Sister Doin' It For Herself

Sister Doin' It For Herself - A Pittsburgh woman with a concealed pistol permit ended the career of a serial rapist yesterday.

As the Instapundit asks - why isn't this getting all sorts of media attention?

The eminently sensible Eugene Volokh (a law professor at UCLA) says this about this incident, and its relation to the concealed-carry debate:

The debates about concealed carry laws, and about gun control generally, ought not, I think, be fought based on anecdotes, whether pro-gun-rights or pro-gun-control. One can only find out the merits of a policy by looking at aggregate data, plus whatever moral or constitutional logic that one thinks is relevant; in a nation of 280 million people, there are going to be isolated incidents that fit virtually any profile.

Nonetheless, I've generally found that even logically and empirically sound arguments work best if they also include some specific incidents as illustrations -- that just seems to be the way the human mind works. There are indeed plenty of defensive gun uses each year; there's a hot controversy about how many there are (the estimates range from just under 100,000/year to 2.5 million/year), but there certainly are lots of them. And this case seems like a very good illustration of this phenomenon.

And it's also just good to hear about, I think.

All food for thought as the concealed-carry debate spools up for another run here in Minnesota.

Posted by Mitch at October 15, 2002 09:52 AM