The national violent crime rate today is less than half of what it was in 1994, according to FBI statistics, but the drop in crime has barely altered Americans’ perception of their safety.
#Good bad i'm the guy with the gun portable
Sales data reflect this: Since 1994, the number of long guns such as rifles and shotguns - which are often used for hunting - owned by civilians rose by 21% while the number of handguns, more portable and easier to conceal, rose by 71%.
A 2016 survey by researchers at Harvard and Northeastern universities found that 63% of gun owners said that self-defense was a primary motivation for owning a firearm - significantly more than cited hunting or other sporting use. Like Bukrym, most Americans who own guns got them for protection. She talked to him, telling him he was going to make it and everything was going to be OK, but beating against the inside of her head was the thought that she had just fired the bullet that killed him. When he began nodding into unconsciousness, she slapped his face to keep him awake. She ripped a strip from her shirt and tied it around his wound. She was crying when she called 911, explaining what happened between short, choppy breaths. In the sudden, blurry, urgent split seconds when a threat bursts into view, the impulse to pull the trigger can overwhelm the need to accurately identify the target, leading to snap decisions that bring permanent tragedies.Īs Schwartz, 21, lay on the floor, bleeding but conscious, Bukrym hoped her friend could be saved. “The bullets are going to be going toward him, also.” In March, Florida passed a law allowing some teachers to carry guns in the classroom.īut good guys with guns don’t only shoot bad guys with guns. “When a sick individual comes into that school, they can expect major trouble,” Trump said of the proposal during a White House press briefing. In the days following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida that left 17 dead and 14 wounded, President Donald Trump and others called on school districts to arm teachers for the safety of their students, an idea originally proposed by the NRA in 2012 after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Pro-gun media outlets, such as Bearing Arms, which has around two million followers on its Facebook page, and Active Self Protection, which has more than three-quarters of a million subscribers on its YouTube channel, highlight cases of armed civilians warding off attackers. In at least 27 of those cases, criminal charges were dismissed or never filed because authorities deemed the shootings accidental, an act of self-defense in a moment of panic.įor years, gun rights advocates have promoted the use of firearms by arguing that “to stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun,” a refrain National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre repeated in a speech in late February. Since 2015, at least 47 people have shot friends, loved ones, roommates, or emergency responders they said they’d mistaken for home intruders, killing 15, according to an analysis of US gun violence incidents by BuzzFeed News and the Trace. “You remember every second of it,” Bukrym said in an interview. Bukrym dropped the gun and fell back against the wall in shock, and soon tears welled in her eyes. The bullet struck the man in the chest, and as he collapsed, Bukrym got a look at his face for the first time. 380, pointed it at the figure filling her doorframe, and pulled the trigger. As the door opened, she reached under her pillow for her handgun, a Ruger LCP. A slightly built 23-year-old living away from her parents’ house for the first time, she’d prepared herself for the possibility of danger. Standing in the middle of her room on that Friday evening in April 2017, the lights on and the cloudy sky darkening out the window, Bukrym moved quickly, instinctively. “There’s a lot of bad people in the whole world, and a lot of people think, ‘It’ll never be me.’ But I’m cautious.” “Everybody in our community was on edge,” she said.
#Good bad i'm the guy with the gun series
There’d been a series of car break-ins at the Ocala, Florida, apartment complex, and Bukrym and her neighbors worried that burglaries would come next. It was a crashing sound, near the front of her apartment, and a few seconds later, another noise twisted her stomach and rattled her nerves: the sound of her bedroom doorknob jiggling, then turning, and the door swinging open with a creak.