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Life in Lion Country

Baltimore resident Tracey Halvorsen recently wrote about her frustration with living in Baltimore:

Life takes you places, you follow a course that isn’t completely of your own making. One day you wake up, and it’s really all up to you. So where do you want to live? I happen to live in a city. Baltimore, to be specific.

And I’m growing to absolutely hate it here.

I’m tired of hearing about 12 year old girls being held up at gun-point while they walk to school.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/blog/bs-md-ci-12-year-old-girl-robbed-20140206,0,5595591.story

I’m tired of saying “Oh Baltimore’s great! It’s just got some crime problems.”
http://baltimorecrime.blogspot.com/

I’m tired of living in a major crime zone while paying the highest property taxes in the state.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/02/06/city-baltimore-is-on-path-to-financial-ruin-report-says/

I’m tired of hearing about incompetent city leaders who are more fixated on hosting the Grand Prix than dealing with thousands of vacant buildings that create massive slums, and rampant crime.

I’m tired of being looked at like prey.

The unfortunate fact is that she’s looked upon as prey because she is.

Lions don’t pick on things that can kill them. They look for prey that can be easily, and safely, killed then eaten. They go after the weak; the ones who can’t fight back. Some thug on the street looking at her sees weakness. Of course, there’s a small chance that she’s armed, but it’s a vanishingly small chance. There are only a few hundred carry permits issued in the State of Maryland. There’s a 1 in 8473 chance that she’s the dangerous one in the herd. That young lion knows, with 99.988% certainty, that he can safely chow down on her.

Now of course, it’s highly unlikely that she’s the type of person who would arm herself. She probably considers a “rape whistle” to be overly aggressive. But that’s not how concealed carry works for people like her.

Concealed carry protects everyone by decreasing the young lions’ level of confidence. In shall issue States and localities, somewhere between 2% and 5% of the adult population will apply for permits. When the odds of meeting a “safe” victim decrease from 99.988% to 96%, the business of being a young lion gets a little more dicey. 96% may seem like good odds, but the point of securing prey like the author is to get money to get high; not to get into a gunfight. At some point, the risk becomes too high and the lion learns to become a jackal instead. He scavenges (i.e. commits property crimes) rather than make his own kills. So unless she goes about with a sandwich board reading “I’M NOT ARMED”, she gets mistaken for one of the dangerous members of the heard and she gets left alone.

If she’s wondering what else she could be doing to improve her city, she should note that her State gets an A- from the anti-gun lobby for its gun laws. She should be working to change that. She should be trying to make her State more like Wyoming.

They don’t have that lion problem in Wyoming, by the way.

(H/T: FreeRepublic.Com)

Posted in News, Self-defense.

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