(From: thinkprogress.org)
Sociologist Jennifer Carlson’s May 26th op-ed in the Los Angeles Times recaps her excellent book, reviewed here and further discussed here by my colleague Dr. Robert Young, investigating why men feel the need to carry guns. Her queries reached deep into cultural and economic reasons that men carry. My own reason was far more primal—survival.
To the degree I had thought at all about arming myself for self-defense, my fallback position had been that if crime was so bad that I needed to arm myself, I would simply live somewhere else, somewhere safer. This thinking did not derive from any fear of guns. I had grown up in a house with guns, and my father had taught me well the basics of gun safety.
Still, whether through denial or distraction, I had never seriously faced the idea that I might need to defend my life or the lives of my family with a gun. Not, that is, until I finished medical school and went on to the next phase of my training as an intern. Many of the best teaching hospitals, including the ones where I landed a position, are located in big cities, often in the worst parts of town.
I didn’t start carrying a gun right away after moving to an Ohio city for my surgery internship. It was only after living a few months on the border of urban danger that I discovered how treacherous my new neighborhood was. I was appalled by the violence whose wreckage I treated in the emergency room.
Tending to the wounds of inner city crime victims taught me as much about human depravity as the mechanics of wound healing. And although many of the victims were also perpetrators, too many of the shot, slashed, and raped I saw were just innocents. I remember still the young girl whose angelic face I sutured back together, never again to be as pretty as before her “boyfriend” cut her.
The threat came close to home. My apartment building neighbors were burglarized. My casual resolve to avoid arming myself, made years before in safe detachment, was now put to the test. I refused to be a victim.
A friend referred me to an attorney. He was as new to lawyering as I was to doctoring. No problem, he smiled. If you have to use your gun in righteous self-defense Ohio law has this thing called an affirmative defense. You’ll be okay. Lots of docs carry in your part of town.
Only years later did I learn the reality. If the police had discovered the .38 caliber revolver I carried to work every day, the law in effect then stipulated that I would have to be arrested. Jail would have followed, and probably a felony charge—not exactly career enhancing moves for a young surgeon. Only when I came before a judge would I have been allowed to assert my “affirmative defense.”
Although the state constitution’s bill of enumerated rights leaves no doubt that “the people have the right to bear arms for their defense and security”, the statutory law exacted a heavy toll from Ohioans who asserted that right. This will of course differ depending on the state, so I would advise contacting an nyc criminal lawyer, or one local to your area, for further clarification on the laws in your state.
In affirming a lower court’s voiding of the law, the First District Court of Appeals explained the dilemma facing law-abiding Ohioans: “The practical effect of this statute is that any person carrying a concealed weapon is subject to arrest, incarceration, and indictment before being able to establish the legality of his or her actions. Thus, a legal action subjects an innocent person to prosecution for a felony. It is only later, at the peril of a trial, that innocence may be established. Guns or no guns, we know of no other situation where a citizen is guilty until proven innocent.”
America has come to a better understanding of human nature since I lived on the bad side of an Ohio town many years ago. The people of Ohio have long since corrected the defects in their statutes that denied their people the right to carry a firearm for self-defense. Long ago they joined the wave of public sentiment that resulted in all 50 states now having some form of right to carry.
I still think of those crime victims who were among my first surgical patients—crippled in body or spirit. The police did not, could not, protect them. This is a trivially elemental truth, but it is one many people cannot accept. That is, they cannot accept its corollary, which is that we are responsible for our own defense. And in the end, that is why men (and women) feel the need to carry guns.
—Timothy Wheeler, MD is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation.
All DRGO articles by Timothy Wheeler, MD.