George Rebane

The latest mass shooting in Grand Blanc, Michigan highlights the problems with our totally unarmed civilian population in the public square.  The incident left 5 people dead (including shooter) and eight hospitalized.  The crazed killer was a military veteran who drove his pick-up through the doors of the local LDS church into the sanctuary where hundreds of people were attending a church service.  There he got out and started shooting people randomly and then took the time to set fire to the building which ultimately was totally destroyed with the authorities expecting to find more bodies in the charred rubble.  Law enforcement took about ten minutes to get there and take down the gunman.

What boggles my mind is that among the hundreds of worshippers, and Mormons no less, there was not a single person legally armed with a CCW who could have engaged the shooter, or diverted him and possibly taken him down, thereby saving lives and the church.  There was apparently more than enough time for such a response while police were on their way.

Sadly, there was no such self-help available.  We have all been conditioned to be sanguine about personal safety from the criminals and crazies among us – the police will protect us.  But when the need demands seconds, law enforcement is minutes away.  Today’s perpetrators are totally confident that they will encounter no immediate armed resistance, especially if they decide to do their crime in a ‘gun free zone’ or a jurisdiction which enjoins an armed citizenry.

The progressives and other light thinkers among us will immediately claim that legally vetted armed citizens constitute a public danger.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  When the last data was available, you were six times more likely to be murdered by a rogue LE officer than a citizen with a CCW.  Today the chance of your being murdered in any given year by a CCW carrier is less than one in ten million.  Pew Research Center documented a national gun murder rate of 4.5 per 100,000 people.  Therefore, being a victim of criminal homicide by a non-CCW person is 450 times higher. 

CCW holders are by far the least dangerous armed people among us, and that includes your local police.  And the lives they save and acts of crime they prevent go unreported by our lamestream media because it doesn’t fit their narrative promoting a disarmed citizenry.  The cost-benefit of having a sufficient share of armed citizens among us to give criminals pause is a no-brainer.