By Peggy Tartaro,
Executive Editor

My friend, Barbara, was visiting from her temporary home in Germany. I hadn't seen her in almost a year, and we caught up over coffee at a café halfway between her mother's house and mine, sitting outside and watching a small corner of the world go by on a (finally) sunny Saturday.

We've been friends, with occasional lapses, for 30+ years, a period of time that is both gulp-inducing and, to my way of thinking, awe-inspiring. To think I could have known someone long enough to constitute a historical period of time makes me proud and happy.

We have lots of things in common, superficial statistics and a shared history. Each of us, I suspect, enjoys having a friend with whom we can disagree about most things, because we find each other's perspectives interesting and opinions reasoned, if not always sound.

I'm not sure we got to cabbages and kings during our several hours together (but tomatoes and British royalty did come up).

I am probably her only pro-gun friend, although she's not my only anti-gun one.

At one point, in a discussion about cities, she said she felt physically safer in Germany and that there were a lot less guns.

I offered to send her the UN Small Arms Conference report (see Page 57) which says, that, surprisingly, Europeans privately hold a lot of guns, and that Germans are buying almost as many new guns per capita as Americans.
Which-as is only fitting-she waved off. "I feel safer," she said.

It's always difficult to argue with feelings, and, indeed, anyone interested in personal protection knows that you should by and large go with your feelings in matters of personal safety.

If Barbara was living in Baghdad, or Monrovia, or even London, and made the same claim, I'd think she was nuts and seriously consider a stern lecture, if not an intervention.

"Safer," though, is probably a relative term in this case. By and large, I think she would say, she felt safe enough in her old home in the Midwest, as she probably felt perfectly safe sitting on a sidewalk on a busy American urban street, for several hours.

The whole notion of "safety" and "safer" is a tough nut to crack when talking with anti-gunners. (I am open to suggestions for a term for people who are not entirely anti-gun, but merely supremely indifferent to the whole topic.)

If you're actually in a public debate setting, there are lots of facts and figures to throw about. And all those facts and figures come out on our side.

But proving a negative model, wherein your opponent says, "why can't we just try this reasonable restriction," is hard to respond to in sound bites.

I'm rather fond of the bumper sticker (cribbed from Robert Heinlein), "An Armed Society is a Polite Society." Sometimes, if you're lucky, people actually gasp if you say that, allowing you to explain in more detail while they recover from the vapors.

You might say, "Consequently, American homes which do not have guns enjoy significant 'free rider' benefits. Gunowners bear financial and other burdens of gun ownership; but gun-free and gun-owning homes enjoy exactly the same general burglary deterrence effects from widespread American gun ownership. This positive externality of gun ownership is difficult to account for in a litigation context (since the quantity and cost of deterred crime is difficult to measure), and may even go unnoticed by court-since the free rider beneficiaries (non-gun owners) are not represented before the court."

But if you did, be sure to credit the author, David Kopel (from Lawyers, Guns and Burglary, Arizona Law Review, Summer 2001.)

You can find the whole article, and lots of other useful information, at Kopel's website, www.davekopel.com.

The argument boils down to this: those of us who are gunowners protect those who are not in ways which are not on display, and which are often unquantified, especially by those who aren't gunowners. Ergo, that Polite Society.

Of the dozen or so people sitting at the outdoor café on a Saturday morning, several were surely gunowners. A percentage of the patrons inside were as well. And, of the dozens of folks who strolled by, many on their way back from the nearby Farmer's Market, yet more were gunowners. I felt very safe indeed.

But more than feeling "safe" I felt "safer," an important distinction.
If I had been sitting in a neighborhood I didn't know, surrounded by people I was pretty sure couldn't possibly be gunowners, I would have felt a lot less safe.

Perhaps it's time to turn the negative into a positive and ask anti-gunners and the disinterested if they've ever really thought about who is closer-an armed neighbor, or the police.

Or maybe that you don't mind them being "free riders," you just objection to them questioning the fare.

Peggy Tartaro
Photo © Copyright 1998 Nancy Floyd, used with permission.