Harvard researcher David Hemenway makes a great case for concealed carry

Here's an excerpt from a great article from Harvard School of Public Health's David Hemenway, comparing criminal vs. self-defense gun uses...

The opportunity for a law-abiding gun owner to use a gun in a socially desirable manner--against a criminal during the commission of a crime--will occur, for the average gun owner, perhaps once or never in a lifetime. It is a rare event. Other than self-defense, the use of a gun against another human is socially undesirable. Regular citizens with guns, who are sometimes tired, angry, drunk, or afraid, and who are not trained in dispute resolution, have lots of opportunities for inappropriate gun uses. People engage in innumerable annoying and somewhat hostile interactions with each other in the course of a lifetime. It should not be surprising that inappropriate, socially undesirable "self-defense" gun uses by people who believe they are law-abiding citizens outnumber the appropriate and socially beneficial use
of guns.

I couldn't think of a better way to explain the rationale for concealed carry.  Here we have a Harvard PhD, funded by the Joyce Foundation, saying that the average person (not even a high risk person!) should expect in his lifetime one confrontation during which he'd be perfectly justified in using lethal force.  I interpret his statement as justifying the daily carry of my concealed pistol.  When that one situation comes, when you're faced with imminent grave bodily injury, there's no better way to deter or stop the threat than with a gun.  He counters this with a specious argument that CCW people will kill indiscriminately when faced with life's everyday annoyances.  Sorry, David, during two decades of shall-issue concealed carry, it hasn't happened.  The evidence is in, and your side clearly lost. 

In addition, Hemenway implies that there exists a distribution of risks.  If the lifetime average number of grave, imminent attacks the average person faces is somewhere between zero and one, then how fat is the right tail of the distribution?  In other words, there is some fraction of the population who can expect two, three, four or more attacks in his lifetime.  I hypothesize that this risk vector includes such factors as urban location, poverty, non-white race and female gender.

These risk factors highlight the racial discrimination and sexism in our gun laws.  When people like Hemenway push to ban civilian gun ownership, they seek to take away the ability of minorities and women to defend themselves in the one or two life-threatening home invasions, muggings, and rapes that they should expect to face in their lifetime. 

It's not the gun banners' proximate intention to further weaken the most vulnerable and at-risk in our society, but that's what they would do.  And it's immoral.