GUNS-Do you wander around with a Glock on your hip, so you are prepared for the day when you’ll open fire on an armed assailant? Do you worry about how you will explain to your kids why you wander around with a Glock on your hip, so you are prepared for the day when you’ll open fire on an armed assailant?
Well, Brian Jeffs and Nathan Nephew, two advocates for openly carrying firearms from Michigan, have a solution for you! The two men have authored “My Parents Open Carry,” a book for children that tells the tale of a young girl and her family as they “turn an otherwise ordinary day into an open carry adventure!”
The book teaches children such lessons as “[o]pen carry can deter a crime, it’s a faster draw, and it’s more comfortable in the summer when we wear light clothing” and that “[t]here are several cases of robbers who staked out a store to rob only to go somewhere else because they saw someone with a gun in the store.” It also includes a glossary to help children understand key terms. The term “Easy Target” for example, it defined as “Someone that would be easy to rob. For example an elderly person, a woman, a person that is preoccupied or one that appears to be unarmed and wouldn’t cause much trouble during the crime.”
Despite the book’s message that “a woman” is easy to rob, the book is not shy about depicting men and women openly displaying firearms in businesses such as a local bookstore:
Although the fantasy of a gun owner halting a crime is common among conservative gun advocates — “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” in the words of National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre — the reality is very different.
For one thing, research shows that lax gun laws and increased gun violence are linked. According to a 2013 Center for American Progress report, “the 10 states with the weakest gun laws collectively have a level of gun violence that is more than twice as high—104 percent higher—than the 10 states with the strongest gun laws.”
One likely reason for this correlation is that most violence does not arise from the kind of confrontation between a criminal and an armed vigilante that fuels so many NRA fantasies. To the contrary, “[n]early half of all homicides, committed by men or women, were preceded by some sort of argument or fight, such as a conflict over money or property, anger over one partner cheating on another, severe punishment of a child or abuse of a partner, retaliation for an earlier dispute, or a drunken fight over an insult or other affront.”
Thus, when an argument arises between two people, the presence of a gun can allow that argument to escalate into a homicide.
(Ian Millhiser is a Senior Constitutional Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and the Editor of ThinkProgress … where this report was first posted.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 63
Pub: Aug 5, 2014
