From Esquire:

By 1981 home was not a safe place anymore. Street crime had grown to such staggering proportions that Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren E. Burger declared crime had created a “reign of terror” in American cities and called for a federal program to deal with the problem. Many citizens decided not to wait for the federal government to protect them but to take matters into their own hands. There was a surge of applications for handgun licenses as rabbis, housewives, and schoolteachers took target practice at local shooting ranges. One Esquire reader, Chip Elliott, wrote a letter to the magazine telling us why he and his wife both decided to pack a gun. It was published as “Letter from an Angry Reader,” in September 1981.