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Twenty five years.
This morning, twenty five years ago, 2,977 people did not come home. They went to work in an office tower. They boarded a flight to California. They reported for a shift at the Pentagon. Most of them had no idea anything was wrong until it already was.
343 New York City firefighters died that day. 37 Port Authority police officers. 23 NYPD officers. 8 EMTs and paramedics. They went up the stairs while thousands of people were coming down them. Hundreds more first responders have died in the years since from illnesses they carried out of that place, and we lose more of them every year. The toll from that morning is still being counted.
And on United Flight 93, forty passengers and crew members pieced together what was happening from phone calls, took a vote, and decided to act. They had maybe thirty minutes of information and no training for any of it. They kept that plane from reaching whatever it was pointed at, and it cost them everything.
I don't have anything to add to what has already been said about all of that. Today belongs to them and to the families who still mark this date every year.
A great deal came out of that day that people still argue about, and I am not going to spend this email on any of it.
What I keep coming back to is smaller and quieter. That Tuesday was completely ordinary right up until the moment it wasn't. Nobody woke up expecting it.
Here is why that has been on my mind lately. The FBI reported this year that the violent crime rate in America fell 9.3 percent, the largest single year drop since they began tracking it in 1936. The murder rate is now the lowest ever recorded in this country. That is real, it is good news, and I am glad for it.
But a national average has never once protected an individual person. Statistics describe crowds. They do not describe your Tuesday. And headlines like those quietly talk a lot of us into treating good odds like a guarantee.
None of us can prepare for something like September 11th. That was never the point. The point is that the people who did the most good that morning were not the ones who had a plan for that specific day. They were the ones who had already decided, long beforehand, what kind of person they were going to be when something went badly wrong.
That decision is what we talk about here every day. Carrying a gun, and carrying it responsibly, is one expression of it. Not because we expect the worst, but because we decided ahead of time that we would not be helpless if it ever found us.
Jacob Paulsen
President | ConcealedCarry.com
P.S. If there is something you do to mark this day, or a lesson from it that has stayed with you all these years, hit reply and tell me about it. No guarantee that I'll be able to respond to all of you, but I promise we'll read them.
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