National Public Radio (NPR) reporter Scott Simon spoke with a mother who said she bought a gun for protection in Aurora, Colorado, and asked her, “Why not just call the police?”
The mother, Misheika Gaddis, told Simon she bought a 9mm pistol because she is a single mom home alone at night with her eight-year-old son, and she is pregnant with another child as well. She explained that she decided to buy the pistol–her first gun–because of crime near her apartment and her experience of coming home from work to find strangers congregating near her door.
Gaddis added, “I stay pretty close to a high school that actually had a shooting sometime this year. Then there’s someone that, like, rides through the neighborhood, and they just let off shots. You can hear gunshots every night.”
Simon asked her what would have to happen in order to spur her to grab the gun and use it in defense of herself and her son. Gaddis responded by suggesting she would grab the gun if someone were kicking in her door or if she heard the little bell on the back of her apartment door ring.
Simon then naively asked, “Why not just call the police?”
Gaddis noted that she has had to call the police in the past and the dispatcher asked her so many questions that the time it took to answer the questions, in addition to the time it took police to arrive, was just too great. This is something privileged white leftists like NPR’s Simon fail to grasp: the reality of crime, and the sobering fact that “when seconds count, the police are minutes away.”