Who, exactly, do weapons laws protect...

So much of our gun debate is based on hypothetical examples, I thought I would pass along a real world example of the ways in which weapons laws, which are intended to protect law-abiding citizens from the criminal element in our society, actually wind up making us softer targets for those who would do us harm.

The story I'm about to tell concerns a knife, but replace the knife with a gun, and the story remains the same, and the ramifications do not change.

I carry a pocketknife... a little three-inch Spyderco blade. It freaks some people out in this town but as I always point out, it's a tool like any other. There's no difference between what I carry and a leatherman, except that my knife is also useful for personal defense.... though mostly I use it to cut up the apples I eat with my lunch.

Couple weeks ago I went to a hard rock show at a medium sized club. Now, hard rock crowds are notorious... perhaps no other music audience is MORE notorious, with the possible exception of Hip Hop crowds. Because of that, I have never been to a rock show where I was not frisked before being allowed to enter the venue.

On this night, I parked a couple hundred yards away from the venue, it was very cold, and I was catching up with a close friend I had not seen in a while, so when we got to the front door of the club, I suddenly realized... "oh crap, my knife is in my pocket!"

Almost at the same moment, the front door opened as someone came out and I noticed that there was no security presence and no one entering the show was being frisked.

So now I faced a pretty stark calculation. I don't know if carrying a weapon into a concert is illegal, per se, but it's definitely not the smart move... especially in a venue where people were likely to be drinking. The right thing to do was to walk all the way back to my car and lock the knife in my trunk.

But again, back to the fourth paragraph of this post... hard rock crowds are notorious for carrying weapons wherever they think they can get away with it. And here we were at a hard rock show where no one was checking to see if the people coming in to the show were carrying weapons or not. Anyone with a violent streak and a propensity towards criminal behaviour was probably not going through the same mental/moral calculation that I was, and if I got rid of the knife, there was a good chance I would be putting myself in a situation where one or more of the people in the venue would be carrying a weapon, while I would be totally unarmed. But even so, the reality was that the chances I would need a knife to defend myself at some point during this concert were extremely slim.

So I did the right thing, went back and put the knife in the car.

An hour later, I'm watching the show, having forgotten about the whole affair, and sure enough, a guy behind us starts getting angry and more than a little rowdy. On top of that, he and his buddy decided that there was something about my friend and me that they didn't like. He spent the next hour or so trying to escalate into a major confrontation with us. We spent just as much time and effort trying to de-escalate the confrontation. We moved around the venue, we ignored him, nothing seemed to work. What we had going for us was that he was drinking mixed drinks two at a time through a straw, and we knew that if we avoided him long enough, he would eventually get too drunk to do anything and break off his agressiveness... which is ultimately what happened.

But what if he hadn't been drinking so heavily? What if he had taken advantage of the fact that no security guard was checking the fans for weapons, and caried something in? What if he'd pulled a knife on me?

Interesting questions as I reflected on the fact that I had voluntarily disarmed myself hours earlier.

And that's the problem with weapons laws. Law-abiding citizens obey them because we follow the rules and do the right thing. Criminals do not because they are criminals. Talk about hypotheticals all you want, but at the end of the day, weapons laws create an unarmed population of law-abiding citizens that are a soft target for armed criminals who never had any intention of following the rules in the first place.

These are the fact of the case, and they are undisputed.