Bart Barber Posts Confusing, Rambling Thread on Guns
On Friday, soon-to-be SBC presidential candidate Bart Barber posted a 25-tweet thread on why he doesn’t carry a concealed firearm, yet owns a “large number of guns,” yet frequently comes across situations where he wished he was armed but left his guns at home (four in the last two weeks), yet thinks the reasonableness of gun ownership is based on whether a person resides in an urban or rural area of the country.
I’ve read through it twice now and (despite the heartbreaking recounting of the boy who died running out in front of his SUV) I can’t figure out what the point was of posting it, except perhaps Barber’s insatiable need to enter the Twitter conversation on every topic in the public conversation.
Barner begins by noting, “Self-defense or defense of my loved ones doesn’t motivate me” because apparently, the people he knows would rarely need to draw a gun in self-defense. He must be unaware of the statistics indicating that defensive firearm use happens between 500,000 and 3 million times every year. He follows with a bizarre analogy comparing the risk of being victimized by an assailant to being victimized by diabetes due to his consumption of milkshakes.
He follows by claiming that carrying (or presumably owning) guns in case of a civil war is “nowhere near” the present circumstances while noting that he has “seen first hand what life looks like in the midst of a conflict like this.” He avoids remarking on whether those involved in the referenced conflict carried guns or not.
Barber heartbreakingly recounts the tragedy of the 14-year-old boy who ran out in front of the vehicle he was driving, was struck by the vehicle, and died while Bart held his hand, before claiming that this tragic incident was Barber “involved in taking a life,” ostensibly comparing his experience to defensive gun use (which is the last resort used to save a life). His experience in driving the vehicle that a boy jumped out in front of (and the grief that ensues in seeing a life tragically cut short) is not a reason to not carry a concealed firearm – instead, it’s a reason to carry. Barber notes that he supports the rights of others to conceal carry (including presumably those of us trained enough to defend him and his family should the need arise), he just won’t do it for them.
He follows by noting a list of reasons to have a firearm (including one clearly defensive situation), yet revealing he didn’t have one at the time:
Barber claims that perhaps the divide on carrying firearms boils down to urban (where concealed guns are carried by nearly every institution looking to protect valuable assets and access) versus rural (where guys like him apparently need guns regularly but don’t have them for some reason) before an astute responder boils down the apparent moral of Barber’s story:
Readers should be forgiven for not getting the point of the thread, other than perhaps Barber needing to say something in response to the renewed conversation about gun rights in the wake of the Uvalde school shooting. And of course, the something being said is an attempt to satisfy those on all sides of the debate.
For my part, all I can figure from this is that not only does Bart Barber refuse to train or conceal carry in a country with 400 million firearms and close to 100,000 incidents of aggravated assault every year, but he also won’t carry a firearm around the farm to have on hand when needed as a tool. He seems to have added nothing to the conversation except a personal and confusing narrative. Oh well, maybe next time.
About Author
Protection of one’s family is a God-ordained responsibility. If you’re not motivated to fulfill that responsibility, something is wrong.
Certain factors, such as crimes prevented by deterrence, cannot be quantified. If your thinking is solely based on statistics and probabilities, you’re already in error, particularly if the logic is circular in that what you’re basing on given probabilities also affects those same probabilities. Your probability of being struck by lightening is very slim, but if everyone went out and stood under tall trees in thunderstorms, those probabilities would obviously change.
Or better said, decisions based on probabilities that are based on statistics, when those decisions circularly influence those same statistics upon which they’re based. It is circular reasoning.