Why do liberals bleed?

So asks a psychotherapist unfortunate enough to live in that bastion of the far Left, Berkeley, California. Writing at the American Thinker, she even ponders the idea of gun ownership. An excerpt:

I've been thinking about learning how to fire a gun, maybe even buying one. Now if you are a lifelong conservative, Red State dweller, and NRA member, you might be thinking, "Big yawn. What's next? She'll be telling us what she had for breakfast?"

So let me try to convey to you the enormousness, the Alice in Wonderland quality of my even posing the question, something I've never, ever considered in my life. No one I know owns a gun. I've never seen a gun (well on a holster of a police officer but I never wanted to get up close and personal with it). I have given lots of good money over the years for gun control. Learning to fire a gun seems as ludicrous as deciding to take up brain surgery.

But, I am rethinking absolutely everything. There is not a single thing that I believed, that I held absolute and holy, that is not up for grabs. My brain is in a tizzy 24/7 and I don't know if up is down, or if east is west.

And the thought about a gun just came to me last week when I was listening to talk radio. A caller related how an armed citizen in the South stopped a take over robbery in a fast food restaurant. A light went on in my head. Suddenly I realized that the Red States may be on to something: the police are strongly supported, the citizens have guns, and, therefore, the gangsters may be a little reluctant to take over the local Burger King.

Contrast that to the Blue States where few liberals own guns and the police are being emasculated. You may have heard of the horrendous case in Oakland where four cops were killed by a known felon, on a parole violation for child rape. But the powers that be in Oakland sent out the message to the police to make nice and not scare the populace, so the officers never drew their guns when approaching this felon. (Anyone else notice how the Left is slowly but surely disarming the police and military, situation-by-situation?) When I expressed my heartfelt grief to a friend about the deaths of these brave officers, he said, "The man who shot them was a human being too." ...

Read the rest here. Unfortunately, even if she were to acquire a gun, getting a carry permit in Berkeley will likely be quite difficult (or more likely, impossible) for an "ordinary" citizen. But at least the lightbulb appears to have been turned on for her on the morally righteous nature of armed self-defense. Baby steps, baby steps.

[Via Thoughts Aloud]