Do you know the thing that will make a lot of people angrier than almost anything else? If you look them in the eye and tell them: “Nobody is trying to kill you or rape you and nobody wants to kill or rape your spouse or kidnap or molest your children. You have nothing anyone wants enough to take it by theft or force. Any time you get scam messages on the Internet? It’s automated. Nobody is targeting you to scam or con. Nobody wants to get in your house. You could leave the doors unlocked for the rest of your life and nothing would happen. Nobody wants to sell you or your kids drugs. You are no one’s target and you never will be.”

I know this, and it’s why I live my life with no fear of other people. It’s why I have spent decades walking totally alone into places that even cops and soldiers don’t go without backup, and walking out without ever even raising my voice, much less getting hurt or killed. I know that nobody cares. And I’m not inconspicuous, unless I’m at a NASCAR rally or ComicCon. I’m big and very white. But I still get left alone for the most part and, despite actively tempting fate by going into far more dangerous places at dangerous times than most people ever do, I’m fine. Happy as a clam. Completely at home pretty much everywhere.

Most violent crimes - including sexual assault - are perpetrated by the victim’s friends, family, neighbors or acquaintances. The reason serial killers were able to operate with impunity for many years is because all criminal investigation is based upon this simple fact. Very few robberies or home invasions are nearly as random as their victims believe they are. The robber is almost always tipped to the fact that something in the house is worth the risk of stealing it. Online crime is a percentage game - if you send a million scam emails and two people with money respond, it’s worth it. Muggings and pickpocketing are down because no one carries cash and phones are too easy to find (unless you’re sending them to China). Cars have alarms and GPS too. Basically, the only actual real world crimes committed by strangers anymore are kids breaking your car window because you left your purse in it and junkies with angle grinders taking your catalytic converter.

So you don’t need a gun, unless you’ve given yourself a reason to carry a gun. Home security is not a reason to carry a gun. You can solve that with a good security/camera system or bars on your windows if you’re that worried, which you shouldn’t be. If you’d rather have a gun than bars on your windows, that tells me a great deal about your personality: namely, that you’d rather kill another person than be inconvenienced or confronted by the truth that you do, in fact, live your life in fear.

A “responsible“ gun owner is like a “benevolent“ dictator: they are until they aren’t. Every prick who murdered a teenager for the crime of walking while black or mowed down a classroom of children was a responsible gun owner… right until they weren’t.

England gives lie to the idea that when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. Criminals here don’t have guns. In fact, if you were to go out in an empty lot in London and fire a gun a few times harmlessly in the air, it would make the national news the next day. There were 22 gun-related deaths here in 2024, out of a population of 66 million or so. There are probably less guns in all of Great Britain - aside from in the armories of the handful of police authorised to use them and on military bases - than there are in Akron, Ohio.

So people stab each other to death, sure, but you know what nobody ever does? Accidentally stab someone across the street from the person they wanted to stab. On the rare occasions someone goes apeshit and commits a mass stabbing, most or all of the victims survive. The difference is both quantitative and qualitative.

I don’t think no Americans need guns. I’ve lived in rural areas where people hunt for meat they can’t afford to buy and get grizzlies at the back porch or have cattle that need protecting from predators. There are lots of rich and famous people who are targeted by strangers who probably need some kind of armed protection. But all of that could be handled by sensible licensing laws.

The fact that you have to prove you can drive to own a car but don’t have to prove you can shoot a gun to own one is preposterous and no sane person, even a rabid gun aficionado, would disagree with me except on the spurious grounds of stretching both the letter and the intent of the Second Amendment as far as you possibly could. Nobody says it’s a violation of the First Amendment to make it a criminal offense to shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater or explicitly call for violence against a citizen; so we are OK with sensible limitations on our rights.

Why is it not sensible to say that if you want to own a murder machine, you should have to prove you’re mentally stable and capable of hitting what you point it at and obtaining insurance in case somebody gets dead with your gun?

I think what worries a lot of gun nuts is the idea that they couldn’t pass those tests or afford to be responsible for what they do with their guns… and that is the very best argument I can think of for having those restrictions.

But the harder truth to face might not be that you’re not sane or evenhanded enough to have a gun; it’s that you probably don’t need one because you are neither a threat nor a target to anyone on earth - that nobody else even wants what you hold so precious you’d be willing to commit murder to protect it. That’s the real violence most Americans could not bear to undergo: violence to their own sense of value and importance and being the target of other people’s anger or envy or desire.

Americans will wade through oceans of blood, but God forbid someone challenge their sense of specialness.

I’m sorry if I made people mad by saying that the chances of being the victim of a violent crime are smaller now for people in the developed world than it’s ever been in history, but it’s true. It just is.

I personally know at least a dozen people who’ve become rich and famous playing music. Half the people I knew in my twenties also know at least four of those dozen people. (The Killers.) Does that mean that millionaire musicians are thick on the ground? Or does it mean that my particular circumstances - being the child of a professional musician and being a musician myself - puts me in more contact with people who have the potential to become rich and famous than, say, your average mechanic or civil lawyer or line cook? But I know for a fact that those same dozen rich musicians I know also know mechanics and lawyers and line cooks… each of whom can also say they know a rock star. Still doesn’t make rich rock stars a dime a dozen.

Likewise, most people - of any race, class, gender or orientation - go through life without ever getting into so much as a fistfight. Your experience and mine of being physically bullied as schoolchildren and other people’s experience of being abused by their parents are absolutely real and absolutely horrid… but it’s also not the norm. That’s just the truth. Most people go through their entire school career without getting so much as a bloody nose and most parents don’t beat or molest their kids. They just don’t, man.

And before you say “Bullshit, man, I have been abused and bullied my entire life and so have half the people I know,” I want you to just stop for a second and think calmly and rationally about all the memes you post about how your tendency to tell horrible stories about your upbringing tends to freak other people out… and ask yourself if maybe your social circle of other people who’ve suffered the same kinda shit you have might not be a tad self-selecting, because your fucked up shit doesn’t freak them out because they’ve been through it too, and vice versa, and that’s WHY you get along so well? The way combat vets tend to hang out with other combat vets, right?

You can sit in a room full of ex-Marines who’ve seen active deployment and almost every one of em will have a story about a buddy getting shot in the face, but if you were an alien who teleported from your spaceship into that room to try to learn about human life and experience, you’d come out with some pretty skewed assumptions about the average Earthling’s average day, right?

Most of us, statistically speaking, have never been shot or shot at or even punched in the face or sexually assaulted or robbed or beaten by our spouse or our parents. That is absolutely not to minimize the pain of those who have, but if we want to talk about this stuff and try to deal with it as a society we have to be honest and realistic about that society, and the fact is that the number of people who are victims of violent crime versus the number who are absolutely convinced by TV and movies and Fox News that they are going to be murdered or assaulted at any moment is a pretty stupidly large discrepancy.

And that’s not because an armed society is a polite society; it’s because by and large, most people, no matter who they are, are simply not murderers or robbers or rapists… and the ones who are tend to murder and rob and rape people who know them: friends, roommates, neighbors, family members - the people, in other words, who will unlock and open their doors and invite their murderer or rapist or robber in and never even think of going for a gun until it’s much too late because none of us want to think that Cousin Tim is a sociopath even when he starts doing sociopathic shit.

That is why I get left alone on the street for the most part. I know y’all like to chalk that up entirely to white male privilege, but I promise you that’s not a factor that your average Juarez cartel enforcer or al-Shabaab Islamist jihadi or Long Beach Crip really takes into consideration. Do you know what happens to Caucasian skin chock full of XY chromosomes when it gets hit with a 9mm round or gets a knife stuck in it? The same thing that happens to everything else.

The fact that I’m a big man is maybe 20% of it, and it definitely makes the likelihood of sexual assault a lot lower… but most of it is because I mind my business and not other people’s and because I neither act like I’m looking for a problem or terrified of one. I don’t go anywhere I don’t have a reason to be, even if that reason is curiosity. And I’ve always had a really strong sixth sense about knowing when it’s smart to get the fuck out, and I’m smart enough to actually trust it. That does far more for me than my height or build or the color of my skin or my genitals. Anyone - male or female, big or small, white or black or brown or yellow - who’s spent much time on the street will tell you the exact same thing. (And I’d appreciate if you would actually chime in here if you’re one of those people so I don’t sound like a clueless honky asshole swanning my way through the world like it’s a fucking Martha’s Vineyard cocktail party. 😂)

The world is safer now than it’s ever been, at least on the crime front, and no amount of statistical noise or disillusioned lack of reporting by victims can account for the drop in rates of recorded incidents. Nor does pointing out that the number of people who ever fire a gun in legitimate self-defense is absolutely dwarfed by the number who shoot themselves or get shot by their toddler or kill their own partner or kid by accident or even by the person (again, almost always an acquaintance or friend) who’s actually trying to hurt or rob or rape or kill them because they take the person’s gun away from them, and that it’s probably not a good idea for most people to have a gun, and if they absolutely have to have it, it’s a good idea to make sure they know how to use it accurately and don’t have any history of the kind of mental or emotional instability that might lead them to use it wrongly, and probably to make sure they have insurance so that at the very least, if they shoot at a guy on their porch and miss and hit the neighbor’s front door, somebody ponies up to get it fixed.

And yes, I know that people with mental or emotional illness are more often the victims of crime than the perpetrators, but I kinda feel like paranoid schizophrenics and people who often feel like the world is doomed and nothing matters anyway - you know, PEOPLE LIKE ME - should probably be discouraged from owning murder machines just to be safe. Because while many of the people who commit mass murders with guns may not have diagnosed mental illness, every single one of them is, in the practical sense, crazy as a shithouse rat.

I don’t think anything I’m saying here is untrue from a factual perspective, and I don’t think my opinions are particularly irrational or even eccentric. I’m not saying crime doesn’t exist or that any of you who’ve experienced it deserved it or that it didn’t matter or wasn’t really that bad or anything of the kind. I’m saying it’s much less common than most people believe and that our reactions to it as a society are largely driven by irrational fear and our inability to understand that TV is not only not real life, it’s nothing like it. (Most American police, for example, never even pull their gun, much less fire it, and almost all homicide detectives are in about as much danger during their entire career as your average accountant.)

And what I said before, I stand by: that telling people this stuff makes them as angry as telling them their kids aren’t particularly special. Which doesn’t make it any less true, unfortunately. 😂

But I would rather be honest when talking about stuff like this, where lives, rather than egos, hang in the balance.