Don’t just carry. Don’t just go to the state-mandated training, buy a weapon, and then forget about it. Unless you train yourself to use it, that weapon would probably be less useful to you in an emergency than a similarly weighted rock. At least you’d instinctively know to throw the rock. Practice with a handgun until you can take it from a position of safe carry to active engagement within seconds. Then practice that again until you’ve beaten your best time. Then practice again. And realize that practice isn’t a burden but a joy. Most people who go to shooting ranges enjoy the experience. Even gun-control activists often grudgingly admit how much they like the simple act of taking shots at paper targets.

None of this, of course, guarantees your personal safety. None of this guarantees that in a moment of maximum stress that you’ll make the right decision. There may come a day when an active shooter immediately guns down a concealed-carry permit holder and then continues with his rampage. Even though — as an Iraq vet — I’ve had far more training than the average American, I still don’t know how I’d respond to any given crisis until that crisis is upon me. Fight or flight is a call that has to be made in the moment, based on the totality of the circumstances. But a gun does give you options, and those options could well mean the difference between life and death, between one reload and five reloads, and between a clean conscience and a lifetime of guilt and pain.