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This meme perfectly describes what you should tell your wife the next time you buy a gun. Tell her that purchase makes you a hero. It is one less gun in a criminal's hands.That said, the truth is the more guns that sit with law-abiding citizens, the safer the rest of us are. Burglars want your television. They do not want your bullets. They weigh the risk.In the United States only about 9 percent of home burglaries happen when someone is inside. In Britain, where legal guns are scarce, that number has run near 43 percent. American thieves wait until the house is empty. British thieves walk in while you are home. That is not an accident. That is a calculation.A Justice Department study of more than 1,800 imprisoned felons found that 80 percent said burglars avoid houses when people are home because they fear getting shot. Seventy-four percent said guns deter crime. Fifty-eight percent said they worried more about an armed citizen than about the police. Forty percent said they had already walked away from a crime because they thought the victim was armed.They love a gun-free-zone sign. It tells them nobody inside can shoot back. They do not love a house that might be guarded by a .357. They cannot see which house is which, so they treat a well-armed neighborhood as a bad bet.Limited government means the state does not get to disarm the honest man and then promise to arrive after the window is broken. Equal application of the law means the criminal faces the same risk he creates. A free people keep the tools that make a thief think twice.Buy the gun. Keep it ready. You are not the problem. You are the reason the man in the mask has to look for an easier house.Would a burglar rather see a gun-free-zone sign on your lawn, or know the neighborhood shoots back?