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A Christian View of Crime and Self-Defense

Knight & Rose Show — Wintery Knight and Desert Rose
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A Christian View of Crime and Self-Defense

August 27, 2022
Knight & Rose Show
Knight & Rose ShowWintery Knight and Desert Rose

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss crime and self-defense. We're going to start by talking about why crime has become a more pressing problem lately. Then we'll talk about what role the police play in stopping crime. Then we'll talk about what the Bible says about self-defense. Finally, we'll talk about the real root cause of crime, and what Christians should do to address it.

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Show notes: https://winteryknight.com/2022/08/27/knight-and-rose-show-episode-20-a-christian-view-of-crime-and-self-defense

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Transcript

Welcome to the Knight and Rose Show, where we discuss practical ways of living out an authentic Christian worldview. Today’s topic is A Christian View of Crime and Self-Defense. I’m Wintery Knight and I’m Desert Rose.
Welcome, Rose. So in today’s episode, I want to talk
with you about what Christians should know about crime and self-defense. We’re going to start by talking about why crime has become a more pressing problem lately.
Then we’ll
talk about what role the police play in stopping crime. Then we’ll talk about what the Bible says about Christians owning weapons for self-defense. And finally, we’ll talk about the real root cause of crime and what Christians should do to address that.
Let’s start with crime
rates. Well, since 2020, there has been an outcry from the secular left to defund the police and replace them with social workers. Let me read an article from the Washington Examiner.
It’s a story dated June 2022. Pretty recent. Yes.
Democratic cities across
the country reduced funding for their police forces over the past two years. Minneapolis, which saw some of the year’s most violent riots, cut its police budget by $8 million. Los Angeles slashed police funding by $150 million.
And New York shrank the NYPD’s
budget by $1 billion. As a result, 14 major Democrat-run cities saw their highest homicide levels on record in 2021. The upward trend has not stopped.
Fox News recently analyzed
data from seven major cities and found that this year, violent crimes have increased up to 40 percent over 2021. The increase has been particularly pronounced in New York City and Seattle, two cities that were on the leading edge of the defund the police movement. It’s not just homicide rates that are up.
Carjackings have become commonplace in many cities, and
major increases in organized retail theft have left business owners struggling, frustrated, and feeling abandoned by local leaders. Wow. Oh, well, we did an entire podcast about how this defund the police movement just started out with the myth that huge numbers of unarmed law-abiding blacks were being killed without justification by white police officers because of racial bias.
The reality is that the number of unarmed blacks were killed each year by
the police is in the single digits. I think it was down to like six for the last year. Yeah.
And even those handful of cases that are counted as unarmed killings include situations
in which criminals resisting arrest, acting violently, and using other items besides firearms as weapons against the police. Yes. If anyone is interested in going back and listening to that episode, that was episode number nine, which was entitled The Truth About Black Lives Matter.
But let’s move on with this podcast. So police budgets were slashed in some of
these Democrat cities with very leftist mayors. But not only were those budgets slashed, but the mayors themselves seem to want to have the police stand down so that the criminals would be given space to riot, loot, commit arson, et cetera.
Yeah. So an article from American Greatness from May 2021 calls this permissive approach to crime the blow off steam approach. I'll read from that article.
It says, this approach
is rooted in the idea that rioters have legitimate grievances, that ordinary free speech is inadequate for their concerns, and that riots are an expression of understandable anger and emotion. In other words, if you let protesters cathartically break a few things and burn down a few stores, their passions will burn out and things will return to normal. As Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake said rather infamously during the 2014 riots in her city, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.
We saw hints of this approach in 2014
police stood by as stores were robbed and police cars were burned in Baltimore, Maryland and Ferguson, Missouri. Wow. Can you imagine if parents approach disciplining their children that way? That'd be pretty funny, right? Like, "Hey, Johnny, I understand you're angry and you need to destroy some things, maybe set some fires, maybe, I don't know, kill a few neighbors if they try to stop you.
So I'm going to give you the space
to do that. Don't worry, I'll pay for the damages, but just know that I'm really crossing my fingers and hoping that at some point you'll get tired of destroying things and become a healthy law-abiding citizen." That would be ridiculous. The thing is that that mayor of Baltimore, she's not going to pay for the damages, right? Right, right.
That's true. She's going to have the insurance companies
pay and she's going to raise property taxes on the people who pay her salary, as if the criminals were paying her salary instead of the law-abiding people. Anyway, one thing I've learned from reading military history, just in general, this is the lesson of military history, is that if somebody is being aggressive, then the best thing to do is to deter their aggression with a strong show of strength.
If you appease them and just try to make it
go away by kind of ignoring that they're annexing other people's land or invading places or rearming or developing weapons, then it just ends up being worse trouble for you later. In fact, we could have had a much shorter, much less severe World War II if we had been willing to stop the Germans when they were doing the first steps of their campaign of aggression. I think the same thing applies to criminals, is that if you let them know that there's going to be a price to pay, then you're less likely to see them being emboldened to destroy things, hurt people, steal things, and so on.
Yeah, exactly. We see that in one administration after another when we, the US, show a force of strength, other nations are far less likely to attack when we don't want them to, and vice versa, when we show weakness, more attacks seem to be the inevitable result. The Insurance Information Institute actually calculated the damage from unrest between May 26th and June 8th, and they said that it could cost $2 billion and maybe more from this damage that was done during that short window of time when criminals were burning things down and looting and all of that.
People might think that corporations are going to foot
the bill for this, but in reality, law-abiding people are going to be the ones who will pay for it, either through probably, almost certainly through higher insurance premiums, and possibly even through higher taxes. Yeah, definitely. I know the people in some of those blue cities who own homes there, they can't even sell their homes to get out of the city.
Some of them even have squatters
like living in there. There's just no law and order at all. So not only is there the higher insurance and the higher property taxes to pay for all the city services, even like the fire department and things like that, but then you can't even get out because you can't get enough for your house to be able to move to a different state.
So, in addition to all of those problems, I read a number of articles that talked about how many police officers are retiring early because they've seen what happens to police officers who try to stop the looters and the rioters and the arsonists. They end up getting prosecuted just for doing their jobs. So not only are police officers refusing to stay in their jobs, they can't even hire new police officers to take those jobs.
In addition to
that, even if these police officers go out and arrest criminals, there are leftist district attorneys in many of these cities who declined to prosecute the criminals. And that just has to be so discouraging to the police who are risking their lives to protect the public from these criminals. Oh, absolutely.
Yeah. In fact, let me read to you from an article from the Christian
Post dated December 2021. It says, "Countless police officers around the country have retired or simply left their departments.
The demoralization of police in deep blue cities has been obvious.
It's part of what Paul Cassel, a law professor at the University of Utah, has called the Minneapolis Effect. Proactive policing was reduced after anti-police protests and violent crime exploded.
Arrests went down and crime went up. Making the crime situation far worse,
especially in places such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, is the huge number of left wing district attorneys who have decided to stop prosecuting many crimes and criminals. Police officers don't have much of an incentive to make arrests when they know criminals will be put right back out on the streets." Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Even when the criminals are caught, they often get released right
away on bail. And a lot of these blue cities are trying to lower the amount that they have to pay in order to get bail or even eliminate cash bail entirely. Yeah, yeah, unbelievable.
Yeah, so I have another story. This one from Fox News dated
February 2022. It says, "Members of the Democrat Squad and President Biden have backed the abolition of cash bail.
Darrell Brooks, the alleged Waukesha Parade attacker who is accused
of taking the lives of six people, including a child, was released on a $1,000 bail five days before the massacre. He was previously arrested for domestic violence charges. The previous charges accused Brooks of running over the mother of his children with the same SUV used in the parade attack.
In New York, more than 3,400 people in total were re-arrested
for violent crimes after their release following implementation of the state's new bail law, according to data from the New York Office of Court Administration reviewed by the Times Union." I'm just, what a disaster. I don't know why people would live in New York City given all these new so-called reforms. Yeah, I guess I think it's not gonna be them who suffers from these policies or maybe they just have family there or they just don't care, they don't know.
They seem to vote these
people in, in these blue cities who don't care about the law-abiding people and their families at all. Yeah. Anyway, so, so far in this podcast, we've been assuming that all of the police are wonderful and they always do their jobs.
And so when we cut their budgets or regulate them or release
the criminals they catch, you know, this is a bad thing. But police aren't, you know, in many cities, they are excellent and wonderful. But police are unionized and they are part of a union and unions typically insulate the members of the union from the concerns of the customers.
Their job is to provide the union members with job security regardless
of performance. So in the private sector, they don't have, you know, as many unions, particularly government organized unions. And so they have to care a lot about the customer because they're facing competition from all the other businesses who are saying, "Here, I have a better product for less money." Right.
Exactly.
So that lack of competition in policing, it is a monopoly, you know, it's a government run monopoly with unionized workforce. So that lack of competition can sometimes make the police indifferent to the needs of people who pay their salaries.
And that's just in
some cities, you know, and in some cases in general, the police are very good on crime. But there are some bad apples. Yeah, exactly.
And I'm sure you remember the Parkland shooting at Stoneman Douglas High
School? Oh, yes. So a lot of those students have actually become youth activists for gun control because their leaders have told them that guns are the problem. Guns are why people were killed at their school that day.
But according to investigations, there were at least eight armed policemen
who rushed to the site and then refused to go inside even though they heard gunshots. Yeah. This was the one in Florida, right? That's right.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay. And so a New York Times article from December 18 of 2018 reported that at least eight sheriff's deputies who raced to the school and heard gunshots stayed outside the building and officers lost even more time scrambling to retrieve bulletproof vests from their cars.
Wow. That sounds similar to what just happened in, I'm maybe pronouncing this wrong, but Uvalde, Texas, they had another case where the local police showed up and they waited a long period of time before. I don't remember how exactly it was resolved or who went in, but they waited a long time while the... While children were being killed, they waited over an hour.
Exactly.
I heard that they never even tried the door to the classroom where this was happening. And even if it had been locked, which it wasn't, which apparently it wasn't, they had a tool to force the door and they just refused to go in.
So the thing is, is that other police
from other police departments, they went in. So it's really, this is not a bashing of all police. This is saying that what we're trying to do is we're trying to say to, in this podcast, is say to Christians, in general, the police do an excellent job of deterring crime.
However,
sometimes the police are incompetent, cowardly. And so if you are paying taxes for them to help you, it may be the case that all those taxes that you're paying don't help you in the moment where you're being attacked by a violent criminal. Mm-hmm.
Right. Right. Yeah.
And just back to Parkland for a moment, the police had actually
received dozens of calls for years from concerned citizens who were worried about violence from this kid, Nicholas Cruz, who was the mass shooter in Parkland. So, you know, red flag laws like those just recently passed by Republicans and Democrats would not have prevented this mass shooting either. Wow.
Dozens of calls about the guy who did the shooting. Yeah.
And the police didn't do anything about it.
That's right. Exactly. For years.
So I'll
read from CNN who reported that, quote, "Records obtained from the sheriff's office by CNN show the law enforcement agency received at least 45 calls for service relating to mass shooter Nicholas Cruz or his brother from 2008 to 2017 before the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland on February 14th. The sheriff's office has insisted it received no more than 23 calls for service regarding Cruz or his family." So even with the conservative number given by the sheriff's office, there were almost two dozen calls about this kid and his family from 2008 to 2017. Wow.
Yeah, that's a good point. And yet it could be worse. Not only could you have, you
know, this kind of situation with the police, but sometimes the police are actually unwilling to provide service to people because of their religion or their politics, or they apply the law inconsistently, depending on the religion or the politics of the people that they're supposed to be helping.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, consider the story about Democrat district attorney John Chisholm.
You actually originally had pointed me toward the story. The UK Daily
Mail reported in September of 2014, "A Democratic district attorney who has pursued Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker over alleged campaign finance violations told a fellow prosecutor that his crying wife, a union official, drove him to hunt the governor and his conservative allies because of his anti-union laws feared by organized labor. Leaders of virtually every conservative political nonprofit in Wisconsin, 29 and all, have found themselves swept up in Chisholm's criminal probe as they were hit with pre-dawn raids that seized their computers, cell phones, email records, even a child's iPad." Wow.
Yeah. Pre-dawn raids by armed police. Anyway, continue reading.
So it continues, "Armed police kept many of them from contacting their lawyers or corralling their children in some cases while they executed searches initiated by Chisholm over a period of a year and a half." Yeah, I remember that story. This is like my nightmare story. This story will always be with me because it really shows me the concrete picture of the concerns I have about government using the police to attack their political opponents.
So this is, I mean, this
was this happened, I'm a big fan of Scott Walker, the Republican government. He was my candidate of choice in the Republican presidential primaries. I read his book.
His book was about the law
that precipitated all these raids. It was something called Act 10. And he was trying to make it so that people who are part of unions didn't have to be forced to join the union in order to work.
Right. And to make the paying of union dues optional. The unions went berserk over this.
Yes. Because this teacher, a lady, cried about what was happening to the unions, which she really believed in and was very strongly supportive of. And her husband was a district attorney in this Democrat-dominated Milwaukee County.
He went after the conservatives with armed
police and predawn raids. And I remember reading articles about this where the police said, if you don't restrain your dog, we will shoot the dog. And you can imagine just being in your home sleepy and having armed police show up at your door and banging on the door saying, if you don't let us in, we're going to break the door down.
And for what? Well, no criminal
charges ever emerge from these predawn raids by armed police. The whole thing was just an attempt by this district attorney because of his crying union wife to intimidate conservatives from participating in the political process. So I think given what we've said before, let's just summarize.
In general, the police have
a deterrent effect on crime and Christians should disagree with defunding them. Sometimes, in some places, the police don't do a good job. And in other times, the police actually discriminate against Christians and conservatives.
So we're still kind of searching for an answer
here about what's the best way for us to deal with this surge in crime. Yeah, this reminds me of a few different things. For one thing, it reminds me of what I've seen in country after country that I've been to that is really poor and with a lot of crime and in need of a lot of help.
I've been to a lot of countries like that. And one thing
that I see is consistent in all of those places is that when a new party or tribe or whatever gets into office, they go after their opponents. And so whenever there's an election, there are fires and riots and looting and people are killed and the new power comes in and they just go after their own interests.
This actually also reminds me of how during the pandemic, Christian churches were closed to services, but BLM marches were allowed to continue. So there was this very clear double standard. Pastors in congregants were ticketed and even arrested while BLM held massive rallies and that was perfectly fine.
So even here in the US, sometimes the laws
are not enforced fairly and especially in deep blue areas. I guess we're getting to the point where we need to talk solutions here. So what do you think that Christians should do to respond to this rise in criminal activity given what we said about the effectiveness, well, the declining effectiveness of the police in some areas where they're being defunded and the possibility of incompetent police or even bias against Christians and conservatives from district attorneys or other people who may not want to apply the law fairly regardless of religious beliefs or political beliefs? Yeah, well, we have the Second Amendment in the US, which allows us to own firearms for self-defense.
So that's significant.
Yeah. So we do have that political right.
But is this something that Christians should
do? What does the Bible say about owning weapons and self-defense? Yeah, good question. Well, some people think that Jesus actually prohibited self-defense in Matthew five when he said to turn the other cheek. But that understanding is undoubtedly false for several reasons.
I mean, first, Jesus urged his disciples to carry a sword
in Luke twenty two thirty six. So this is what he said to his disciples. He said, But now let the one who has a money bag take it and likewise a knapsack and let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one.
So, yeah, Jesus is saying if you don't have a
sword, go out and buy one. Then when his disciples tell him that they have two swords already, he says, OK, that's plenty. Wow.
So they in the passage, they actually have two swords already. So they've been carrying
swords all this time where they were doing ministry with him and traveling around. Yeah, I remember reading about this Luke twenty two thirty six passage in Wayne Grudem's excellent book Politics According to the Bible.
So I really recommend that book to people. In fact,
I saw I think Christian book had a deal on it. The sale is probably over by the time you guys are here in this podcast.
But yeah, just check out that book if you ever want
to know from an excellent pastor and theologian how to apply the Bible to pretty much any policy issue. Yes, Wayne Grudem is phenomenal in theology and politics. That book is excellent as are all of his books.
And in the chapter on self-defense that Grudem has, he also talks about how it
was common for people in Jesus' day to carry swords for protection against robbers. In addition, we know that Jesus' command for his disciples to make sure they had swords extended beyond just that one occasion when he told him to make sure to get some because Peter still had his sword when the authorities came to arrest Jesus in Luke twenty two. Oh, I remember that part where Peter cuts off the ear of the one of the people.
But
remember Jesus rebuked Peter for using his sword. So he's pro sword control. Okay, so when Peter cut off the ear of the servant of the high priest, Jesus warned Peter that all who take the sword will perish by the sword.
But this shows that his disciples
had been carrying around swords for three years and he never told them to throw them away or get rid of them. In fact, even after Peter cut off the guy's ear, Jesus didn't tell him to throw away his sword. He told him to keep his sword when he said, put your sword back into its place.
Okay, so this is interesting because they're carrying the swords around. So it's not like some countries allow you to have, you know, a weapon in your home for home defense, but you can't carry it when you go out. So this this policy would actually allow the concealed carry of swords.
Yes. But but if you live today, he would probably need to get a concealed carry permit like I did. Yeah, I had to get one too, but not for swords.
Yes. Yeah, I mean, in context, it really becomes clear that Jesus' warning to Peter was not a warning about having dangerous utensils or swords or weapons. His warning to Peter was that this was not the way he was going to advance the kingdom of God.
The kingdom
of God was not going to advance by force. Self defense is necessary. So yes, as they were traveling all over the regions, he wanted his disciples to have swords.
But Jews of
that time expected the Messiah to come as a warrior and to overthrow the Romans by force. And Peter was ready to fight with literal swords to advance the kingdom. And Jesus said, no, that's not the way it's going to happen.
And then he surrendered to crucifixion. Right.
Very different from Islam.
Yes, exactly. Very clear distinction there. Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
So I don't remember reading about any sword fights in the New Testament. So probably what these things were for, although that would probably be in the movie if they made a movie about the New Testament.
Oh, undoubtedly. Yeah, especially if like, you know, Netflix or somebody made it and then they just didn't do it. Yeah.
So probably they're just carrying these things around to deter criminals. Like
they're not real excited about having to fight, but they're just thinking, well, if we have a couple of these, then we're not going to get robbed. So you just have to carry it and maybe show it in an extreme case, but you wouldn't have to use it.
And that actually
happens in real life. Do you remember this case of this, um, a mass shooting that occurred in in Texas? I think it was in 2019. Yeah.
The one at the church.
Yeah. So this guy was able to deter a crime by using his, well, he was, he was able to make the crime less bad than it, than it was.
Yeah. Actually, um, there was an article in the Christian post, uh, from December of 2019 about that. And, um, I'll go ahead and read a little bit from that.
Cause I actually have
that right here. Okay. Um, on Sunday, a gunman opened fire at the church killing two people before being brought down by Jack Wilson, a 71 year old firearms instructor who has also been a reserve sheriff's deputy on Facebook.
Wilson wrote, I just want to thank all who
have sent their prayers and comments on the events of today. The events at West freeway church of Christ put me in a position that I would hope no one would have to be in, but evil exists. And I had to take out an active shooter in church after the shooting, Texas officials credited the state's gun laws for preventing further deaths.
A measure enacted
this year allows licensed handgun holders to carry a weapon in churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship. Yeah. I like that extract from this article from Christian post because it really shows the interest that Christians should have in legislation because a piece of legislation is passed this year, which was 2019.
And then like a couple minutes later, the legislation
is used by Christians to defend themselves from a dangerous attacker. Right. So, um, yeah, in that case, you know, the gun had to be fired in order to prevent a crime.
But
I know from reading a lot of studies on gun ownership, uh, from, um, different people that a lot of the time guns don't get fired in order to deter a crime. In fact, uh, they don't even like they, they don't even have to fire a warning shot, just like brandishing the weapon, uh, or showing the weapon to an attacker will cause most attackers to break off their attack. And I think in some places it's illegal to brandish a weapon.
So what
I mean by that is you're facing the, well, not you, but the person, a person who, who has a concealed carry permit and has a concealed weapon is facing an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death. And they pull out their weapon in order to defend themselves on the person sees it. That's what I mean when I say brandishing, I mean, you're not supposed to brandish a weapon, you know, in order to intimidate people.
But in this case,
I'm saying this person is acting in self-defense, getting ready to defend themselves from what they see as a threat of serious bodily injury or death. And that causes the attacker to break off their attack. Yeah.
Uh, you know, Gary Clek, have you heard of him? Yes. He's
one of the authors of these studies. Yeah.
Yeah. So he's also referenced in, uh, Wayne
Grudem's book, but, um, yeah, he's, yeah, he's the, Wayne Grudem knows everything. He knows every Bible verse that applies to, that's cloudy today.
So let me give you a list of
50 Bible verses that apply to the weather. But anytime he talks about something that is interesting to us, uh, then he, he has a million Bible verses and then he's also got a million studies to go with it. If you're ever trying to get a biblical worldview, this is your guy.
Anyway, tell us about Gary Clek. Yeah, definitely. So, um, he's a, so Gary
Clek is a left-leaning criminologist at Florida state university.
And he published an article
in September of 2020 in the American journal of criminal justice. Okay. And that article says at least 21 national surveys have asked large samples of the U S adult population, whether they had used guns defensively, including 17 privately sponsored surveys before 2000.
And at least four more since 2000, the private surveys have generally yielded annual estimates of the number of DGUs by adults against other persons in the one to 3 million range, one to 3 million DGUs. What's a DGU? Okay. So that's an acronym for a defensive gun use.
Okay. So they have a whole bunch of surveys that are being cited in Gary's peer reviewed article in a peer reviewed journal. And he's estimating one to 3 million defensive gun uses per year.
That sounds like, yeah, in the United States, that sounds like a lot
of shooting though, Rose, I'm not sure that people are going to agree with that. Well, the article also says that only 23.9% of DGUs involve the gun being fired even as a warning shot. Wow.
Yeah. So something north of 75%. Let me see if I can do math.
I used to do
a lot of math. 76% of DGUs have the gun not being fired. Right.
That's right. Exactly.
Yeah.
So yeah, that's almost three quarters. So we can trust this guy. We can trust this
Gary Klock guy.
Yeah. So he's definitely an authority on this topic. His award winning
book Point Blank Guns and Violence in America is published by an academic press called Root Ledge or Rout Ledge.
The book won an award from the American Society of Criminology because
it quote made the most outstanding contribution to criminology, the most outstanding. So yeah, this is, this is a guy to listen to. Yeah, this is quality work, but I kind of think of people in criminology as being really left wing because I know a guy who did a bachelor's degree in criminology and he was, he's a conservative and he told me that it was a, it was a nightmare for him to have to justify his views all the time.
Anyway, so that's a criminologist. I'm
going to talk about a couple of studies cause I talk about these all the time on my blog. Whenever I have discussions about this, I always bring up academic publications because I like to win.
And if you're dealing with somebody who's like, you know, my feelings,
it's better to bring up my peer reviewed study. And, and so let's start with, let's start with an economist. This guy's name is John Lott and he has a study called more guns, less crime, understanding crime and gun control laws.
It went through a couple of additions
with the university of Chicago press and what his book is about. It's about more guns, less crime. Basically what he does is not like these concealed carry laws.
They're new. And
what he looked at was the statistics on violent crime rates prior to the adoption of concealed carry laws and after the adoption of concealed carry laws in all the states that have adopted concealed carry laws. And he saw precipitous drops in violent crime rates after states enacted concealed carry laws.
And you go, what's a concealed carry law? So this is a
law that allows people who are extraordinarily law abiding. You have to be squeaky clean. You have to pass many background checks and then they, and then go in and apply and they will give you a permit in order to carry a weapon concealed so that you can defend yourself if you are ever attacked and you can't defend your property.
You know, this doesn't tell
this weapon can't be used to just, you know, you know, for target practice on criminals. You have to be in an immediate threat of serious bodily injury or imminent death. You know? So this is not a license to kill like James Bond.
This is, this is like a last resort.
Right, right. Yeah.
And so John Lott found that when more people were allowed to carry,
the criminals didn't know who was carrying a weapon and they, they stopped committing violent crimes, at least at the rate that they were, that they had been before. Right. So that's one study that's by an economist.
So we've had a criminologist and an economist
writing in, you know, nice prestigious academic presses. And I got a third one. This is from Joyce Lee Malcolm.
She is a professor of law at George Mason University School of Law. If
I could get a law degree from anywhere, I would get it from George Mason. They have a phenomenal economics department and a law school.
I'd like a couple of those degrees,
please, from those two departments. But she wrote a book called Guns and Violence, the English Experience. And by English, she means UK.
And that book is published by Harvard
University Press. So in, in this book, she analyzes how the violent crime rate in the UK more than doubled in the four years after the UK banned almost all gun ownership by law abiding people. So this is the flip side to the John Lott study.
Okay. Yes. So the criminals knew their victims would not be armed.
So they committed even
more violent crimes. Right. So yeah, so that's three academic studies, a criminologist, an economist, and now a law professor.
Yeah. So given all this experience from academic studies and books, it's surprising to me to learn that, for example, like in July 2022, the Democrats in the House passed a ban on many semi-automatic weapons. The Texas Tribune reported in July 2022, the US House approved a bill that would impose the first ban in decades on semi-automatic weapons.
The bill would
ban the importing, manufacturing, selling, transferring, or possession of certain types of semi-automatic weapons. It would cover semi-automatic pistols and rifles that accept detachable magazines and have certain types of barrels, grips, and stocks. Wow.
Yeah. So semi-automatic, as you know, just means that you pull the trigger once and one bullet comes out. You have to pull it again to get another bullet to come out.
So semi-automatic
actually describes most guns that people own. Right. Okay.
So people who don't know guns very well, and you and I have been kind of
exploring this a little bit. Like we both went out and got concealed carry permits and we had to qualify and everything like that. Yes.
So we, you know, a semi-automatic firearm, we know what this is. This is not a firearm where you hold the trigger down and it just keeps firing all the time. That's what like a journalist would think who's, you know, he never touched a gun in his entire life and just drank his way in, you know, through college with a million dollars in student loans that he now needs a bailout for.
I'm surprised you didn't say philosophy major since you like that so much. Philosophy major, no, journalists are. I can understand philosophy.
Journalism is something
else. But yeah, this is not an automatic weapon. Okay.
This is one trigger pull, one bullet
comes out and this is what they're banning. It just doesn't make any sense to me. This does remind me of something though that the police officer who taught my concealed carry permit course told me.
I just want to get this into the podcast so people understand
people who go out and get these permits and own weapons. He said this. He said, even if you're 100% justified in defending yourself with a weapon, it's better to avoid the threat that causes you to do that in the first place.
He talked about situational awareness and
crossing the street. If you see something on the other side of the street that looks dangerous, avoiding dark places, not going into the city, you know, not going downtown at night. So basically even for people who believe in concealed carry permits and believe in firearm ownership, the advice that you get from the experts is please never do this.
And that's because it is going to involve you with the law. You will have a lot of explaining to do because they don't just let these things go typically, especially if you're living in a blue area. So the best thing you can do is to defend yourself.
The first thing
you can do to defend yourself is when you're young, think about what education you're going to get so that you can have a high paying job that allows you to afford to live in a nice area, one, you know, maybe a red state and a small city with an accountable police force and maybe a Republican mayor rather than the Baltimore mayor who's like, Oh yeah, let the writers have space to write in your house. So think about working from home so that you're not, you know, on the road or filling up with gas where you can be carjacked. Think about homeschooling your kids where they're not going to be vulnerable to a school shooter.
You know, Christians need to like, that's what this podcast is about. We're saying crime is getting worse. The police are good, but they're not always good.
And what should you
do about it? And the first line of defense, although obviously from the Bible we've seen only a gun is permitted. The best line of defense is to think about, about how you're going to live and make sure that you put yourself in a position where you never have to deal with this. Yeah.
And you know, those are all great pieces of advice and I advise people to do all of
those things as well, actually. But at the same time, I don't want us to get too far into a like bunker type mentality. We do have to solve the crime problem by attacking the root cause.
And I really think that a big aspect of the root cause of criminal behavior
is fatherlessness. We have to challenge people who make reckless, irresponsible choices that result in fatherless children. We have to stop subsidizing single motherhood.
Study
after study shows this correlation, very strong correlation between fatherlessness and those children becoming criminals. And so single mothers, you know, can get charity from churches along with relational support and prayer and guidance about how to turn their lives around. And fatherlessness would really decline significantly if women decided to choose responsible marriage minded men.
So we should be bold about encouraging grownups to be careful about the partners they choose and their timing of sexual activity in order to avoid fatherless children. Basically, relationships should only be given to people who are interested in commitment because the children are more important than the selfish desires of the adults. Yeah.
And not only someone you suspect is interested in commitment, but make them commit
first before you start having sex with them. That'll avoid a whole lot of problems for a whole lot of people. Okay.
So let's close with, I wanted you to tell me a little bit about your experience
of purchasing a firearm and getting your concealed carry permit. So I won't tell you specifically what to talk about. But if you are interested in telling us what the process was like or what your female acquaintances think about you now that you have done this terrible thing, what do men think about girls who own guns and anything else that stood out to you about the whole process? Oh my goodness.
I have so much to say on all those topics. Let's see. Well, I decided
to get my concealed carry permit because I was teaching all over the country about very controversial topics and especially topics which are known to draw threats from people who are capable of carrying those threats out and don't tend to have any conscientious objection to ending people's lives.
At the same time, I was kind of watching the defund
the police movement. I was watching crimes go up. And so I thought it would be a good idea to at least become informed, get my permit and to go through that process.
So a lot of
people seem to think somehow maybe, I don't know how from like watching the news or something that you can just like order a gun online and you're all set to go. It just comes from Amazon or whatever. Right.
Just like that. Right. Right.
It was quite the process. I mean, it's a little different from state to
state, but I had to take an all day course and I had to pass a couple of different quizzes and I had to actually fire the firearm and pass an accuracy test. Wow.
How accurate are you?
I'll just say that we were a bit into the test when the tester said you've hit far more of the targets dead on than is needed to pass. So I'm going to go ahead and and cut this this test short. So that was really fun.
But I had I had practice quite a bit and at all
from all different distances. And so for my test, we actually started with the farthest distance that you have to pass. So when I got all of yeah.
So when I got all of those
on target, he's like, yeah, I know you do like two at mid range and one up close and then yeah, you're good. So it was interesting. Actually, I I thought that a lot of the my my female friends would be put off by that or kind of appalled by that or at least indifferent at the most generous.
But that wasn't the case. It probably has a lot to do with where
I live as well as, you know, having seen the the defund the police movement and the crimes going up. And, you know, I've read that that the majority of the firearms and concealed carry permits of the last few years have been for women initiated by women who are scared and guns are for girls.
Yeah, yeah, it helps them to neutralize the difference in upper
body strength with men. So yeah, exactly. There were a few people who who just looked at me like, oh my goodness, you're one of those people.
But I would say, you know, I
asked this person who I'm thinking of who was who was appalled that I had gone near a gun and that I was okay with gun ownership. I asked her about her knowledge and familiarity with firearms and she had absolutely none. She actually it turned out she was from another country and she's like you Americans and your obsessions with with guns, you're just going to get everybody killed.
And so I encouraged her to read the studies and to learn more
information and not just trust her stereotypes that are perpetuated in her home country. So for anyone who is scared of guns or who is skeptical of their the value of concealed carry, I would say, read the studies, get training. They are, as you said, great equalizers against large men who wish to do us harm.
And for women who are, you know, who, or for
anyone who may at any time potentially have a child in their house, keep the gun in a safe they have safes that you can't get into without the fingerprint of the owner. Keep them away from children, but there's no need to keep them away from trained responsible law abiding adults, you have to have an FBI security check, background check and all this information, you know, all this these tests run. So we're not talking about just, you know, going to the local farmers market and picking out a gun with no idea what to do with it.
Very good. Okay, anything else you want to say about that? This is probably gonna
sound kind of silly, but I will say something that surprised me was just how interested a lot of the guys in my life became in talking to me when they realized that I knew something about guns and that I was interested in them. One day I was at this place of business.
I
mentioned that I was trying to decide what kind of firearm to purchase and I had my concealed carry permit and it was all the guys just just stopped what they were talking about and turn their focus to me and got so excited and several of them ran out to their cars. They're like, you're interested in firearms? Oh my goodness. What's your favorite? Hold your hold stay here.
And they like ran out to their cars and they brought their weapons
in and like it, trust me, it's, I'm not talking about like, you know, this was not like a government building or anything. It was perfectly legal, but they were and they, but they laid them out all out on the ground and they were all excited to talk about their favorite ones and the pros and the cons and give me advice. And so single girls, you want to get boys' attention? Learn a thing or two about firearms and then, you know, express your interest.
All right. That's probably a good place for us to attend this episode. So listeners, if you enjoyed the show, please like, comment, share, and subscribe.
You can find the references
for this episode on wintryknight.com. That's W-I-N-T-E-R-Y-K-N-I-G-H-T.com. We appreciate you taking the time to listen and we'll see you again in the next one.
[Music]

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