Let me start by saying that I support both, but that's not the point of this blog article.
For as long as I can remember, and I spent most of my teenage and young adult years in California, I've been told that guns are the greatest evil in our society. They enable vigilantism, they kill people who otherwise might live if other means were used, and/or they enable people to kill many more per mass casualty event than a knife or other object (save maybe, oh I don't know, let's say a pressure cooker packed with shrapnel?).
When confronted with the reality of the necessity of guns for protection, I would almost always receive the same response. In fact it was almost scripted. "That's what the police are for. You need to let them do their job."
Now let's set aside response times, 911 triage, officer availability, and IA compliance issues for a moment, and let's just accept their argument as factual. I don't need a gun because of the police. Ok, assumptive facts admitted into evidence your honor. Then the reality is that we need cops.
But NOW, enter the defund the police movements, many of which are just thinly veiled abolish the police movements, and you end up with a conundrum of hypocrisy that can only be solved with absolute insanity. These same people who I spent years arguing gun control with NOW say that you need neither a gun NOR the police. No, you heard that right, you don't NEED to be defended. Defending yourself or being defended is, of course, at its very core, racist.
I could write a 30 page paper on how they get there, but let me just boil it all down to this. Society is unfair, people need to steal to balance the scales, so if you defend yourself or are defended it's racist because it doesn't allow for that scale balancing to occur. With me so far? I know, it's nuts, but I'm going somewhere with this.
You see, what we as society are being asked to do is to accept theft as normal. No, they won't say it out loud, they know that it won't play well, so they say things like, "we won't prosecute theft under $1,000.00." Or sometimes they say, "yeah, but you had more than enough anyway, so you really shouldn't press charges. We'll just call this a lesson learned."
Can there be any wonder why people are beginning to wake up to the reality that they need a gun?
Gun sales have skyrocketed since the beginning of the protests, and have only continued to climb since the defunding of police departments has begun and as violent crime has also skyrocketed. People don't feel safe, and in the absence of someone to defend them, they choose to defend themselves.
I know three people, personally, who have been asked directly if someone can borrow one of their guns until things return to normal, I have at least five liberal friends who used to argue with me vocally about the unnecessary sales of firearms in American who now all own at least one firearm, and I have received multiple requests to give shooting instructions once it is safe to return to the ranges. Coincidence? Not a chance.
You see lost in all of these "defund" movements is that by doing so, these movements are creating a wild west type of scenario where people take their defense as a personal responsibility as opposed to a societal one. We've already seen what happens when that becomes the case, but as Solomon said, "there is nothing new under the sun."
You see, in the end, people, not just Americans, but people in general, will not accept what these movements want them to accept, and that is that their things, money, time, and success are not really theirs, and that it should be considered fair game to be taken, shared, and redistributed among everyone. Believe me, banning guns and then police protection of private property is just a stone's throw from their ultimate objective, the elimination of private property all together.
Yet here's the good news, the sales of firearms recently has thankfully shown us that the majority of Americans reject that way of thinking and that cultural shift. So now, it's time for these movements to face a very tough choice. You can have police that protect the private property and bodily safety rights of others, or you can have them do it themselves, and they'll do it with guns. That's the choice, because letting someone steal or riot and have no repercussions for it? That is simply not an option, and gun sales show that it likely won't be if not ever, than for a very very long time.