I’m not originally from the United States, and when I go back home to visit, one of the questions that I get asked a lot is “why do Americans own so many guns?” So in this post, I wanted to look at some stories from the United States about crime and gun violence and see why so many Americans own guns.

My favorite writer on these issues is Amy Swearer, who writes for the Daily Signal. I find that her articles are useful for explaining to people who don’t own guns, or want to ban guns, why it might be a good idea to own a gun, and to know how to use it.

The first article to see is a review of 14 examples of defensive gun use from December 2021.

She writes:

As 2022 begins, cities across the nation are experiencing unprecedented spikes in serious, violent crimes. Meanwhile, many public officials continue to push overly lenient and nonsensical prosecution policies that further endanger the public and embolden criminals.

Americans are becoming increasingly aware of just how important the right to keep and bear arms can be, especially when the government cannot be counted upon to protect them from violent threats.

Almost every major study on the issue has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually, according to a 2013 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

She has 14 examples in the article, and here are a few of them:

Dec. 12, Fairfax, Virginia: Police said a burglar armed with a knife entered a home through an unlocked door and refused to leave after residents confronted him. When the burglar lunged toward one resident with the knife, the resident—armed with a gun—fired a warning shot into the floor. The resident then held the burglar at gunpoint until police arrived.

Dec. 15, Lakeland, Florida: A homeowner shot an intruder who used a flowerpot to smash through a glass door. Police arrested the intruder, who had an extensive criminal history including 14 felony convictions. The homeowner “did exactly what he had a right to do,” Sheriff Grady Judd said in a press release. “I commend him for protecting himself and defending his home.”

Dec. 18, Cairo, Georgia: An elderly woman, awakened by noise in the middle of the night, confronted several armed intruders who had broken in. At least one intruder opened fire and wounded the woman, but she shot back with her own gun, prompting the intruders to flee. Police later arrested seven suspects in the home invasion, including five under age 16.

Dec. 22, Abbottstown, Pennsylvania: A disturbed man wearing nothing but a shirt broke into an elderly couple’s home and violently assaulted them, police said. The woman’s husband was able to grab a handgun from the bedroom and fatally shot the attacker as he beat her. The husband and wife suffered serious injuries, but were expected to recover.

Like Amy says, if you live in a blue state, or even in a blue city in a red state, then you can’t count on law enforcement to protect you. They are too busy being politically correct, or trampling unarmed peaceful protesters with horses. You have to be able to defend yourself, and your loved ones.

And here are some more from January 2022:

Just one month into 2022, it became clear that the new year hasn’t brought relief from the unprecedented spikes in violent crime in many cities since the summer of 2020.

Take Philadelphia, for example. With 140 carjackings reported through the first five weeks of 2022, the city is well on pace to surpass last year’s total of 757 carjackings.

Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, experienced more homicides and shootings in January 2022 than in January 2021—doubly concerning, since 2021 was by far the most violent year in Portland’s history.

And here are a few of the stories:

Jan. 13, Philadelphia: After a good Samaritan intervened to help a woman who was being harassed on a commuter train, police said, the harasser followed him off the train and attacked him with a knife. However, the good Samaritan had a concealed carry permit and happened to be armed that day. He shot and wounded his assailant.

Jan. 27, Fort Worth, Texas: An armed carjacker opened fire on a driver, wounding him. But the driver was able to draw his own gun and shoot back, potentially saving his life and sending the carjacker fleeing. The  car was recovered a short time later after the carjacker, wounded and in serious condition, stopped to ask for help.

The  one about the Good Samaritan was interesting. One of the reasons why armed men are inclined to help women is because they know that if anything happens, they have a weapon to fight back with. So many young, unmarried women voters want to disarm law-abiding men. But do they realize that if they do that, then only the criminals will have weapons? Do these progressive women think that unarmed men are going to stand up for them against threats?

The peer-reviewed research

Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic books by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.

• The Lott book was published by the University of Chicago Press (now in its 3rd edition)
• The Malcolm book was published by Harvard University Press

The book by economist John Lott, linked above, compares the crime rates of all U.S. states that have enacted concealed carry laws, and concludes that violent crime rates dropped after law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry legally-owned firearms. That’s the mirror image of Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study, which shows that the 1997 UK gun ban caused violent crime rates to MORE THAN DOUBLE in the four years following the ban. But both studies affirm the same conclusion – more legal firearm ownership means less crime.

One of the common mistakes I see anti-gun advocates making is to use the metric of all “gun-related deaths”. First of all, this completely ignores the effects of hand gun ownership on violent crime, as we’ve seen. Take away the guns from law-abiding people and violent crime skyrockets. But using the “gun-related deaths” number is especially wrong, because it includes suicides committed with guns. This is the majority (about two thirds) of gun related deaths, even in a country like America that has a massive inner-city gun violence problem caused by the epidemic of single motherhood by choice. If you take out the gun-related SUICIDES, then the actual number of gun homicides has decreased as gun ownership has grown.

For a couple of useful graphs related to this point, check out this post over at the American Enterprise Institute.

I’m seeing a lot of people on the secular left posting Ukraine flags on social media and “feeling sad” about getting the exact result that they voted for. How does Putin have the money for this invasion? He’s been selling oil and gas to Canada, the United States, and especially to Europe. Those countries curtailed their own energy production in response to global warming activists.

This Twitter thread featuring nuclear-advocate Michael Schellenberger explains:

After Russia invaded, a few people demanded that Europe stop buying its natural gas, but European utilities snatched up long-term Russian contracts, and the White House said, “Our sanctions are not designed to cause any disruption to the flow of energy from Russia to the world.”

People who believe that nothing could have been done to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine thus imply that Russia’s chokehold over European energy supplies was inevitable, but it wasn’t. Europe could have easily increased, rather than closed, nuclear plants and natural gas.

Britain, too:

Britain could have increased fracking for natural gas but didn’t. Why? Because Russia pumped $95M into anti-fracking advocacy. Noted the head of NATO, Russia “engaged actively with environmental organizations… to maintain Europe’s dependence on Russian gas”.

Russia was paying global warming alarmists to attack natural gas (fracking) and nuclear power? Yes! That’s how he was able to get the money for his invasion of Ukraine. Western democracies paid him to do it, rather than develop our own energy sources. That’s what the global warming alarmists insisted on.

Do you remember how our mainstream news media made such a big deal out of this no-credential angry child “Greta Thunberg”? Well, she had a huge impact helping Russia to get its army funded:

Europe could have kept operating and expanded its nuclear power plants but instead, under pressure from climate activists, including Greta Thunberg, shut them down.

Climate activists even forced nuclear-heavy France to throttle its nuclear plants so order to use more industrial wind energy. The result was significant outages over the last few weeks at a time when French nuclear plants were needed most.

The big banks joined up with global warming activists and left-wing politicians:

Efforts to make Europe less energy independent, and thus more dependent on Russian gas imports, were led by powerful banking interests in coordination with climate activists and center-Left parties around the world.

So we are now seeing increased prices at the pump because oil and gas are scarce. Who will pay for this? You will. You will pay at the pump, and you will pay through your utility bill:

Biden and Democrats would like to see the whole of the US follow the California model

California saw electricity prices rise 7x more than the rest of the US over the last decade, is experiencing blackouts, and intends to shut down its last nuclear plant.

And the Biden administration hasn’t learned a thing. They are doubling down on shutting down pipelines and denying drilling permits. MSN reported this last week:

The Biden administration has once again put a pause on new leases and permits for federal oil and gas drilling after a judge blocked the administration from using a metric that estimates the societal cost of carbon emissions.

Earlier this month, US District Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana issued an injunction preventing the Biden administration from using what’s known as the “social cost of carbon” in decisions around oil and gas drilling on public land, or in rules governing fossil fuel emissions. The ruling has consequences for a range of Biden administration actions on climate change, but especially on the Interior Department’s federal oil and gas leasing program.

Democrat voters are fine with this – they voted for it, even after Trump lowered gas prices and made us energy independent. We’ll see if they’ve learned anything in the November 2022 mid-terms.

I just want everyone to understand what is really going on when you see all these left-wing global warming alarmists suddenly concerned and sad about Ukraine. You can’t have it both ways. If you vote to restrict natural gas (fracking) and nuclear power at home, then you are necessarily voting for more money for Russia – and Russia’s powerful armed forces. Canada wants to fund Russia. The European Union wants to fund Russia. And America wants to fund Russia. These weak Western countries don’t want to develop their own energy at home. They want to pay Russia to develop their energy. And now we know the price of their naivete.

A while back, I blogged about a case in Canada, where a father was imprisoned for objecting to the forced transgendering of his child by the schools, hospitals, lawyers and judges. The people pushing for the transgendering were all feminists and LGBT activists. That case was quite disturbing, and I was wondering when this would come to America. Then I found an article by Abigail Shrier in City Journal.

The father, Ted, is a senior software engineer with Apple. He is comfortable living in San Francisco. His wife Christine is an executive at BlackRock, the firm that is always buying up people’s houses and then renting them out. They also champion ESG, which is a social credit system for businesses, that leads to socialism.

Things started to go wrong for Ted when his wife moved to the East coast with the two boys for family reasons:

Ted was then fully preoccupied with a grueling six-week project for Apple… On a Saturday in August 2019, shortly after returning from upstate New York with the boys, Christine walked into Ted’s home office and announced both that she was leaving and that their son Drew was transgender… Christine walked out, taking the kids to stay with her at a neighbor’s house.

Most women who go along with transgendering do so because they want their children to like them, and they want to be seen as compassionate and tolerant by their peers.

But the father did research on the risks to his child:

While trying to keep an open mind about Drew’s gender, Ted was adamant to the judge that he did not want Drew to begin medical transition. In the 312 days since he had last seen his boy, Ted had done a lot of research on medical transition and gender dysphoria. He begged the court to consider research that suggested puberty blockers could impair cognition and diminish bone density. He knew that Drew, if administered puberty blockers along with estrogen, would be at high risk of permanent infertility. He wasn’t even sure that his son had gender dysphoria. He wanted to see his son—and he wanted this bullet train to slow down.

The San Francisco judge awarded full custody of Drew to his wife:

On June 24, 2020… Judge Joni Hiramoto granted Christine sole legal custody of Drew on a temporary basis and approved the shared legal and physical custody arrangement of their younger son. She assured Ted that her order was not yet permanent. Judge Hiramoto had decided to order the appointment of a minor’s counsel to investigate how the boys were faring before making any permanent decisions. She already had the perfect person in mind. “I actually know of one who was previously appointed by the court, by a different judge, on a case involving children that were allegedly transgender,” she said. That minor’s counsel was attorney Daniel Harkins.

Harkins decided that Ted’s hesitance to drug therapy and sex change surgery was a sign that Ted was not a fit parent:

Based on the lengthy minor’s counsel report, Harkins gave Ted’s parenting a failing grade: “Father has not been accepting of [Drew’s] status as transgender. He has been quite clear that he does not accept that [Drew] is in fact transgender.”

[…]Harkins’s judgment was swift and ironclad: mom should retain full legal custody on a permanent basis and provide Ted updates, at her discretion, regarding matters that affect Drew’s health, education, and welfare. Drew would commence hormone therapy, as directed by USCF. Judge Hiramoto made all this official. The only right that Ted seems to have retained is the power to prevent Drew from undergoing “any gender identity related surgery” before he turns 18, absent agreement of both parties.

Without Ted’s knowledge or permission, Drew got a puberty-blocking implant, and Ted had to pay:

In October 2021, Ted was stunned by a $209,820.34 charge on his insurance statement. When he wrote to Christine, she confirmed that a puberty-blocking implant had been inserted in Drew’s arm months earlier and that Drew had begun a course of cross-sex hormones. The combination—if not soon stopped—would likely sterilize Drew. No one had asked Ted’s permission for the procedure or even informed Ted of what had been done.

This part is interesting, especially for men who are considering marriage and having children today.

Read it carefully:

Ted responded to this news with a flurry of e-mails to Christine’s attorney. He told Christine’s lawyer that the medical procedure was in violation of a court order, and Christine was risking being held in contempt of court. A day later, Christine’s lawyer filed a request for a Domestic Violence Restraining Order against Ted, alleging that he had spoken to his ex-wife “menacingly” at their younger son’s football games. Ted was served with the temporary restraining order; California law now required him to relinquish all his firearms within 24 hours or potentially face felony charges. He quickly complied.

Ted was informed about the long-term consequences of the decision, because he had looked at evidence. But how did his ex-wife respond to his evidence? By charging him with domestic violence. Not actual violence, but just words of disagreement which caused her to feel unhappy.

Ted made the decision to let people at his Silicon Valley company know what was happening in a company Slack channel. Slack is software used to allow employees to communicate with each other in a chat format. People in the channel were offended, and reported him to Human Resources:

Ted joined the Apple Slack channel devoted to “trans kid parenting” and shared his outrage and concern about his son’s medical transition and the risks involved. The other members chastised him and reported Ted to “Employee Relations,” known everywhere else as “HR.” Ted now worries for his job.

The details of Ted’s divorce were not revealed in the article, but if he is supposed to pay child support and alimony to his wife, and he lost his job, he probably would still have come up with the same amount of money, or go to prison for not paying his debts. That’s how the divorce courts work.

And here is how the story ended for with Harkins:

Within just a few months, the court would definitively end Ted’s parental relationship. He would have no right to see Drew, no right to talk to him, no right to demand that Drew attend therapy with him, and absolutely no right to stop a medical transition already planned by the Child and Adolescent Gender Center of UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital.

And now I want to say something about what this means to me as a Christian man, who is frequently urged to go to church and get married and have children by church-attending women and pastors.

The denial of male headship

The overriding of male leadership of the home that you saw from the judge and the attorney is universal… even among conservative evangelical Christian women who claim to be social conservatives. One evangelical Christian social conservative woman told me that “Masculinity means that men use their strength to protect and provide for women”. Another one told me that male headship does not exist in the Bible, and that men have no authority in marriages – only responsibilities. She also said that when women divorce, it is ALWAYS the fault of their husbands for not meeting the wife’s emotional needs.

Even many evangelical Christian socially conservative women don’t think that men have a distinct role to confront evil, protect their children, or lead their homes. They would side with the divorcing wife and the female judge against the mean, excluding, judgmental, father Ted. They would say that men’s role in marriage is to be compassionate, tolerant, and to make their wives happy.

Marriage and child-bearing exposes you to the state

To Christian men who are considering marriage and child-raising, you need to choose women who form their views on morality, policy, etc. through reason and evidence. If she isn’t interested in truth, then understand that her views will be formed by her feelings and peer-approval. You will not be able to change her mind by appealing to reason and evidence. Look for women who have the demonstrated ability to defend their theological and moral views against the secular left culture. For example, the issue of male headship in marriage. Otherwise, you can expect the treatment that Ted got at the hands of his ex-wife, the judge, etc. Divorce is a nightmare for men. The feminist state will overpower you. You will lose your freedom, your savings and your children. You will become a slave.

Read 2 Tim 2:4 and consider whether you want to use your freedom and finances to serve God, or whether you want to be controlled by the secular left state. As a Christian man, you already have a Boss. A woman’s role is to help you serve your Boss. Beware of women who want to take the place of your Boss. Beware of women who think that marriage is about you making them happy. Beware of women who scorn your moral leadership. Beware of women who demand that you show compassion, tolerance and approval for whatever is popular in the secular left culture.