Guns​—A Way of Death

“THEY have this illusion,” said one prominent police official, “that they’re going to point the gun at someone and they’ll be in control and when it doesn’t work out that way, they hesitate, just as many police officers will hesitate a split second, and they pay for that with their lives.”

How quickly could you get to your concealed gun if you were suddenly accosted by an assailant? Consider her own experience: “When I was mugged​—by a crazed addict with a butcher knife—​the steel was at my throat before I saw or heard my attacker. If I’d gone for a gun, who’d have won a photo-finish?” Then she adds: “I would not dream of keeping a gun for personal protection. This is not a matter of morality; it is a matter of practicality.”

Now consider some overwhelming facts. In the “relatively rare shoot-​outs between householders and burglars that do occur, it might easily be the burglar who proves more skilled in handling his gun and the householder who winds up in the morgue,” reported Time magazine of February 6, 1989.

“Well, you can’t have it two ways,” said one police chief. “If you really safeguard your gun so that innocent people in your house, your children or visitors or someone else, can’t get hurt with it, then [you] won’t be able to get to that gun for the kind of emergency that [you] bought it for in the first place.”