Imagine telling a rape victim – one who was previously denied a concealed carry permit – that she only had a twenty percent chance of stopping her attacker with a gun. Tell her you won’t settle for anything less than one hundred percent. But if you say this to five rape victims, make sure you don’t report the cumulative percentage. That might cause unnecessary emotional trauma – although I admit to being less than one hundred percent certain as of this writing.

“Gun-control Gary” Sackett also teaches us that homicide and suicide rates are lower in places like Japan where they have more restrictions on handguns. But he fails to tell us that less than forty percent of crimes are reported to the police agencies that are under no obligation to report crimes to the federal government, which does not include any federal crimes in its own reports. Are we to also conclude that there is no federal crime in America? Or should we just ask Martha Stewart instead? Never mind, I think she has a nine year old grandson.

Actually, we do learn something from studying our federal crime statistics; namely that they wildly underestimate the amount of crime in America. And we also learn that, despite their limitations, they are vastly superior to the statistics of virtually every other nation, including highly advanced societies like Zimbabwe and Castro Cuba.

That means we can’t make cross-cultural comparisons like the gun control lobby would lead us to believe. But, fortunately, we can compare our national statistics from one year to the next since they tend to have roughly the same level of error from one year to the next.

When we compare the 1950s to the early 21st Century we realize that the increase in per capita ownership of devices with transistors has been accompanied by an increase in property crime. And the correlation is probably a reflection of a causal relationship – this is because the prevalence of lighter and more portable valuables is more appealing to larcenists and burglars alike.

But there’s no need to fear that a group of people in the Gun Violence Prevention Center will form a sister group called the Transistor Crime Prevention Center. They don’t know that my choice to buy an item with a transistor is driving up the crime rate. In fact, the latest statistics show that Japan has both lower crime and more transistors per capita. If anything, they may start to lobby for concealed carry transistor permits in order to bring crime back down to 1950s levels.

When the public policy director for Gun Owners of Utah said that a concealed permit is something that every adult “needs to consider” he was right. We all need to consider (read: think seriously about) important issues in the 21st Century.

But Dee Rowland said that the assertion that we should “consider” – or think about the issue – is “absurd” adding that even her nine year old grandson asked rhetorically “how could that help?”

The next time you try to talk to a nine year old only to find he is opposed to serious thinking, just ask someone else. You could just survey a member of the gun control lobby or maybe even a Muslim in a shopping mall.

Just as long as someone else is doing your thinking - especially someone with a political agenda - everything will probably work out fine.