maybe you’re one of those who wants to carry a gun and pay less taxes. I’m not. Our department is paid enough to have regular patrols. They’ll be here within five minutes. I’m just as confident that the burglars won’t come in with guns blazing as you are that they’ll immediately rape the ladies and bludgeon the dog.
They came for the TV, they don’t want any hassles. The number of intruders bent on raping and pillaging is quite small and I probably have more to fear from eathquakes.
So it would have been OK if the mom was the one who pulled the trigger, instead of the 15-year-old, then. It’s just an age/maturity/gender thing. Right?
He wasn’t “tasked” with any damn thing. He was home, minding his own business, when two criminals attempted a felony. He chose to defend himself, and his sister. Kid deserves a medal.
And what about those of us that live in rural areas? No police out here. Only the Sheriff’s department. Between midnight and 6:00 AM, there are only two deputies on duty. If there’s a wreck or other incident on the other side of the county, it may be half an hour or longer before they could get here. Thirty minutes can be an eternity when your life is on the line. Thankfully, we have sane laws in my state…a strong Castle Doctrine and a Stand Your Ground law. I have the means and the will to defend my wife and myself.
So you’re fine with random violence directed against defenseless innocents?
If I lived in Flint or many downtrodden parts of Pennsylvania, I wouldn’t count on the police either. We have a good police department I doubt that more than ten minutes goes by before I see the car on regular patrol, so he’s not far away. The fire department is less than one minutes drive from here.
My single objection to this particular story is that these children were alert and able to flee from danger instead of applying potentially deadly force. I don’t care if it’s their house, the proper response to danger is to flee from it until no longer possible. If someone bumps into my car, my first response will not be beating them about the head with a baseball bat. Some gun owners think that the gun is always their first option.
I’m pleased that they were able to defend their house. I’m distressed that they did it so badly that they couldn’t take down the target with three or more bullets. If you need to shoot, I want you to be accurate so that innocents are not hurt. The boy was old enough to be able to handle the weapon
The question was why should a kid have to run from someone in his own home.
And I answered it, directly, without substituting any straw men, nor did I attempt to move the issue onto another subject. Tough to do, I know, when you’re so emotionally wrapped up in your image of the way things ought to be, and your perception of rights and how they ought to be protected. But if you’d like to skip all the intermediary steps and jump straight to a specific constitutional debate, or a stand-your-ground law debate, go for it. As I said earlier, hypotheticals can be a bitch.
Stand your ground = last resort. Not first, but last. Anyone who would encourage their children to risk their lives at the defense of material possessions isn’t worthy of parenthood. We’re not talking about a North Korean invasion here. There’s no slippery slope from home burglary leading straight to anal penetration. It’s plain and simple. Burglar? Mugger? Give them the stuff, and take your safety as your spoil. Or, intervene in a way that doesn’t involve immediate escalation to lethal force. Preparation should involve much more than just “teach them to shoot it dead” because hardly ever will that be an appropriate response.
As an aside, any person who thinks that they weapons they own will somehow protect them from a “government seizure” of anything they own, or of their liberties, is delusional. No citizen will ever be able to stand up against the government with weapons. This is not 1776 anymore. Let’s just be grownups and admit that the 2nd amendment was poorly thought out and could have used a lot more clear syntax. If it weren’t for the damnable ambiguity I’m sure things would look a lot different right now in this country.
Lovely. “Your” department might be. Many others aren’t.
You are completely entitled to hand your fate over to your elected officials, but some people prefer to be more proactive and self-reliant. What’s wrong with that?
Cool! We’re playing the out-of-context game! Can I go next? This one time, Obama said “rape” and “women” in the same sentence. Dude’s obviously advocating rape.
Try again you sensationalist.
Predicated on the hypothetical situation of a country with no civilian access to ridiculously lethal firearms YES I’d take the very rare and small scale risk of “violence” (burglary =/= violence) directed at innocents as the cost of greatly decreased likelihood of public massacres.
Are you able to parse that sentence? Do you see the point? Or are we just gonna yank out the words where I said “YES” and “I’d take” and “public massacres”?
Politics aside.
If an intruder breaks into my home and has a weapon, I’m only asking once. If they draw that firearm towards me first, I don’t bother asking.
Good on the kid.
I’m pretty sure that house is now off their list of places to burglarize.
Bullshit. There is no duty to retreat in your own damn house in most states, nor should there be. If you want to run, fine. Good luck with that. Maybe you’ll be faster than the bad guy. Maybe your wife and or children will be faster than the bad guy, too. You do not get to choose for anyone else.
From The Brady Campaign.
72% of all burglaries occur when no one is home.(Which means that in 28%, someone is home.)
Violence occurs in 7% of all burglaries.
Which means there’s a 1 in 4 chance that if you are home during a break-in, there will be violence committed against you.
Let’s just get this out of the way: I agree heartily with your penultimate sentence. But: who the hell brought up protecting themselves from “government seizures”? You; another straw man and you were the only person that mentioned it.
But running away :rolleyes: as the first and most obvious response to a threat, when a: it’s your own fucking house and b: you have a weapon, whether it’s a gun or a big-ass stick- ummm. no. Running away would be way down on my list of responses.
I am just not feeling that running away and hiding thing. At all.
Are you on LSD? Watching too many Lifetime movies?
When ever does a burglar chase down wives and children during the course of a robbery? Seriously let’s get some fucking statistics on that one.
Holy Christ this is what’s in the brains of these people who are advocating more gun ownership. It’s entirely Hollywood to them.
Batshit insane indeed, Oakminster. But certainly not on my part.
Notice the “As an aside,” part? That means it’s not a strawman, nor a substitution, just an aside. Perfectly permissible to completely ignore if you do not feel it confronts your point. Which in this case, it did not, nor did I intend it to.
Bullshit. You said you were fine with any family going through a costly and traumatic experience. How else would that be taken?
How do you know what the guy breaking into your house intends to do? Are you a mind reader? I’m not. I assume he intends to attempt violence on me and mine. I’m not going to wait to conduct an interview to determine if he “only” wants my TV. I’m going to eliminate the threat to my family.
Ordinarily, I’m a peaceable man. Don’t break into my home, and I won’t shoot you. Break that deal, and I’ll do my damndest to get you first.
I thank you for providing the link because it allows me to include what you left out.
Of the burglaries in which someone was home and violence occurred (7 percent of all burglaries), 65 percent of victims knew the robber. Most people subject to violence were not injured or suffered minor injury (89 percent). Burglary-related homicides are rare, accounting for 430 average annual homicides or less than 1 percent of total homicides (2003-2007).
A one in four chance of being one of the 89% bruised by a burglar does not warrant deadly force.
Unlike some others here, I’m not going to try to attack you for saying this; I think it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
I’d just like to point out that we all have different views about how to balance certain risks against certain liberties or certain moral concerns. You make your decision one way, realizing that in the end, even a small increase in statistical risk will eventually be manifested in real tragedies, but you decide that this is acceptable. For myself, I place a greater value on the right to bear arms, so I deem it acceptable that the widespread availability of semiautomatic rifles roughly corresponds to a 0.00001% chance that any given person will be killed by a maniac with one in a given year. This is especially easy to accept since it is orders of magnitude smaller than the risk from other things we barely think about, like personal automobiles and the availability of alcohol, cigarettes, and fast food.
But I can easily see how your decision makes more sense if one places no value on the right to bear arms. That’s all.
Well, at some point we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this part. I feel that a person in their own home has the right to defend it from an intruder. At the point of crisis, they have a choice to make, and, in general, they should make the choice that has the greatest likelihood of safety for themselves and their family. But at all points they have the right to repel the invasion with force, whether that’s a gun, a baseball bat, a kitchen knife, or their fists and teeth.
Nowhere at any point is the safety of the invaders taken into consideration; they made the choice to invoke the law of the jungle by violating another human being’s peace and security; let them flee if they are able. This has nothing to do with guns; I’d feel this way too if I lived in a country where nobody was allowed any weapon more dangerous than a steak knife. Anybody who forcibly enters your home can be forcibly stopped by whatever means are available to you.
Oh! Cute!
It’s not an arguable point if you precede it with “As an aside.” I guess I missed that directive.
Alrighty then.
I’m going to bed. Happy 2013. 