100th Post Special: 84,999,987 Legal Firearm Owners Killed NO ONE Yesterday

In less than three weeks since inception, this website has gotten thousands of hits, mostly in the United States, but visitors have also come from the UK, Germany, Ireland, Australia, Japan, and dozens of other countries. The US map is already covered in blue icons where responsible citizens have used handguns they were legally concealing, handguns in the home, M1 Carbines, and yes, even the infamous AR-15, to defend themselves, loved ones, and sometimes complete strangers from robberies, burglaries, rapes, stabbings, and murders. And, if you scroll out or click to view the map in Google Maps, you'll see red icons showing massacres that have occurred in countries with either very strict gun control or without the use of guns (more will be added later, but there are so many defensive handgun stories that I've been slow in cataloging others).

Admittedly, not every story is interesting. It's not every day that a man shoots his way out of a honey trap, shoots the naked guy choking his dog before charging him, or saves a woman from being murdered by a man wielding a knife like the two different events here and here. It's also true that not every story is so clear cut in that it is easy to tell that the actions of a responsible citizen with a gun definitely saved the lives of many people, as it was in the case of this supermarket stabbing spree, or this attempted church shooting, or this attempted church shooting. We can probably legitimately say that without a handgun, this woman and this woman would most assuredly have been raped.

Not that any of us wishes for justification to use a weapon, but when we have to or someone else does, these stories are certainly more interesting to read since they either have a small element of tongue in cheek humor to them (come on, tell me you don't think there's any humor at all in being awoken to a naked guy in your backyard trying to choke your dog), or it is easy to see that these actions legitimately saved lives.

But those stories are outside the norm. The vast majority of the posts that I write is nothing but a boring regurgitation of what amounts to be a non-event. Sometimes I wonder how I will ever attract a dedicated audience when a lot of the material is simply boring. But that's the point. Just like the headline states: Equalizing Unequals. When a criminal discovers that the unfair advantage over his victim that he thought he had, either in numbers, strength, size, or surprise, is suddenly equalized when his victim produces a handgun, the confrontation typically ends in uneventful fashion.

As for attracting a dedicated audience, feel free to bookmark and visit often, "like" the page on the floating buttons to your left, and follow me on twitter (@rationrebooted). Share the page with your friends, the gun lovers and gun grabbers alike (the gun grabbers in particular love it when you copy and paste links to actual events that they pretend never happen just to prove how wrong their premises are).

I genuinely want to help the country find a solution to violent crime and murder. Even though our violent crime rate is actually much lower than other "civilized" countries, despite what the gun grabbers try to claim, I don't think that necessarily permits us to be satisfied with the status quo. However, in order to affect REAL change, it is imperative to first DEFINE THE PROBLEM. In order to do this, you must ask yourself why. Oftentimes, you will ask yourself why after answering a question of why. This is what allows you to get to the root cause of the problem. One thing that is statistically clear is that guns themselves are not the answer to the question "Why?" I have my theories, but I would not pretend to have solved such a large problem by myself in such a short amount of time. We will never be able to have a rational discussion about the real causes of violence, however, until the majority of people succumb to reason, rather than emotion. Sharing the stories of the people who have been saved by a gun is one way of reducing the emotional significance people place on the stories of people who have been harmed by one.

Seeing is believing!

So in closing, remember that 84,999,987 legal gun owners did not kill anyone yesterday and a large number of non-gun owners received the benefit of protection through the deterrence of anyone who thought about committing a crime but didn't because of the uncertainty of facing an armed victim.