WASHINGTON, DC, Mar 16 – What if Ukraine had the kind of stringent gun control laws that America’s Leftist Progressives demand? Putin’s invasion would have been like a walk in the park. Instead the free people of Ukraine are fighting back, much to “Vlad the Impaler’s” chagrin.
A recent online blog notes that, “One of the most remarkable aspects of the tragic events in Ukraine concerns the sudden uprising of thousands or even millions of ordinary citizens, who have abandoned their normal humdrum lives and loved ones to take up arms and defend the mother country with AK-47 assault rifles, homemade incendiary Molotov cocktails, and even by kneeling to block Russian tanks.”
The gun rights website, Bearing Arms, posted a new report recently that begs the question: what would you do if the U.S. was invaded? In fact, Tom Knighton, who authored the piece, cites a Quinnipiac survey that asked that very question. The poll’s results were published last week and found that: “As the world witnesses what is happening to Ukraine, Americans were asked what they would do if they were in the same position as Ukrainians are now: stay and fight or leave the country? A majority (55 percent) say they would stay and fight, while 38 percent say they would leave the country. Republicans say 68 – 25 percent and independents say 57 – 36 percent they would stay and fight, while Democrats say 52 – 40 percent they would leave the country.”
Let’s hope and pray that we won’t ever be invaded. In the meantime let’s get real about gun control. The term, itself, makes it seem that stricter gun control laws would make us safer by keeping weapons out of the hands of bad guys and miscreants. Not true. The bad guys who hold up corner grocery stores and commit murder don’t usually use legally registered weapons to commit their crimes. They buy them on the black market. They could care less whether we have stricter gun control laws. But honest, law abiding citizens who wish to defend themselves from those bad guys with their black market weapons do care.
According to criminologists Gary Kleck and Marc G. Gertz, armed resistance works and by further limiting the ability of potential victims to purchase firearms puts them at the risk of bodily harm and/or death. Kleck and Gertz produced a study a few years ago in which they noted that defensive gun use is proven to work, even when confronted by an offender who is armed.
In that study, they argued that: “Potentially, the most consequential form of forceful resistance is armed resistance, especially resistance with a gun. This form of resistance is worthy of special attention for many reasons, both policy-related and scientific. The policy-related reasons are obvious: if self-protection with a gun is commonplace, it means that any form of gun control that disarms large numbers of prospective victims, either altogether, or only in certain times and places where victimization might occur, will carry significant social costs in terms of lost opportunities for self-protection … the defensive actions of crime victims have significant effects on the outcomes of crimes, and the effects of armed resistance differ from those of unarmed resistance. Previous research has consistently indicated that victims who resist with a gun or other weapon are less likely than other victims to lose their property in robberies and in burglaries. Consistently, research also has indicated that victims who resist by using guns or other weapons are less likely to be injured compared to victims who do not resist or to those who resist without weapons.”