In Seal Beach, California, a shooter took eight lives by a marauding sweep of a hair salon. The cry for gun control is now surfacing, this time being written, as I see, by contributors who seem to be middle-of-the road gun owners or second amendment mavens… but who seem to be ‘rethinking’ their views.

I doubt these, and their remarks are another chance for us to educate the electorate on the subject of role the armed citizen.

In summary, many of the op-ed pieces appearing after the Seal Beach Murders seem to be even-handed, but there is one tell which divulges that the contributor is probably not a gun owner. Yes, we have our critics within the liberty movement but on principle, which is within every armed citizen, we do not differ. A gun owner would likely know this. Yes, gun owners may differ on many things, but not on core principle.

At the core of suspicion is the concept that regulation or even a gun ban would have helped. No honest gun owner would believe this because they understand deeply how they are the only one they can count on in time of violence. The entire purpose of carrying a gun is – as we often say  – because a cop is too heavy.

Think of the death of Michael Jackson and the trial of his physician Conrad Murray: do you believe that regulation of all doctors would ever prevent this or remedy this case? As they gleefully said in Indiana Jones, “They’re looking in the wrong place!”

And this is one of the problems of the left, is it not: the practice of doing everything but the most effective thing. For all the handwringing, officials are looking for community safety in all the wrong places.

Criticism of guns following shootings such as the Seal Beach Murders will never stop violence, and a gun owner knows this, or h/she wouldn’t own a gun. Law does not stop killings, because law responds after the fact as in defining a crime and provision for penalty. This crime was not due to guns, but a combination of factors as so-called ‘new information’ emerges. The more we learn about the shooter’s environment, the more we conclude that no regulation would have stopped these murders. Please name one law which would have prevented this shooter from killing eight people. Just one.

Now look at how many laws were broken. Start with Murder. Every single crime of violence is an impeachment and humiliation of gun control.

Let me spell this out: if an armed citizen were present, chances are he or she may have stopped the shooter in his tracks.

[The armed citizen's immediacy, lawful authority and lethal force are what make the difference. Instances are well documented by the millions (2.5 million) each year, the only opposing anti-gun content being mocking and emotional carping.

Many times, I have said that your two hands can save a life, because your two hands holding your handgun and your two hands which can do CPR can make all the difference between death and survival of innocents.]

The solution to these is not to look in all the wrong places, such as gun control, because there is no such thing as controlling guns; it is a lack of self-control which murders people, not the availability of guns. Murder is in the mentality of anger or pathology which can easily outwit and overcome any gun law in order to obtain weapons and shoot people to death. As gun owners say, murder is already illegal irrespective of the weapon. You won’t prevent murders by adding lesser charges.

The goal is not to try and prevent them by law, but to stop them by force. Immediacy and force. The improved odds that a shooter will encounter an armed citizen can be as effective at preventing premature death as one out of ten citizens trained in CPR.

Thirty years ago, we used to say, “If only someone knew CPR.” We never said, “If only the paramedics were here…” We said ‘someone’.  Your two hands can save a life because you are there, not because of who you are. You don’t have to be a medical person to save a life, and you don’t have to be a policeman to save a life. Or eight of them. Or thirty-two of them.

It’s time to look in the right places and to stop governing by crisis in every corner of this country. We need to see our officials presiding over prosperity after the 2012 election and not crisis as a never-ending mandate for them somehow. We need to see less gun control and more nationwide acceptance of the armed citizen as the norm it is in forty-eight states. How 2012 candidates feel about the armed citizen will be a reliable indicator of how they feel about who is the Sovereign in this country, and that is how we want to live in this country; as the Sovereign, with more independence from our servants and less of their independence of the electorate.

With civil disturbance looming on the horizon and with shortages of all sorts, it is a distinct possibility that mobs can easily spill over into home invasions. For many of these individuals, the disturbance itself is cover. That violence mentality will be amok, and not with guns, but with bare hands, sticks, vehicles and arson.

Crime is fought best at the scene of the crime. Gun control only assists crisis and chaos, and it must be removed as an obstacle to self-governance.

The cost of freedom and safety is more than fair, it is quite a bargain. The price of gun control for safety is far, far too high; it makes for bigger government and dependency on it to the exclusion of all alternatives.

Meanwhile, many of us are working for smaller government as our best path back to safer streets. Safer streets are evidence of a healthier self-rule. We won’t find our way back to smaller government and self-rule without the repeal of gun control first.

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Carrying a gun protects people from criminals, but carrying an audio recorder can also pretty important. The Phildelphia Daily News yesterday showed just how valuable a tape recorder can be. Some police in Philadelphia apparently didn’t know what Pennsylvania and Philadelphia laws are on law-abiding citizens carrying handguns. Given that there are about 800,000 concealed handgun permit holders in Pennsylvania, there could be a lot of misunderstandings.

Police are extremely important in stopping crime, but even they can make mistakes. Hopefully because this incident was taped there will be a few less mistakes in how Philadelphia police treat permit holders in the future.

On a mild February afternoon, Fiorino, 25, decided to walk to an AutoZone on Frankford Avenue in Northeast Philly with the .40-caliber Glock he legally owns holstered in plain view on his left hip. His stroll ended when someone called out from behind: “Yo, Junior, what are you doing?”
Fiorino wheeled and saw Sgt. Michael Dougherty aiming a handgun at him.
What happened next would be hard to believe, except that Fiorino audio-recorded all of it: a tense, profanity-laced, 40-minute encounter with cops who told him that what he was doing – openly carrying a gun on the city’s streets – was against the law.
“Do you know you can’t openly carry here in Philadelphia?” Dougherty asked, according to the YouTube clip.
“Yes, you can, if you have a license to carry firearms,” Fiorino said. “It’s Directive 137. It’s your own internal directive.”

Unfortunately, referencing the actual law correctly didn’t have the desired effect on the police.

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People walking the streets armed with guns must be dangerous, right? The Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center keep claiming that even those individuals who have legally obtained permits to carry concealed handguns are extremely dangerous. With millions of Americans already having been issued such permits from the various states, this is an important issue.

The gun control organizations have frequently made these claims in the press. The Associated Press articles by Erik Schelzig and by Jim Abrams have given extensive, uncritical coverage. Members of the gun control organizations have made these claims unchallenged on such places as Fox News and on the Huffington Post. But the gun control advocates inaccurately describe many shooting cases, choosing to ignore that the majority of incidents involve people properly defending themselves.

Over the past three years, the number of active permit holders in the United States has gone from about 5 million to more than 6.2 million today. The numbers issued by the state regulatory agencies show time after time that these permit holders abide by the law.

Take Florida, which currently has the most concealed handgun permit holders in the country and is one of the two most populous states with right-to-carry laws. Between Oct. 1, 1987, and May 31 this year, permits had been issued to 1.8 million people. On average, the permits had been held for quite a long time, well over 10 years. For all those individuals across the more than 22 years of legal carry, there were only 167 cases where the permit was revoked for a firearms related violation, or about 0.01 percent of permit holders. While the state doesn’t provide a precise breakdown of the reason for those revocations, the vast majority were apparently for people who accidentally carried their concealed handgun into a gun-free zone, such as an airport or school.

Throughout the past 30 months, beginning January 2008, only three additional permit holders have had their permit revoked for a firearms-related violation. With more than 739,000 active permit holders, that is an annual revocation rate of 0.00017 percent.

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