and guns mix. And today I will tell you some stories about that very thing. The kids names were Kendra and Alyssa and then there was the 11-year-old boy whose name we just dont know. What we do know is that they lived in places called Bryan County Albuquerque and Palmview. We know that guns were in their homes and that something horrible befell them.
Last year 12-year-old Oklahoman Kendra St. Clair was home alone unsupervised. At some point she accessed her mothers handgun a .40-caliber Glock. Then Kendra pulled the trigger.
And that bullet tore into flesh.
You probably know the rest of the story.
Or maybe not.
The bullet tore into the flesh of a 32-year-old home invader causing him to flee. Kendra was left scared and crying but unscathed.
The story of Albuquerque 11-year-old Alyssa Gutierrez turned out differently. Three teenage burglars broke into her home but they fled after she merely grabbed her mothers rifle. No one was hurt but the criminals were caught.
But sometimes innocents do get shot. Such was the case with an 11-year-old Palmview boy in 2010. At home with his mother he got his hands on a .22-caliber rifle. And after the two armed and masked illegal aliens who had broken into their home shot through their bedroom door after the mother refused to open it hitting the boy in the hip he returned fire. He struck one of the criminals in the neck causing them both to flee. They were apprehended when the wounded miscreant showed up at a local hospital.
These were children who lived in places called Bryan County Albuquerque and Palmview. Thank God they still live in those places. And thats what can happen when kids and guns mix.
If youre unacquainted with my work you perhaps didnt expect this piece to take the turn it did. You perhaps didnt hear these stories; the mainstream media doesnt report such things much. But now that you have ponder this question: do you wish these children hadnt had access to firearms? Because they wont if the gun-control crowd gets its way.
Of course the above real-life stories are just that: anecdotes. Some will say theyre rare and not statistically significant. And I suppose they are rare; most people will never face such evil and have the ability to thwart it. Yet theyre not nearly as rare as a Sandy Hook or Virginia Tech: your chance of dying in a school shooting approximates that of being struck by lightning. In contrast Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck estimates that 2.5 million Americans each year use guns for self-defense and that 400000 of them say they would have been killed if they hadnt been armed. Thats 400000 a year.
Do I believe they all would have been murdered? No. People have a penchant for the dramatic and fear and stress can corrupt judgment. But even if only one half of one percent of them are correct thats 2000 innocent lives saved with guns every year. This is approximately 76 times as many as were killed at Sandy Hook and considerably more than were lost in all American gun massacres during the last 40 years. And if five percent of them are right it amounts to 20000 innocent lives saved far more than the number murdered with guns in America every year.
Ah that big if" some will say. Woulda coulda maybe perhaps I suppose. Of course we could also mention that those 2.5 million annual defensive gun uses represent rapes robberies and assaults thwarted usually without firing a shot. And thats part of the problem. Its a headline when a gun goes off; it can be head to the next story when a criminal is merely scared off.
As for hypotheticals they arent as emotionally compelling as a school shooting where you see victims pictures grieving relatives and emergency vehicles dominating your TV. Perhaps it would be different if we as in a science-fiction movie could somehow get a glimpse into alternate gun-free futures where the worlds Kendras and Alyssas and millions of other good citizens couldnt defend themselves. Maybe if the citizenry saw in living color how many of these people while now safe would have been left brutalized killed and lying in a pool of their own blood we could compete for emotional impact. Thus we should remember to use a play on a Frederic Bastiat saying that a bad policy-maker observes only what can be seen; a good policy-maker observes what can be seen and what must be foreseen. Dead innocents killed with guns can be seen; the innocents who would be killed were it not for guns must be foreseen.
Yet even what can be seen such as the stories I opened with wont usually be because they dont fit the anti-gun mainstream-media narrative. Instead we hear about how 13 children a day are killed with firearms with no mention that this statistic includes children up to age 19 or 24 depending on the source most of these incidents involve teenage gang members shooting each other" writes Guy Smith at Gun Facts. Or were asked questions such as Why does anyone need an AR-15?" Perhaps we should ask the then 15-year-old Houston boy who used that very weapon to defend himself and his younger sister against two burglars in 2010.
Heres what you might learn: being a light gun (seven pounds) with little recoil its an ideal firearm for youngsters and women. A lady I knew once fired a shouldered shotgun when she was a girl and the kick knocked her on her backside; an AR wont do this. This is partially because its high-tech mechanism absorbs much of the recoil energy but also because it is not nearly as powerful as even many hunting rifles.
How can this be? Isnt this scary black gun" a killing machine" as Piers Morgan put it? As explained and illustrated in this video this class of weapons is designed to wound a 170-lb. man while a high-powered hunting rifles purpose is to kill a 300 to 800-lb. deer or moose. In fact in some states and countries it is illegal to hunt large game with an AR-caliber round (.223) for fear that its relative ineffectiveness will leave a wounded and suffering animal wandering the forest. As to this note that the AR-wielding 15-year-old Houston boy shot one of the intruders at least 3 times and the man lived. It might have been a different story had the teen used a 30.06 deer rifle and a very different one with a buckshot-loaded shotgun.
So do kids and guns mix? Well kids and their guns have sometimes been mixing it up with criminals and coming out on top. But neither kids nor anyone else mixes well with guns when ending up on the wrong end of one. This happened at Sandy Hook. It happened in Aurora Co. It happens during many other garden-variety crimes. And it could conceivably happen scores of thousands of times more every year. The only way to find out precisely how many more times is to disarm the American people.