Besides the extraordinary cost of maintaining a full-time force that will always be at their stations, we must also worry about the prospect of collateral damage that an armed volunteer can cause when missing his target, for example, or if the weapon falls into the hands of a child or someone not properly trained in the use of guns, or into the hands of a person intent on doing evil.

Real violence and TV violence are not the same. Even highly trained police officers confirm that when real-life shooting begins, the adrenaline rush that kicks in will often cause an experienced officer to empty his weapon even after the immediate threat has been neutralized, resulting in many shootings that were never intended. How do we balance those concerns against the image of an armed terrorist entering a school or house of worship with nobody inside who is trained and armed to respond, leaving us faced with the choice of cowering in fear or fighting armed attackers with our bare hands until our heroic first responders arrive on the scene, hopefully in time to prevent mass murder?

I am worried, however, about encouraging a plan that arms too many civilians. As someone who has spent 40 years in the criminal-justice system, I have been around guns and the people who use them for both good and bad reasons. I have seen the murder and mayhem that weapons can cause when used by criminals, but I also know of many cases in which guns were used by private citizens who, despite their best intentions, caused more harm than good, as well as cases in which a failure to safeguard the weapon resulted in horrific tragedy and the loss of innocent life.

FK – How about just forcing our governments to acknowledge the most basic right any human, any creature, possesses, that of self defense, the right to fight back against criminals whether they be in government, on the street, in the home or wherever?

But that ‘scares’ you too much doesn’t it? You’d rather a grandmother be beaten or a child be raped by thugs, when the victims aren’t otherwise capable of fighting back against superior strength or numbers in the several minutes to hours it can take for official ‘help’ to arrive.

Many millions of instances of self-defense with guns simply aren’t reported.

It’s time to put the governments of the world in their place, as servants to ‘we the people’ and not as our eternal masters.

A right applied for is a privilege. Life is not a privilege, it’s a right. The tools to defend said life are a right, not a privilege.