Date: Sun, 7 Apr 1996 16:14:33 -0400
Reply-To: [E--rS--r] at [aol.com]
From: [E--rS--r] at [aol.com]
Subject: op-ed: Concealed Guns Can Save Innocent Lives

Concealed guns can save innocent lives

By Edgar A. Suter
from the San Ramon Valley Times, Wednesday, April 3, 1996, page 17a

One rainy night a year ago I left one of my favorite San Francisco
restaurants then noticed a shoe untied. While kneeling down before I could
tie my shoe, three gangbangers stepped from the shadows to surround me and
pin me against a brick wall. They demanded money.

I retreated as far as I could, but they kept coming until I reached for my
holstered pistol. My body language was so unambiguous that all three beefy
hoodlums fled before I could even draw my high-capacity, semi-automatic
pistol.

Unharmed, I filed no police report, visited no emergency room, and didn't
make the late news. Instead I went home and kissed and hugged my little boy,
Jared. That night I thanked God that I was one of those lucky Californians
licensed to carry a handgun for personal protection.

A year later, Jared still has a daddy who hugs him, loves him, cooks him
dinner, and plays ball with him-and so it goes for almost all of the 2.5
million mothers and fathers and others who use guns annually to protect
themselves and their families.

In over 98 percent of those protective uses, like mine, the gun isn't even
fired. In only 1-in-a-thousand protective uses is the criminal killed. This
is why the "43 times as likely to kill the homeowner" sound bite is so
deceptive-homeowners scare attackers away a thousand times more often [than]
they kill them. One of my friends, Dr. Suzanna Gratia-Hupp, wasn't so lucky.
In 1991 Texas law did not allow her to carry her pistol. So it was useless in
her car, when George Henard methodically murdered Suzanna's mother and father
right in front of her and along with 20 other people. The prohibition against
carrying a concealed weapon stopped Suzanna from carrying her protection, but
it didn't stop George Henard

California's prohibition against carrying concealed weapons has not stopped
gang bangers and predators from carrying guns, but the prohibition has kept
good people from having the safest and most effective means of protection-a
gun-at their disposal when they are vulnerable outside their homes.

For almost a decade, state after state has taken note that there are 2.5
million lives protected annually in America by guns. There has beena tidal
wave of progressive reform of concealed weapon licensing law.

These laws have eliminated the abuse of local law enforcement discretion
that, like California, typically ensures that only white, affluent,
politically connected men have the "privilege" of protecting themselves.

[Hovering for over a decade,] the anti-self-defense vultures think that they
might have found their victim anecdote in Texas, but for effect, they leave
out the important details. After a minor fenderbender, a beefy laborer ran a
slender older man off the road and began punching him repeatedly in the face.

The older man used his legally licensed pistol to shoot and kill his
attacker. We weep no tears for a brute that was trying to beat a man to
death, but the late bully has become a poster-boy for the anti-self-defense
lobby.

Since 1987 Florida, in the vanguard of reform, has issued a third of a
million licenses and revoked a few dozen, almost none associated with injury.
Licensees have a far lower rate of crime than the general populace. The
licensing procedures in Florida, like those proposed for California in AB638,
are so effective that we believe that a person is more likely to be
feloniously shot by a police officer than by a concealed weapon licensee.
Florida's homicide rate was 36 percent above the national average before
reform and fell after reform, remaining below the national average to this
day.

Whether good citizens in the 22 states that allowed good citizens to readily
carry guns for protection carried their guns in their cars, on the street, in
churches, in bars, or courthouses, homicide, assault, and overall violent
crimes were each 40 percent lower, armed robbery was 50 percent lower, rape
was 30 percent lower, and property crimes were 10 percent lower. You, your
family, and your neighbors are not the incompetent hotheads that the
anti-self-defense lobby pretends and, when the police can't be there, we want
you to have the safest and most effective means of protection against the
vicious predators-a gun like the one that save[d] me.

Suter is national chairman of Doctors for Integrity in Research & Public
Policy a non-profit national physicians think tank. He practices medicine in
Danville.