A Liberal Defense of the AR-15

Up until very recently, I held the standard issue Democratic Party position on guns. (Something along the lines of: "All guns are more or less unnecessary and bad for society, but no gun is as unnecessary and bad for society as the AR-15.")

Had I ever even held an AR-15 in my hands? No.

Had I ever studied the AR-15? Also no.

But I did know that the gun had been used to kill lots and lots and lots of school kids. I found the increasing frequency of these killings intolerable and the unwillingness of Congress to "do something" exasperating. Enough already! Get those weapons of war off the street!

Fast forward to December, 2024. America had just elected a fascist-curious felon.

I live in an area where Three Percenters and Oath Keepers show off their allegiance with decals in their car windows. The violence of January 6th, 2021 revealed the methods they were willing to use to achieve their objectives. My husband and I acquired a twelve gauge shotgun for home defense.

I had spent most of my life opposed to gun ownership, and now (at the ripe old age of 51) I had become a gun owner. This was disorienting. What did this mean? I obviously could no longer roll my eyes at the Second Amendment. I was keeping a gun and bearing it (to the range, if nowhere else).

But I wasn't yet prepared to embrace gun culture. In particular, I maintained my opposition to so-called "assault rifles". Something in my stomach just didn't sit right with people owning that gun. Frankly, it seemed nuts. With the confidence that only a newbie can muster, I told myself that my twelve gauge was a perfectly reasonable weapon to possess, but that it was reckless to endorse the AR-15. After all, any self-defense benefit was purely theoretical while the classroom carnage was all too real.

Yet, here I am, nine months later, writing an essay in opposition to assault weapons bans, bans on so-called "large capacity magazines", etc. What happened?

Did I get red-pilled by a particularly suave, shirtless ex-Navy SEAL dude bro? Um, no.

Did I succumb to peer pressure from other gun owners? No.

Rather, I think my opinion started to change when I started to study actual self-defense encounters. You see, eventually I decided that I might want something a lot more portable than a shotgun; something that could be concealed and carried for self-defense when I'm out and about. And, because I'm more than a little obsessive, I got into studying filmed self-defense encounters to see what guns and tactics worked best.During my research, I ran across Active Self-Protection, a Youtube channel that specializes in analyzing police body cam and security camera footage of violent confrontations.

I found this video particularly interesting. It documents a security guard needing to fire sixteen rounds to defend himself against a single assailant. Why did he need sixteen? Was the assailant wearing some sort of body armor?

Nope. He needed sixteen rounds because, well, some of his shots missed. (Unlike TV, real life encounters include misses.) Some hit, but didn't hit anything vital that actually stopped the guy. Some hit something vital, but it took a while for the actual "stopping" part to happen. Until he lost enough blood, he was still in the fight.

So, the security guard needed sixteen rounds. He didn't just want them. He needed them. Would he still be there if he was subject to a law demanding he arm himself with no more than ten rounds in a magazine? It's a valid question. Quite possibly, he wouldn't.

When you decide to take some responsibility for your own self-defense, you think about these sorts of things. If I might need sixteen rounds to deal with one bad guy, is it unreasonable to think I might need thirty to deal with two or more? And, given that fascists like to travel in packs, wouldn't it be realistic to think that--if the worse case scenario really does happen and shit hits the fan--a liberal defender would need to be prepared to stave off multiple assailants? And wouldn't an AR be a good platform for that sort of situation?

Of course, this is just one video. An anecdote. But there are more where that came from. Cases where just the sight of an AR-15 was enough to dissuade bad guys from bad guying. (In that case, the AR was actually a violence deterrent.) There have also been cases where it has taken a good guy with an AR-15 to defeat a mass shooter bad guy with an AR-15.

Once confronted with these facts, I had no choice but to jettison my ill-informed notion that self-defense with an AR-15 was "theoretical". You didn't hear about these cases on TV, but they happened. Real people have saved real lives with that much-despised weapon. Maybe we should stop despising it.

Thus concludes the bright and cheery segment of this essay. What follows is a bit darker.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (an industry trade group) estimates that around twenty-four million AR-15s rest in civilian hands. Now, if we assume that the average AR owner has two of them, that would mean we'd have twelve million AR owners in the U.S. Let's be more conservative and say that the average AR owner possesses three of them. That would mean there were eight million AR owners.

Now, let's assume that ten percent of those AR owners are physically fit and well-trained in the AR-15's use, maintenance, etc. That would mean we'd have a possible paramilitary force 800,000 strong. Because of Democrats' allergy to guns, nearly all 800,000 would be conservative. Probably 400,000 would be extremist MAGAs willing to use those weapons to terrorize their political opposition.

For context, our active duty U.S. Army is only 450,000 strong.

If the worst-case scenario occurred, a sort of end-of-America-as-we-know-it, Civil War II, liberals would be outgunned. And, when the shit hits the fan, to be outgunned is to be subjugated.

So, we probably need a lot more Democrats to buy AR-15s. Remember: they can serve as a deterrent. (Just the sight of them can stop bad guys from bad guying.) And, if forced to defend ourselves from a life-threatening attack, the type of violence encountered only in the gravest extreme, we would have an excellent tool at our disposal.

Note one caveat: if you have thoughts of self-harm, or thoughts of harming others, you should pass on gun ownership. But if you can be a safe, sane, sober, moral, prudent person, I think you should consider it. At least have the conversation with your family.

Full disclosure: neither me nor my husband own an AR-15, right now. I have a rifle with a so-called "high capacity magazine", but it's a far cry from an AR-15.

That said, I don't rule out the possibility of acquiring one. One downside: they're very loud. I've been at the shooting range when someone has been shooting one close by and YOWZA do they make noise. In a self-defense encounter, that might prove distracting. One solution is to get a suppressor (aka, "silencer") to keep the dang thing quiet. But there are a lot of hoops to jump through to get one of those. (Another bit of gun regulation that I find appalling.)

Anyway, I understand that some might finish reading this and remain unconvinced. That's okay. If someone reads this and simply re-evaluates their stance on gun control, I've done my job. But if the current crisis worsens to the point of armed conflict, I don't want my side to get its ass kicked because it was too righteous (or conflict-avoidant) to arm itself.