Taking control of your personal safety by exercising your Second Amendment rights is something we NRA Women encourage. But if you’re going to do so, it’s important that you step back and think about why, and what your mission is when carrying a gun.
The “why” seems pretty obvious: We want to protect ourselves and our families. That’s an excellent answer, but when you carry concealed, your everyday mission goes a bit deeper than that. What does it really mean?
Think about what purpose you hope to achieve when you put that gun on every day. What’s your goal or your primary objective, really deep down, at its heart? Using a firearm in self-defense is a life-changing event, even if it goes according to plan and you “win” your defensive encounter. In the extreme, it could cost you your life literally or figuratively. What are you willing to lay everything on the line for? That’s your mission.
I’ll tell you my mission, and I think it’s one that many or most of us share: I want to come home safely to my family at the end of every day, and to keep them from harm when they are with me. That’s it.
Now, you might have a slightly different mission, and that’s fine. What are you willing to risk it all for? Maybe your mission is to help your fellow man. Maybe part of it is to represent the firearms community well. Maybe part of your goal when carrying concealed is to stand up for those who can’t stand up for or defend themselves. All of those are worthy goals and missions.
The key is that once you have really, truly defined why you carry and what your goal is, you have to examine your behavior and attitudes and make sure they match your mission. I’ve written about this extensively in “Should You Get Involved?”and “The Problem With the Sheepdog Analogy,” but it bears repeating because it gets directly to the heart of my mission and my reason for carrying. Because my goal is to get home safely and protect my family, I don’t involve myself in things that would jeopardize that goal. I don’t step into violent or volatile situations that aren’t my business; I run away from trouble rather than confront it. I don’t chase down troublemakers; I let them leave. I don’t start anything if I can help it—I back down from an argument, even when I’m right, because I’m armed, and escalating a disagreement carries a risk of a situation spinning out of control. And if a stupid argument spirals into me needing to draw my gun, I’ve failed at my mission of simply getting home safely. Escalating an argument is what you’d do if your mission is to defend your own pride or ego, not your life.
Maybe I’m taking the coward’s way out; I don’t know. And maybe I’d feel differently when faced with the reality of protecting a stranger, especially if it was a child or other particularly vulnerable individual. But my mission isn’t to save strangers. My mission is to protect myself and my family and get home safely, so I don’t do things that put me in harm’s way if they’re not required to accomplish my mission.
If your mission is different—you want to help people—you might behave differently. This is an admirable mission, but I want you to decide now, while you’re cool-headed and under no pressure, what your primary objective is and think through how it affects your behavior.
We’ve had several examples in the news in the past decade about people whose mission differed from mine. Remember George Zimmerman in Florida? While I can’t put words in George’s mouth, I think it’s safe to say part of his mission when he left his house that evening, armed, was to protect his neighborhood. This is a gross oversimplification of what happened, but George made many decisions that night, some that were aligned with his mission and some that probably weren’t, as the situation changed rapidly. The end result was that someone died and George’s life was essentially ruined.
Kyle Rittenhouse is another example. If Kyle’s reason for owning/carrying a gun was like mine—to get home safely—he would never have been on the street that night in the first place. So it’s pretty safe to assume part of his mission included protecting his father’s store, and if I had to guess, a general sense of “someone has to stand up against this chaos” righteous indignation was probably involved. A worthy mission, many would agree. But again, circumstances change rapidly, and Kyle found himself on trial because of the eventual consequences of his decision to carry out his protective mission. With his acquittal, Kyle scored what many consider a victory for the 2nd Amendment and for law and order in general, which you could argue might mean he fulfilled his original mission (although this probably wasn’t the way he expected it would play out). Was it worth it? You’d have to ask Kyle.
Imagine you’re watching TV at 10 p.m. and hear a disturbance down the street. Peeking out the window, you see is a fight is obviously developing and about to turn violent. This is where your mission comes into play to dictate your actions. Me? My mission is to get home safely to my family and protect them—and I’m already home and we’re all already safe. I’m calling the police, locking my doors and watching out the window. Grabbing a gun and running out into the street to try to break up that fight, while maybe tempting from a nosy-neighbor perspective, is contrary to my mission. It would be a foolish choice for me.
But if your mission involves protecting your neighborhood, standing up for the vulnerable, helping people when you can or being a peacemaker, you might make a different choice. Staying inside doing nothing wouldn’t align with your mission. Going out to try to cool everyone down might be better in line with your goals. Is that a dumb thing to do? Maybe, from a tactical perspective, but you and I are trying to accomplish different goals, so we must use different tactics. You have to make sure your mission is worth the potential consequences.
In a less obvious example, say you found someone trying to break into your car. You shout at them from a distance and they look up at you, then drop their tools and start running away. Your primary objective determines what you do next. For me, I’m done. They’re leaving, and I’ll call the police, but that’s it. That enables me to get home safely to my family. But if your instinct is to draw your gun and chase them because you’re outraged, you need to examine what your mission really is. That behavior might mean your pride and possessions are tied up in your mission—which might be OK, but if that’s not the case, you’ve let your behavior and your mission get separated, and you’re likely to regret whatever comes next.
We all make choices every day based on what’s most important to us. And we have to live with the consequences of our choices when it comes to firearms. The key is to clearly define your “why”—your own mission and goals for concealed carrying—and act accordingly, letting it drive your decision-making. If your mission is worth everything to you, and your actions work toward that mission, you’ll have made the right choices for you.
