Editorial: New Gun Owners — You’re Not A Victim!

I’m a victim. You probably are, too, so let’s celebrate our victimhood together. Yay!

Or not. Mostly not.

I’ll warn you right out of the gate: this is a rant. It’s a tirade directed at society in general and our newer gun owners in particular. I’ve been carefully hand-polishing this opinion for a while, so let’s take her for a spin: We need to stop this modern collective insanity of the self-flagellating need to be victimized.

Worries

I felt compelled to share this opinion after someone recently sent me a long, haughty article from one of the major U.S. east-coast newspapers concerning new gun owners. The writer interviewed a group of people, including several who claimed to be “card-carrying liberals,” about why they purchased guns during the last few years. Without exception, all of the interviewees hit two points — first, the unexpected fun and satisfaction they discovered once they went to the range (great!), and secondly, the main reasons they bought a gun. You wanna guess what every one of them said? Victimization.

Curiously, they weren’t fearful of death and injury at the hands of “bad people.” Instead, every person named a group or movement who they said would “kill people like me” if given half a chance. If you take the story at face value, it appears there are countless armed gangs of folks roaming the countryside waiting to pounce on victims selected exclusively because of their race, sex, sexual orientation or whatever other demographic factor the victim industry chooses. Frankly, I’m not sure how we even find time to post cat videos on social media with all this victimizing going on.

As a retired cop, I wholly endorse a good, healthy fear of criminals because they have been a feature of everyday life since Cain whacked Able. Yet, if they mentioned it at all, these newer gun owners only mentioned crime as an obligatory afterthought. First and foremost, the various groups who “hated” them (the interviewees) completely drove their decision to pack a firearm. Of course, the story held the whole idea in mild contempt with a clear underlying message of “How sad — a liberal felt they needed a gun. It’s yet another sign of how the Orange Man and right-wingers have destroyed the world!”

I came away from the story shaking my head. Fear is a healthy thing which tends to keep you out of trouble if you pay heed. However, reading otherwise rational adults name some group they’ve never met as the main reason for their nightmares, I came away with one overwhelming conclusion — identity politics and fear-mongering have worked. The modern fear of “groups” has now become completely and totally engrained into our collective human psyche.

I mostly blame the Democrat party, but some right-wing politicians and media also follow this wonderous fear-based strategy to influence people and win followers. When you mix in our algorithm-driven online echo chambers, the whole thing takes us down a rabbit hole of irrationality.

I see it in my own children, who believe the world is one seething mass of mortal danger. I know we Boomers constantly joke about it, but their generation never experienced steel lawn darts, a total lack of child safety seats and medical doctors who smoked during your exam. The world today is overall safer, but no one seems to realize it.

What I saw in this latest article wasn’t “Be Prepared” but “Be Prepared because hate groups are standing behind right behind the hedgerow.”

Statistical Analysis

Let’s look at the data. First off, FBI crime data is always a little questionable overall and definitely on the bias side of things —and this opinion comes from the guy who had the “privilege” of tabulating and submitting my agency’s crime data to the feds for about 10 years.

Murder, aggravated assault and bias-driven vandalism is pretty cut and dried, but when you get into some other categories, such as “Forgery” or “Sports Tampering” (discrete bias categories in the FBI data), I fail to see how things like sexual orientation or ethnicity could be a primary causative factor, all those screaming “advocates” be damned. Maybe it is, but let’s just take a look at physical violence caused/based on victim identity because it numerically covers the majority of cases and is fairly straightforward in terms of documenting.

Rather than boring you with the details of how I arrived at the number, let’s agree there are about 18,000 violent bias crimes reported each year which could legally justify a deadly-force response from the victim. Based on our current population of 341 Million, this means you are running a 1 in 189,944 yearly risk of being a victim of violent bias crime. Meanwhile, the odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 161,831. This means you’re statistically more likely to get hit by a bolt from the blue than get attacked by a hate group, even if you are a raging jerk.

On the other hand, violent assaults by run-of-the-mill criminals run around 1.2 Million crimes reported per year, meaning you have a risk of 1 in 284 people being killed or injured at the ATM or local Stop-N-Rob.

It doesn’t seem like actual risk lines up with “the narrative” of folks who tell you these hate groups are running rampant. As an aside for the doubting Thomases, I arrived at these numbers using the same methodology Business Insider employs to determine odds of death in U.S. by gun violence in its widely-cited series of reports.

Granted, statistics don’t matter when you’re the one person who gets honest-to-goodness dead at the hands of a racially-motivated lynch mob, but I’m not sure collectively fearing all these alleged monsters is a very sound idea socially or psychologically. It certainly isn’t helpful strategically.

The new gun owners who believe they need to focus on rampaging conservatives, the KKK, the Trilateral Commission, The Orange Man, “Right Wing Media,” a wide variety of “-phobes” and “-ists,” The Methodist Church, Amway representatives — or, in my own fears, those despicable people hosting The View — are worrying about something which isn’t, statistically-speaking, a big problem.

You know what is? Crime. Boring, everyday crime.

I can’t help but wonder if some of this outlook is simply a result of our social-media-driven, “everyone gets a trophy”-world. It would seem many people have difficulty accepting the notion a random dirtbag with a random meth addiction might randomly wipe them out some terrible evening just to feed his habit. This whole idea just seems, so … yucky and sad and above all, ordinary. On the other hand, I suppose if you’re so special as to have a whole group of people you’ve never met who want to kill you, well, you are indeed an exceptional person. And we’re all exceptional, right?

Let’s Get Real

Once you’re aware of the facts regarding the actual physical danger to yourself, you can focus on what matters. Worry about the criminals living next door and not the hate group hiding in a bunker in Idaho or rampaging across Facebook. Once you put things into perspective, you’ll become less susceptible to hysteria and fear-mongering but more focused on the real threats to you and your loved ones.

Simply put — don’t waste your time and mental energy fretting over the American Nazi Party or Moms for Liberty (a hate group as defined by Southern Poverty Law Center). Instead, worry about Jim the Junkie and Percy the Psychopath. When you see danger where it really lies, you can better prepare for the possibilities. Then, on the one-in-a-bazillion chance the KKK does show up at your door with a noose, you’re ready.

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