If the Sixth Commandment establishes the duty to preserve innocent life, the practical question follows: by what means? In the world we actually live in — not the one in policy papers — the answer for an ordinary citizen, most of the time, is a personally carried firearm.
This page is the practical case. It is not the moral case (covered separately) and it is not a legal brief. It is the answer to the question: Why carry?
The state cannot be everywhere
The standard objection to civilian firearms is that police are responsible for public safety. In 2020 that argument cracked open in front of millions of people. Police departments were defunded or pulled back; 911 dispatchers in some American cities began telling callers that no officer was coming. People watched riots involving more than thirty participants on the news, and then went home to think about what a “high-capacity magazine” actually means in a country where thirty hostile people in front of your house is no longer hypothetical.
The same year, gun sales broke every record on the books. They would have broken more if the supply chain had been able to keep up. By the end of 2020, polling suggested roughly one in nine Democrats had bought a gun — a number that, depending on which way you flinch, is either alarmingly high or shows how widely the practical case for a personal firearm has spread across the political spectrum.
The lesson is not partisan. It is that the assumption “the police will be there” is a thin one. Even in normal times, response times are measured in minutes; violent encounters resolve in seconds. In abnormal times — a riot, a natural disaster, a deliberate police pullback — minutes can become hours, or never. A citizen who has accepted the duty to preserve life cannot outsource the means of that preservation to a delivery service that may not arrive.
The internal contradiction of the disarmament argument
The same political movements that, in 2020, called for police to be defunded also called for civilians to be disarmed. T.REX’s observation at the time was simple: this combination is incoherent. “We will reduce the number of armed professionals available to protect you, and we will reduce your ability to protect yourself.” That sentence has no consistent worldview behind it — it is two separate ideological priorities that happen to share a microphone.
A citizen evaluating the case for carrying a weapon should notice this. The position that the state must be the only entity allowed to use force is at least coherent. The position that no one should be allowed to use force, including the state, is at least coherent. The position that the state should be diminished while the citizen is also disarmed leaves only one party intact: those who are willing to use force regardless of any law.
Civilians have always pushed firearms forward
A second common argument is that certain weapons are military and not for civilians. This sounds reasonable until you actually look at the history of small arms. With one notable exception — the bolt-action repeating rifle, which armies adopted before civilians did — every major small-arms development from the flintlock forward was pioneered or popularized by civilian inventors and adopted by civilian shooters before militaries caught up. Samuel Colt, Christian Sharps, John Browning, Hiram Maxim, Eugene Stoner: their best work reached the commercial market before, or alongside, military contracts.
The AR-15 is not an exception to this pattern. It is the most recent expression of it. A modern semi-automatic rifle in civilian hands is not a strange military intrusion into civilian life — it is the normal, historically continuous state of affairs in a country whose founders explicitly assumed citizens and soldiers would carry comparable weapons. (See The Citizen-Soldier Tradition.)
What “carrying a weapon” actually means
Carrying a weapon is not a single decision. It is a chain of commitments:
- A weapon you can actually run — chosen for fit and reliability, not fashion. See Pistol Models for fighting handguns.
- A way to keep it on you — a holster that allows fast access in normal clothing, all day, every day. See IWB Holsters.
- The skill to use it under stress — see Training as a Duty.
- The legal knowledge to know when you may — covered in Law & Politics.
- The mental and moral preparation to know when you must — and, equally important, when you must not.
Without all of these, a carried weapon is liability without capability. With them, it is one of the things a free citizen owes the people in his household and his community.
Why this is a responsibility, not a hobby
The framing matters. There is an entire industry of people who own guns the way other people own golf clubs — as a hobby, a collection, a recreational identity. The Sixth Commandment does not condemn this, but it does not satisfy the duty either. The reason to carry a weapon is not that it is fun. (Sometimes it is fun; that is incidental.) The reason is that you have accepted that the protection of innocent life — your own, your family’s, your neighbor’s — is something you are not going to delegate.
In that sense, Why carry? has a single-sentence answer: because the citizen has decided that, if a moment of violence comes, he will not be the reason an innocent person dies.