Ivy League Conservatives

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This is why we can’t let liberals take our guns away. They make a great point over at Hot Air:

I don’t understand why gun rights aren’t more of a feminist issue. Well, no, that’s not true: Most self-styled feminist intellectuals come from the left, where the dogma on Violence trumps the need for self-defense from miscreants. I can understand worrying about 20-year-old guys running around with assault rifles, but a woman carrying a .38 Special in her purse in case she runs into someone who won’t take no for an answer? If the Patriarchy’s as sinister as they say, you’d think this would be a core plank of the movement.

In this news item, none of the things that liberals fear about guns actually happened. No one was shot. No one was murdered. The wannabe robber was caught. A woman went to bed in her home with all of her possessions–and her life. Besides, like the quote above, a gun is the great equalizer in an altercation. It’s the only way a 90-pound woman can overtake a man that is three times her weight and a foot taller than her. 

Whenever I hear about concealed carry, I can’t help but think of something that happened at Penn. Two of my male friends–also Penn students–were walking in Old City, probably intoxicated. One was a varsity wrestler, exceptionally noted for his temper. The inevitable happened, and the two were held up by a young male brandishing a gun. My wrestler friend seized the gun from the kid, at which point he ran down the street. My friend chased after him, still holding the assailant’s gun, until an officer stopped him. The kid was long gone, and after the officers figured out that my friend wasn’t at fault, they shook his hand and let him go, just in time for last call at the campus watering hole. 

We’re not always in the company of such brazen–or well-trained in hand to hand combat–individuals. And our potential assailants won’t always be so quick to escape the scene of the crime. The same sequence of events could have happened another day and resulted in a double homicide. Making access to guns illegal for law-abiding citizens only hurts those law-abiding citizens. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met a murderer or gang member who bothered to register his guns or only shoot them at the gun range.