It is late at night, and you’ve just heard the unmistakable sound of intruders kicking down your front door and invading your home. Within minutes – perhaps even within seconds – they’ll be in your bedroom.
Imagine that you have a choice of two items on your nightstand. One is a cellphone with 911 programmed into its speed-dial. The other is a loaded pistol. Which would you reach for as the sound of the intruders’ footsteps approaches your door?
This is actually a somewhat unfair scenario, because the correct answer is ‘both’ and there should never be a real world scenario where we are restricted to a choice of only one of these two essential items.
So let’s reword the question – Would you wish to keep a loaded firearm close at hand in your bedroom, as well as a phone? Or is a phone all you’ll ever need to guarantee your safety?
We have a follow-up question, too – especially if you feel that all you will ever need is a phone. How long is the average – and worst case – response time for your local police to arrive at your residence; from the time you first pick up your phone, to the time multiple units have reached your property and the officers in question have worked out a strategy for responding to your home invasion? Oh – did we not mention? If you call the police and say ‘There are multiple intruders in my house’ there’s close to no chance that the first car to arrive, with probably only one officer in it, will do anything other than observe. He’ll wait for more officers, and ideally for a K-9 unit, before even getting out of his cruiser.
Don’t forget also the time it takes to get through to 911, to verify your address and other information, and to persuade the operator that your call is genuine and deserving of a highest priority despatch. That will eat up a minute or more of time before the police ever start rolling towards your home.
The best case scenario is that you’ll be waiting 5 – 10 minutes before any police response starts to make its presence felt. Worst case? You could be still waiting, half an hour later, due to the police being too busy on other priority calls, and you needing to wait your turn, or due to a tragic series of command miss-steps and excessive caution and concern for ‘officer safety’ such as sometimes happens when the police respond to such calls.
In the scenario where intruders are already in your house, you don’t have 10 minutes; you don’t even have 5 minutes. Your life, and that of your loved ones, could change profoundly in the next 30 seconds if you don’t do something to directly impact on what is about to otherwise happen.
We do agree – it is always best practice to call the police as soon as you are aware of intruders in your house, and to then try to get out of the house and to escape, or failing that, to barricade yourself as best you can in your bedroom or bathroom, and hope the police turn up before the intruders get to you. You should call out to the intruders telling them to leave, and advising them you’ve called the police and they’re on their way.
But do you want to trust your life to the desperate hope that this will be all you need to do? Intruders are not necessarily rational people and in a sober state of mind. They may be high on mind-altering (mind-destroying) drugs, and may not be worried at the thought of the police having been called, and/or they might know how long it will take for the police to arrive and not feel any time pressure at all.
For all these reasons, it is prudent to have a firearm conveniently at hand to use as a last-ditch defense option.
Not everyone agrees with this recommendation. Read, and weep upon seeing, the assertion boldly made by (thankfully now retired) Supreme Court Justice Stevens, who in recently addressing a group of DC gun haters, suggested (quoted near the bottom of this article)
Stevens also had a recommendation for people who keep a weapon in their homes for self-defense purposes. “Maybe you have some kind of constitutional right to have a cell phone with a pre-dialed 911 in the number at your bedside and that might provide you with a little better protection than a gun which you’re not used to using,” he said to laughter.
Sadly, we suspect the laughter was not at Justice Stevens for uttering such a preposterous nonsense, but with him, at the imagined foolishness of people who seek to have a firearm as well as a phone for their personal protection.
Oh – as for the rest of his opinions that are referred to in the article? Being as how he was on the losing minority side of both the two Supreme Court cases that dealt with the Second Amendment in 2005 and 2010, there’s little reason to respect his opinions and legal interpretations now as being any more accurate than they were in those two cases. He is clearly a gun-hater and views the law through that distorted perspective only.
But it for sure is a scary thought that a person who was formerly (and for 35 long years) one of the nine people who hold ultimate say over our ability to own and use firearms, would offer up such imbecilic nonsense as suggesting that we don’t need firearms and that cell phones are all the protection we need. Has he never heard the oh-so-obviously true adage ‘When seconds count, the police are only minutes away’?
Update, March 2018 : Justice Stevens again showed his animosity to the Second Amendment and his eagerness to overturn the US Constitution in an “Op-Ed” opinion piece he published in the NY Times, also no great lover of the Second Amendment. He suggested the Second Amendment should be eliminated. Thankfully, it isn’t as easy as he might wish it to be to overturn the wisdom of our founders.