You don't need a gun, friend citizen.

A large part of the anti-gun strategy is trying to paint the ownership and carrying of guns as paranoid, delusional, and ever-obsessed with violence. Self defense is all well and good, sure, but you should only improvise with what you have on hand, never prepare. It's the same phenomenon as the asshole who believes people should practice safe sex, sure, but still calls a woman a slut for carrying condoms.

Part of this is just prudence: there's no good case for gun control based on the facts, so a good ad-hominem is one of the only options open. But I think a lot of these people are really just projecting their own issues onto people they'd rather see as caricatures. Recently, a gun blogger posted about an armed push-in robbery on Halloween, discussing the prudence of keeping your gun handy at home. A couple of us commented about our decisions to keep guns handy that night, and one of the usual anti-gun suspects responded thus:

I find it an abomination of American values to imagine Elmo and Weer'd and I guess yourself opening the door to trick-or-treaters armed like that. It's sick and paranoid and if it only affected you I wouldn't mind. But you guys are part of the problem, and that problem affects many of us.

Let's sum up.

The probability of a push-in assault, on Halloween or not, is extremely low. The consequences of such an assault are quite high. I already own a gun and a holster for it. It costs me zero dollars and two minutes to holster the gun and pull an overshirt over it. And spending those two minutes to take one small precaution against a low-probability/high-consequence emergency before settling in to watch crappy movies and hand out Reese's peanut butter cups to kids in Spongebob costumes? That's "an abomination", "sick and paranoid", and such a terrible danger to others that I should be ashamed of myself.

Either Mike is just trying to fill space in his blog and solicit backpats from his fellow anti-gun obsessives, or he really does think that having a gun secured on my body (as opposed to its usual home by the bedside) is an enormous, toweringly significant corrosive presence that justifies all that hyperbole.

Me, I don't freight the gun with all that angst. My little .380 makes pocket carry so unbelievably easy that carrying is essentially a zero-effort proposition. The probability of a violent encounter in an average day is vanishingly small, but the cost in effort of preparing for it is nonexistent, so preparedness wins that equation.

Unless you bring your own fetishistic freight of the gun as a MACHINE OF MURDER to the table, carrying a firearm for self defense in a safe neighborhood is exactly as paranoid as putting on your seatbelt to move the car across a parking lot. Sure, the chances of a lifethreatening accident are almost nonexistent, but why take the chance when a bit of insurance is so cheap?