Gun control advocates think they’re slick when they quote statistics like more than 35,000 men, women, and children are killed each year by guns in the United States and among high-income countries the US accounts for 80 percent of all gun deaths in the world, 86 percent of all women killed by guns, and 87 percent of all children younger than 14 who are killed by guns. What do these numbers mean? Simply this: they prove American exceptionalism, an idea that goes back to Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous nineteenth-century French historian who wrote that America was a great place to live and a model for the world because we were bigger, bolder, and brimming with badass braggadocio.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right of the people in this nation to bear arms and it’s amazing that so many of my fellow citizens do not choose to exercise this right. What’s wrong with these folks? They don’t mind exercising their right to free speech, religion, and peaceable assembly. Are they put off by the noise that guns make, the expense of buying a firearm, the fear that they will be harshly judged by those who think gun ownership should be way more restricted than it is now? Well dear reader, there are lots of ways to remedy all that and the first way is to make sure that everybody understands the many advantages of owning a gun and how great it would be if everybody possessed one.

So what are some of the benefits of having a gun and universal gun ownership? Here’s a few that come to mind: If everyone carried a gun people would get faster service at the motor vehicles bureau and individuals would listen more respectfully to each other in the office. Women would feel safer packing pistols during dates and subway rides would be great adventures since if someone had a bad day and was jostled by another person on a train they might pull a gun, which I doubt they’d use since everyone on the train would be carrying. The meekest among us would feel tremendous self-confidence knowing that threats by bullies could be easily handled by firing off a round or two.

This may be hard to imagine but there are actually people around who favor gun control. They argue, in addition to the stats already mentioned in the first paragraph, that every year in the United States more than 1300 children die in gun-related accidents, that guns and domestic violence make a deadly combination (in the US, over half of family murders are carried out by a handgun), and that access to a gun increases the risk of death by suicide by three times. My answer to their arguments is this: Kapow! Kapow! Kapow!

Lily-livered liberal loons cannot be allowed to take way the fundamental, God-given right that each of has to own a gun. Hey, if the good lord didn’t want us to have guns he wouldn’t have given us trigger fingers. And why is it that human beings are at the top of the food chain? It’s because we got to the ordnance first, ahead of the chimps, apes, orangutans, and all the other beasts. If those guys had gotten their paws on the hardware before us, we’d be the ones in cages at the zoo. Guns are also good for clam digging, stirring soup, and they make excellent paperweights. As a proud member of the NRA (the National Reprobates Association), and as a firm believer in the notion that “guns don’t kill people, bullets kill people,” I can tell you unequivocally, unmistakably, and without the slightest doubt that despite their increasing appearance in America’s mass shootings there’s nothing like an AR-15 to keep one’s life and documents safe and in place.