We made the road trip back from Texas last week. It was a three-day drive with a two-year old, a five-month old, two large dogs and two separate vehicles. Coming into Laramie on day two, I would have questioned our sanity if not for our resolution that we will not fly while the TSA is still gate raping toddlers and old people.

Somewhere in Wyoming, I flipped on NPR. NPR has two purposes: it plays classical music for my kiddos and the political commentary irritates me enough that it keeps me awake at those points in a long drive when I might find it tempting to fall asleep behind the wheel (parts of Wyoming, eastern Colorado and practically all of Kansas).

Sure enough, it didn’t let me down. They were doing a program on guns and a caller from Arizona lamented the fact that you can buy guns, and that you can even buy them at gun shows. And some have assault rifles! What do people need those for, anyway?

If I lived in Arizona—particularly in the Phoenix area—I might want an assault rifle. But I couldn’t have one, legally. They’ve been restricted since 1986. You’ll have to forgive her hysterics, though, since it’s an easy mistake for someone who has never been around guns to make. There is a difference between assault rifles and assault weapons, and even something like an AR-15 (it says AR, it MUST be an assault rifle!) isn’t truly classed as an assault rifle because it’s only semi-automatic.

People are afraid of the unknown. While numbers are higher in the last Gallup poll than they have been since 1993, still slightly less than half of Americans admit to being gun owners, making guns and gun ownership seem almost foreign to the average American. I’m not sure this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment. While, yes, the Founding Fathers often had no access to a police force and the United States was still an agrarian economy, I wonder what they would think of modern Americans and our hesitancy to take responsibility for our own self-defense.

Because that’s really what it comes down to—if someone kicks in the door of my house, I can either call the police and hope they get there before the bad guys get to me and my kids (abdicating my right to self-defense), or I can call the police while I load guns and tell them I’ll handle the situation while they’re on their way.

We would never think of giving up the right to free speech (even though it is happening), or that it could somehow just fall by the wayside as we progressed into a new age of agreeability where no one said anything to offend anyone else. Would we even want to imagine a world where we just decided along the way that trials by jury were archaic and unnecessary?

So, why, then, do a majority of Americans believe that gun ownership is unnecessary and that someone else will just magically be there to take care of them? Or, even if they live in a safe, crime-free area, that owning a gun that might be handy in ye olde “well regulated” militia isn’t something they need to do? How have we gotten to the point where people are calling into national radio shows wondering why other people even want to own guns?

So why do I own guns? Primarily, I like having my guns for self-protection and then for sporting purposes. Thirdly, it’s great stress relief at the end of a long week, just to spend a day putting roughly 150 rounds down range like I did last Saturday with a bunch of ladies in a women’s only handgun course (I would have shot more, but I only had two seven-round magazines with me and at the end of the day, reloading was getting tough!). It’s too bad that lady from Arizona wasn’t there, actually, since I think she would probably have had a great time and developed a whole new level of empowerment and self-reliance. She might have figured out, too, why those of us who own guns appreciate them and would like to continue owning them.

Link to the latest Gallup data on gun ownership: http://www.gallup.com/poll/150353/Self-Reported-Gun-Ownership-Highest-1993.aspx

Photo taken in Minute Man National Historical Park. Sculpture : “Minuteman” by sculptor Henry Hudson Kitson (1863-1947); image courtesy of Aldaron