Reformed Baptist theologian Wayne Grudem speaks on the Bible and the right of self-defense.
About Wayne Grudem:
Grudem holds a BA from Harvard University, a Master of Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. In 2001, Grudem became Research Professor of Bible and Theology at Phoenix Seminary. Prior to that, he had taught for 20 years at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he was chairman of the department of Biblical and Systematic Theology.
Grudem served on the committee overseeing the English Standard Version translation of the Bible, and in 1999 he was the president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He is a co-founder and past president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. He is the author of, among other books, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, which advocates a Calvinistic soteriology, the verbal plenary inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, the body-soul dichotomy in the nature of man, and the complementarian (rather than egalitarian) view of gender equality.
I found a splendid at the Daily Signal article that ought to be read by everyone who has an opinion about the conflict between gun confiscation vs self-defense.
Here are the 8 points made in the article, then I’ll comment on my favorite one:
Violent crime is down and has been on the decline for decades.
The principal public safety concerns with respect to guns are suicides and illegally owned handguns, not mass shootings.
A small number of factors significantly increase the likelihood that a person will be a victim of a gun-related homicide.
Gun-related murders are carried out by a predictable pool of people.
Higher rates of gun ownership are not associated with higher rates of violent crime.
There is no clear relationship between strict gun control legislation and homicide or violent crime rates.
Legally owned firearms are used for lawful purposes much more often than they are used to commit crimes or suicide.
Concealed carry permit holders are not the problem, but they may be part of the solution.
Whenever we discuss gun violence, it’s very important to exclude suicides using a gun from the overall rate of gun deaths. Once you do that, you will find that the rate of violent crime has been declining as more and more law-abiding Americans have gone through the process to purchase a firearm for self-defense.
Let’s talk about the gun homicide rate and how the steady increase in firearm ownership has affected that. When you look at the graph below, keep in mind that two thirds of the homicide are suicides committed with a firearm.
Here is a graph:
Gun ownership up, gun violence down
The question I want to address is this: why would someone want to own a gun in the first place?
Here are the points from the list of eight points that are relevant to that question:
Higher rates of gun ownership are not associated with higher rates of violent crime.
Switzerland and Israel have much higher gun ownership rates than the United States but experience far fewer homicides and have much lower violent crime rates than many European nations with strict gun control laws.
Higher rates of concealed carry permit holders are even more strongly associated with reduction in violent crime than are “right-to-carry” states. The probable reason for this is that “right-to-carry” studies often include “open carry” states, which have not been shown to correlate with more people actually carrying or even owning firearms. Rates of concealed carry permit holders are better indicators of the number of people who actually possess and carry firearms within a given population.
There is no clear relationship between strict gun control legislation and homicide or violent crime rates.
Homicide and firearm homicide rates in Great Britain spiked in the years immediately following the imposition of severe gun control measures, despite the fact that most developed countries continued to experience a downward trend in these rates. This is also pointed out by noted criminologist John Lott in his book “The War on Guns.”
Similarly, Ireland’s homicide rates spiked in the years immediately following the country’s 1972 gun confiscation legislation.
Australia’s National Firearms Act appears to have had little effect on suicide and homicide rates, which were falling before the law was enacted and continued to decline at a statistically unremarkable rate compared to worldwide trends.
According to research compiled by John Lott and highlighted in his book “The War on Guns,” Australia’s armed and unarmed robbery rates both increased markedly in the five years immediately following the National Firearms Act, despite the general downward trend experienced by other developed countries.
Great Britain has some of the strictest gun control laws in the developed world, but the violent crime rate for homicide, rape, burglary, and aggravated assault is much higher than that in the U.S. Further, approximately 60 percent of burglaries in Great Britain occur while residents are home, compared to just 13 percent in the U.S., and British burglars admit to targeting occupied residences because they are more likely to find wallets and purses.
It is difficult to compare homicide and firearm-related murder rates across international borders because countries use different methods to determine which deaths “count” for purposes of violent crime. For example, since 1967, Great Britain has excluded from its homicide counts any case that does not result in a conviction, that was the result of dangerous driving, or in which the person was determined to have acted in self-defense. All of these factors are counted as “homicides” in the United States.
Legally owned firearms are used for lawful purposes much more often than they are used to commit crimes or suicide.
In 2013, President Barack Obama ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to assess existing research on gun violence. The report, compiled by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, found (among other things) that firearms are used defensively hundreds of thousands of times every year.
According to the CDC, “self-defense can be an important crime deterrent.” Recent CDC reports acknowledge that studies directly assessing the effect of actual defensive uses of guns have found “consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”
Semi-automatic rifles (such as the AR-15) are commonly used as self-defense weapons in the homes of law-abiding citizens because they are easier to control than handguns, are more versatile than handguns, and offer the advantage of up to 30 rounds of protection. Even Vox has published stories defending the use of the AR-15.
AR-15s have been used to save lives on many occasions [list omitted by WK]
Concealed carry permit holders are not the problem, but they may be part of the solution.
Noted criminologist John Lott found that, as a group, concealed carry permit holders are some of the most law-abiding people in the United States. The rate at which they commit crimes generally and firearm crimes specifically is between one-sixth and one-tenth of that recorded for police officers, who are themselves committing crimes at a fraction of the rate of the general population.
Between 2007 and 2015, murder rates dropped 16 percent and violent crime rates dropped 18 percent, even though the percentage of adults with concealed carry permits rose by 190 percent.
Regression estimates show a significant association between increased permit ownership and a drop in murder and violent crime rates. Each percentage point increase in rates of permit-holding is associated with a roughly 2.5 percent drop in the murder rate.
Concealed carry permit holders are often “the good guy with a gun,” even though they rarely receive the attention of the national media. Concealed carry permit holders were credited with saving multiple lives [list omitted by WK]
So, I think that those points provide a very necessary balance for the “ban guns” crowd. Gun ownership is a vital part of a free citizen’s right to self-defense. People who want to discuss gun confiscation vs self-defense need to be aware of the way guns are really used by law-abiding people to protect themselves and their families.
I often struggle to explain to my Canadian and British friends what the second amendment is, and why Americans insist on being able to legally own firearms. I normally make the argument from academic studies to show that banning guns leads to more violent crime, while concealed carry laws reduce violent crime. But sometimes, it’s nice to illustrate the statistics with a case study.
MSN.com reports on a story of an attempted mass-shooting that occurred on the weekend at a church:
A gunman has killed one person and critically injured another inside a packed Texas church during a livestreamed service before he was shot dead by an armed member of the congregation.
[…]Video of the livestream shows a person wearing a large coat, with the hood covering his head, standing up and walking over toward another man at the back of the room.
The shooter appears to say something to the man, prompting him to point in a direction at the back of the church.
In a matter of seconds, the shooter whips out what appears to be a shotgun and fires two rounds.
One of the shots hits a man who stood up in the back of the church and the other shot hits the man the victim had spoken too.
After the second shot was fired, the gunman attempted to flee the scene before he was shot by an armed member of the congregation.
[…]According to one member of the church, the victim had spoken to one of the deacons in the back of the church before he opened fire.
The member wrote on Facebook that another deacon ‘who is a concealed carry instruction, and retired law enforcement officer, shot the guy before he could fire a third time!’
That deacon has not been identified but according to CBS 11, he is actually a former FBI agent and part of the church’s security.
Here’s some video coverage from the far-left CBS News:
Here is what Joe Biden, leading Democrat presidential candidate, has to offer the Christians in that church:
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden attacked Texas Governor Greg Abbott earlier this year for signing a bill into law that allowed lawful gun owners to carry firearms in places of worship, repeatedly calling Abbott’s decision “irrational.”
[…]“Dealing with firearms, it is irrational, with all due respect to the governor of Texas, irrational what they are doing,” Biden told reporters on September 2. “On the very day you see a mass shooting … and we’re talking about loosening access to have guns, to be able to take them into places of worship, it’s just absolutely irrational. It’s totally irrational.”
[…]Biden continued, saying that any weapon that was capable of carrying “magazines that can hold multiple bullets” should be banned – which is nearly all firearms.
[…]Later asked if there could be any compromises with Republicans on the issue, Biden responded, “None. None on this. I think this is no compromise. This is one we have to just push, and push, and push, and push, and push.”
Biden has armed security everywhere he goes. He just doesn’t want you to have armed security.
Just picture in your mind what would have happened in that church if Joe Biden had prevented law-abiding church members from carrying weapons to defend themselves. That is the goal of every Democrat – they want to disarm law-abiding people, and leave them at the mercy of criminals who don’t obey gun laws.
I want to link to this column from famous black economist Thomas Sowell to help people understand how frequently law-abiding Americans use legally-owned firearms to prevent crimes.
He writes:
We all know that guns can cost lives because the media repeat this message endlessly, as if we could not figure it out for ourselves. But even someone who reads newspapers regularly and watches numerous television newscasts may never learn that guns also save lives — much less see any hard facts comparing how many lives are lost and how many are saved.
But that trade-off is the real issue — not the Second Amendment or the National Rifle Association, which so many in the media obsess about. If guns cost more lives than they save, we can always repeal the Second Amendment. But if guns save more lives than they cost, we need to know that, instead of spending time demonizing the National Rifle Association.
The defensive use of guns is usually either not discussed at all in the media or else is depicted as if it means bullets flying in all directions, like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. But most defensive uses of guns do not involve actually pulling the trigger.
If someone comes at you with a knife and you point a gun at him, he is very unlikely to keep coming and far more likely to head in the other direction, perhaps in some haste, if he has a brain in his head. Only if he is an idiot are you likely to have to pull the trigger — and if an idiot with a knife is coming after you, you had better have a trigger to pull.
Surveys of American gun owners have found that 4 to 6 percent reported using a gun in self-defense within the previous five years. That is not a very high percentage but, in a country with 300 million people, that works out to hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns per year.
Yet we almost never hear about these hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns from the media, which will report the killing of a dozen people endlessly around the clock. The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.
Although most defensive uses of guns do not involve actually shooting, nevertheless, the total number of criminals killed by armed private citizens runs into the thousands per year.
Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic studies by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.
The book by economist John Lott 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. Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study found that after the UK banned guns, violent crime rates doubled in four years.
WINTERY KNIGHT 