Preach It, Pastor!
Thomas Brouwer, pastor of Messiah Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, in Middletown, wrote a reply to an anti-self-defense letter published by the mother of a CWRU shoting victim. His letter to the editor published in the Middletown Journal.
Click the "Read More..." link below for an archived copy of the letter, and a link to the newspaper.
Letters to the Editor, 07.02.03
For The Middletown Journal
‘Guns are not the problem’
Guns are good. Guns make us safer. In her guest column (June 25, “From a survivor’s perspective”), Susan Helper makes the usual false assumptions and advances emotional arguments without fact that will ultimately hurt people. Defenseless women are raped, the elderly are robbed and beaten, and the blood of innocent citizens is poured out because of the misguided, uninformed, illogical policies of people biased against guns.
People biased against guns falsely assume that more restrictive gun laws will mean less crime.
The fact ignored by gun control advocates is that countries with complete gun bans continue to have very high homicide rates. For example, the Soviet Union, where a ruthless totalitarian system enforces a ban on the private ownership of guns, has had a higher homicide rate than the U.S. for the last 35 years. In the U.S., the states with the highest gun ownership have experienced by far the lowest crime rates.
People biased against guns also assume that guns are the problem. They think that if we could just get rid of the guns, crime would decrease. They don’t understand that criminals don’t obey laws, gun control or otherwise. Disarming citizens simply means that now only the bad guys will have guns and they can now use them against defenseless citizens. Following the logic that guns are the problem, we would also then have to get rid of knives and baseball bats because they also are used to commit crime.
Guns are not the problem. Evil people are the problem. Anti-gunners fail to make a distinction between a gun in the hands of a law-abiding citizen and a gun in the hands of a criminal. Concealed weapons in the hands of good people can be used to save lives and stop attacks.
The percentage of the American public that views guns negatively does so because they have heard only, or at least mostly, negative things about guns. When was the last time there was a major story in the media that talked about how many lives are saved and how many crimes are prevented because of guns?
Guns aren’t presented favorably in the media because the media is biased against guns. For example, in January 2002 a shooting at the Appalachian Law School left three dead. Although the event made international news, one fact was missing from virtually every news story: The attack was stopped by two students who had guns. Research shows there are about two million defensive gun uses each year in the United States. Only in a small percentage of them are shots even fired. Simply brandishing a gun stops crime 95 percent of the time. Unfortunately that doesn’t make the news.
Anti-gunners want us to obey laws while they ignore the Second Amendment to our Constitution. Those who would impose gun control laws on law-abiding citizens join the ranks with crooks, criminals and other law-breakers when they would strip Americans of their fundamental right to keep and bear arms.
Gun control only hinders people’s ability to deter or stop criminal attacks. If Susan Helper and those who think like her don’t want to own or carry a gun, that’s their right. But don’t strip other people of the constitutional right to protect themselves and their families.
THOMAS BROUWER
Middletown
Click here to read the letter in the Middletown Journal.
Click here to read more about the ongoing CCW battle in the pages of the Middletown Journal.
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