Do you carry fire insurance on your home? Ever actually have a fire? Have tornado coverage too? Ever actually have a twister blow your house away? Just insurance. A precaution.

I know two people personally who have had to use a concealed weapon to stop a person who was attempting to hurt them and their family. These are people in my direct family and close circle of friends and not friends of friends. While those situations were horribly traumatic the alternatives were the death of themselves or their loved ones.

Just relatively recently I've had to use my own carry weapon to drop a vicious pitbull rot mix that attacked me as I was out at the end of my lane. I live in a rural area and this dog had apparently become too aggressive for it's town owners and had been dumped. It came out of brush at the ditch and I barely had enough time to draw and drop him. If I hadn't been armed I would have been mauled and possibly killed if he had got me on the ground.

It's better to have it and not need to than to need it and not have it. Once you get use to carrying it becomes second nature. For me it is just one of the things I put on my person as I leave the house. Wallet, cellphone, pistol, boots, keys, pocketknife and jacket or coat in appropriate weather. I don't even think about it anymore. It's just a tool that's always there if needed.

 

Our community is small enough that the local paper still publishes a daily record of city police and sheriff department arrests and call outs. Thanks to the popularity of crystal meth, there are always reported instances of attacks on people by tweakers on a weekly basis. The local Wal-Mart parking lot alone is good for a car-jacking or armed robbery once a month.

To answer your question, in today's increasingly haves and have-nots society, my feeling on carrying a concealed weapon is the same as vehicle insurance; while I may never need it, I have only myself to blame in the event of not having either in the event of an incident or accident.

 

That and it's only recently that it hasn't been fashionable to carry a pistol. Back years ago all gentlemen carried a pocket pistols and ladies carried small purse gun or tiny pistols that could be concealed in their hand warmers. Back when my grandmother was a teacher back in the early 1900s she often had to collect pistols from her grade school boys. I recently read a note in some of her papers where she had sent home a note to a boys parents because she had caught him fiddling with his pistol during class. Back then in a country school it wasn't any more a big deal that getting busted with a yo-yo.

It's only a recent phenomenon that we've developed this bizarre phobia with firearms weapons and potentially dangerous things in general. There are reasons for that but to explain it would lead to an excessively long and rambling rant I won't get into at the moment.