BELLEVUE, WA – Participants in Saturday’s planned “March For Our Lives” events around the country should use the opportunity to celebrate the lives of all the survivors of violence who are alive today because they had a firearm with which to fight back, the Second Amendment Foundation said today.
“Every year, hundreds of thousands of Americans defend themselves with firearms, often without firing a shot,” noted SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “They are victims of violence, too, but they are alive today because they had the will and the tools to fight back.
“Each year,” he noted, “between 800,000 and 2.5 million people use guns to defend themselves and others. That’s 2,100 to 6,800 people every day whose lives are saved, thanks to guns.
“We join in spirit with all of those who will be marching to remember the victims in Florida,” he continued. “However, what began as a worthwhile desire to make schools safer has been assimilated into the gun prohibition campaign. A worthy cause is being exploited by those with an anti-rights political agenda.
“Lost in all of this debate is the fact that lives are saved every day because a properly-used gun was available,” Gottlieb observed. “Contrast what happened this week in Maryland with what happened last month in Florida. Who knows how many lives were saved thanks to the presence of a gun in the right hands?
“Remember last year’s intervention by an armed citizen outside a church in Texas,” he added. “Remember the school in Pearl, Mississippi where an armed school official stopped a teenage madman. Think about all of the times that people have saved their own lives or the lives of others because they had a gun.
“It is admirable to want a better world,” Gottlieb concluded. “We all want that, for ourselves, our children, our neighbors and friends. But we shouldn’t want to reach that goal by trampling on the rights of others, and that’s a lesson that apparently isn’t being taught in schools these days.”