Maya Angelou Owns a Gun, Once Fired at an Intruder
April 5th, 2013
Following the tragic Newtown school shooting that took place earlier this year, some well-meaning but misguided politicians began pushing new legislative initiatives that would only restrict the gun rights of law-abiding citizens who would never commit gun violence. Gun crimes have a tendency to inspire strong emotions among the public at large in ways that defensive uses of guns do not, and this can cause a degree of tunnel vision in the debate about how to best approach securing America for those who abhor violence.
Poet Maya Angelou is doubtlessly a national treasure. Her poetry, journalistic work, and autobiographies have inspired generations, and she worked alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. as an organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the Civil Rights Movement. In a recent interview with Time Magazine, Maya Angelou indicated that she keeps a firearm for home defense and once had to fire it to scare off an intruder at her North Carolina home. What might have happened had she not been armed when she heard an intruder rustling in the leaves outside? Check out the Fox News transcript of the Time interview, and let’s talk gun rights after the jump.
Understated in the Gun Rights Debate: Defensive Uses of Guns
Gun control advocates often point out the numbers when it comes to victims of gun violence. However, it’s difficult to quantify the number of fatalities that are prevented by defensive uses of firearms. How often have rural land owners driven off would-be burglars and home invaders by firing a warning shot? How many more victims would have died over the many years had defensive uses of firearms not stopped murderers in their tracks?
Maya Angelou, it turns out, may owe her life to gun ownership. Said Angelou in the above-linked Time Magazine interview, “Well, I do like to have guns around, I don’t like to carry them. But I like — if somebody is going to come into my house and I have not put out the welcome mat, I want to stop them.”
Someone Tried to Come into Maya Angelou’s House Sans Welcome Mat, She Stopped Them
After hearing of her penchant for gun ownership, the Time reporter asked Maya Angelou if she had ever discharged her weapon, to which she replied, “I was in my house in North Carolina. It was fall. I heard someone walking on the leaves. And somebody actually turned the knob. So I said, ‘Stand four feet back because I’m going to shoot now!’ Boom! Boom! The police came by and said, ‘Ms. Angelou, the shots came from inside the house.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know how that happened.’”
Whoever turned her doorknob fled before facing the hot barrel of Maya Angelou’s sidearm. While it’s hard to know whether the intentions of this intruder included killing the treasured poet, the discussion is an academic one primarily because her decision to brandish and fire her pistol rendered those intentions moot. Had she not owned a gun at all, there is a realistic chance she would have been a victim of gun violence herself.
The fact that Maya Angelou is an Obama supporter who also recited poetry at the inauguration of former President Bill Clinton demonstrates that the gun rights issue doesn’t fit neatly on the left-right political paradigm. Citizens from all political persuasions recognize that this is a dangerous world, 911 response times aren’t fast enough to guarantee an immediate defense against an active shooter, and self defense is a personal responsibility on a certain level.
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