The Nanny State is Taking a Hit

 Taking Responsibility For One's Own Safety

As so often happens, we have another case of women leading social change.  This time it is in the United States.  Women are moving rapidly and in sizeable numbers to be pro-gun.  It's progress, Jim, but not as we know it.  This, from the Sydney Morning Herald:

Robin Natanel picks up a compact black pistol, barrel pointed down range. Gripping the gun with both hands, left foot forward, she raises the semi-automatic and methodically squeezes off five shots. The first one creases the left edge of a red bull's-eye on a target 7.5 metres away. The four others paint a 7.5-centimetre pattern around the first. If the target were a person's head or heart, he would probably be dead.

Natanel is a Buddhist, a self-avowed ''spiritual person,'' a 53-year-old divorcee who lives alone in a liberal-leaning suburb near Boston. She is 153 centimetres and has blonde hair, dark eyes, a ready smile and a soothing voice, with a hint of Boston brogue. She's a Tai Chi instructor who in classes invokes the benefits of meditation. And at least twice a month, she takes her German-made Walther PK380 to a shooting range and blazes away.

She joins a cohort of people that used to be regarded as anti-gun: liberal, progressive, homosexuals, college-students--and female.  But, in the last four years domestic handgun production and imports have doubled in the United States.  Its a fe-nom.

Twenty years ago, 76 per cent of women felt that . . . handguns [were implicitly dangerous and thought that no-one should be allowed to have them], and 68 per cent of all people in the US were wary enough of firearms of any kind to tell Gallup pollsters that they backed laws more strictly limiting their sale. Then what Gallup calls ''a clear societal change'' began.

In October, a Gallup poll found record-low support for a handgun ban - at 26 per cent among all, and 31 per cent among women. The poll, which has tracked gun attitudes since 1959, documented a record-low 43 per cent who favour making it more difficult to acquire guns. Forty-seven per cent said someone in the household owned at least one gun, the highest reading in 18 years.

New groups are "arming up"--and not the ones previously found.  

Besides Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, there are the Pink Pistols, Mothers Arms, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, the Second Amendment Sisters, the Women's Firearm Network and the International Defensive Pistol Association, among others. Their influence may be outsized in gaining converts as they set up Facebook pages, churn out blogs and post recruiting videos on YouTube.

Part of the rising popularity is due to people coming to believe that the police protections are largely fictional.  They fear getting caught short and without protection.  Moreover, the image of gun ownership is changing due to the fear promulgated by anti-gun activists that if lots of people carry firearms, mild arguments would end up in people being shot and killed.  It hasn't happened.  So, the scaremongering  has backfired. 

In any safe society, the first line of policing is always citizens defending themselves.  When police and authorities attempt to subvert this most fundamental aspect of policing, criminals gang up and eventually exert control.