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Monday, March 29, 1999: Armed
I saw a disturbing commercial
on television last night. It showed an earnest young couple with a child sitting
on a couch in their home--a bulky young man with a soccer haircut, his pretty wife
holding their baby--talking about their lives. He's a tow-truck driver, and he
described how he has to get up in the middle of the night sometimes to go out and
tow cars--he doesn't like it, especially, but it's his job. Sometimes he has to
go to bad parts of town, and that's dangerous. His wife pipes in and says, "It's
a good job, but I worry about him," and she looks over at him, and he looks at her,
and they both look at the baby, and he says something about how it would be nice
to be able to protect himself, and she nods . . .
Cut to a logo saying, "Support Proposition B." No mention is made of
what this Proposition is, but it's the proposition regarding carrying
weapons. Maybe I'm too cautious, but I just don't think it's necessarily a good
idea for tow truck drivers to be armed.
Not that I think it's a good idea for me to be armed, either.
The radio ads I've heard quote a woman who was raped saying that she might not have
been raped if she had been carrying a pistol. Yeah, that may be true. It also
might be true that the rapist could have taken the pistol from her and shot her
with it. Or she could have shot someone that she thought was going to rape her, but
had no intention of doing so. Maybe she would have shot someone who simply looked threatening.
There are a lot of considerations, and I've heard all the arguments.
And there are certainly times when having a weapon would be useful and possibly comforting. But as
a general rule, it just doesn't seem like something I think should happen. If I felt the
need to protect myself, I would probably carry pepper spray or an alarm or
something else non-lethal, and something that, if turned against me, wouldn't hurt me
irrevocably.
Bob has guns, of course. We have guns in the house, and I don't object to them, really. I don't necessarily
agree with the philosophy that causes them to be here, and if I lived alone, I wouldn't have them, but I
respect his right to own them and I suppose it makes me feel safer to a certain degree to know that
he has them and knows how to use them if the need arises.
But that's not to say that I think he should be walking around on the street with one. And I realize that if the
law passes, it probably won't make too much of a difference one way or another. My vision/fear of an
armed society is probably a little exaggerated. Still, I think it's something to think about.
Keeping the world safe for cats . . .
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