I need to ask this question, because I can't make any sense of anyone who feels that owning a gun somehow makes them safer. This is not meant to be derogatory or insulting to anyone who may consider themselves a gun right's activist... It is a serious question.
This is why I ask.
Man Injured in Rogers Park
Just two doors down from me about 4 hours ago, a 21 year old was shot in the neck, and thankfully he survived the attack, and he is doing quite well at a nearby hospital.
It was a drive-by shooting. How do I know this? I heard the shot from just outside my window around 7:30 this evening... and as I always do in my neighborhood, I hoped it was a firecracker... an M-80 left over from the 4th.
I heard people swarming and yelling out on the street. I looked out my window and there were a couple dozen people out there on the five-points corner milling about pointing. One young woman starting yelling and throwing her hands up in the air. It was almost 100 degrees outside and in this neighborhood of old buildings, most people only have a single window air-conditioning unit.. maybe two at most.
So, I am leaning out of my second story window and asking the kids who've stepped out of our building, "What's going on? Was that a gunshot?" And five kids from the ages of about 7-15 say "Yeah".
What I need to know is, how could my owning a gun have helped to keep this from happening? If it was legal for me to own and carry a gun in the city of Chicago, could I have somehow kept the shooter from attacking the victim? Would the life of the victim be any different if I had been authorized to "pack" in Chicago?
I am curious to know if most gun rights activists live in neighborhoods where this happens every couple of months? Do they see this happening? And have conversations with kids on their street to whom this is just another part of life?
Can someone please explain to me how if I had been licensed to carry a gun into the movie theater in Aurora how it would have helped to save anyone?
I appreciate that if the British had come back in the 1770s/'80s that my forebears had a right to keep a few muskets to defend themselves, but this? This senseless killing again and again with weapons and ammunition that kill a dozen people in the span of a minute?
Why do so many people have such a huge problem with the well-regulated part of the second Amendment?
With blood on the pavement just two doors down from me, can someone please help me understand this?