Concealed Carry
“Everybody get on the ground!,” a shadowy figure shouts as he fires two shots in the air in your local bank. Everyone is paralyzed in fear and cowers at the sharp sound of gun shots. You’re with your lovely spouse and your two small children, the crook has the gun pointed towards you and your family. You see his index finger slowly squeezing the trigger to shoot them “BAM!” A shot is fired. By the time you open your eyes, you a lifeless body slowly descend to the ground. Your eyes begin to tear up then abruptly stop when you notice something: The lifeless body isn’t the cadaver of your loved one but instead the corpse of the crook who threatened to take the life of someone you loved. You look to your left that there is a guy with a gun in his hands with an iron grip, knuckles turning white from the pressure he’s exerting. The gun is still smoking, which somehow takes a huge burden off your chest. Situations like this is happening daily in America and authorities aren’t always around to protect us. Concealed carry is why your spouse and two children are still alive to retell their frightening story. Thus, Americans should have a right to concealed carry.
To begin, concealed carry is a constitutional right to law-abiding citizens. Supporters of concealed carry say that “criminals are less likely to attack someone they believe to be armed. They cite the 2nd Amendment’s ‘right of the people to keep and bear arms’...”(concealedguns.procon). It is set in stone that Americans have- or should have the right to keep and bear arms- why should this era be any different? The dangers present when the Amendment was written are, in a way, still present. It is absurd to want to enforce a law that goes against our own national ethics. In addition, the same source says “most adults who legally carry a concealed gun are law-abiding and do not misuse their firearms”(concealed.procon). America is too concerned about what criminals are legally able to do, but in that limit the freedom of law-abiding citizens. Criminals will break laws regardless of the sequel of their crimes if they are caught. Laws only limit the freedom, and in this case, the safety of the “good guys”
Furthermore, authorities cannot always protect everyone. As represented in the hypothetical example in the introduction to this essay,”it’s extremely unlikely that police officers will be able to arrive and save you from harm faster than an attacker can farm you” (concealedcarry). As much as authorities try to, their efforts often go fruitless to get to the area where a crisis occurred before it is too late. Another source says “The average police response to an emergency call is 11 minutes, with some responses taking longer. In Detroit, the average response time is 58 minutes”(concealedguns.procon).  It’s frivolous to, and even to think to, keep your own safety in the hands of authorities alone. Concealed carry will bolster already low safety and potentially make it a high-medium, being as though it is true that the police cannot get to you faster than you can be harmed. Try as they might, the police’s efforts to protect everyone in their jurisdiction can, and will go in vain.
Indubitably, criminals will find ways to illegally conceal a firearm regardless of what laws are enforced. One source says that “criminals will carry them anyway,”(debate) and that is true, it is far too late to try to enforce gun laws when “there are 270 million firearms possessed by civilians and only 897,000 are carried by the police”(dosomething). At more than 100 times as may firearms carried by civilians versus policemen, it is, unfortunately, far too late to want to regulate how civilians will use them. Criminals use drugs and “drugs are illegal, but people still obtain them and use them”(debate). Illegal concealed carry is almost just as easy as carrying a small amount of illegal drugs, and it happens right under the authorities noses even with laws put into place to ban them. To be honest, “the only people it will hurt are the good, law-abiding citizens”(debate).
In conclusion, Americans should be able to keep the constitutional right they both need and deserve. Besides that, for safety purposes, Americans should be able to protect themselves in a case that the police cannot. Also, criminals will find a way if concealed carry is banned to carry guns illegally.