I’m going to regret engaging in this discussion, but here goes. How do you know the first bolded part? Were you awake and watching the guy come into your room several times before you acted? Why? You had a gun, and you lay there pretending to be asleep while the intruder looked over your bed, left, came back, left… how many times, exactly?
Where was the intruder when he heard you unsnap the holster? I’m curious how loud the snap on the holster is. I’m not a gun owner, so I don’t know. Are the snaps on holsters a lot louder than the snaps on, say, my wife’s purse? Or was the intruder within a couple feet of you when you unsnapped it? Or was he in another room in the house and he had particularly sharp hearing?
You want me to just give you $5000? Are you insane?
For that matter, why don’t you give me $10,000?
I’ll tell you what; prove you’re right and I’ll give you five bucks. It should take precisely two minutes of your time; you just have to name the city and tell me it’s okay for me to use your IP address to verify your location. Five bucks is a pretty good haul for two minutes’ work, you’ll be proven correct, I’ll happily say you’re correct, and we’ll all know a city to stay the hell away from, since that would be a truly alarming (and completely unique thing, for an American city in 2012) rise in murders. Feel free to send your claimed place of residence to me by PM if you don’t want anyone else knowing. If you use an IP proxy, I guess we’re a bit screwed, but hopefully you don’t.
He had the house wired with surveillance cameras with sound, and looking at the tapes, the intruder says “Gadzooks! That snap sounded like a holster being opened! It sounds like a holster that would carry a Smith & Wesson .38 with copper jacketed hollow point bullets! I must evacuate the premises immediately without raping and killing the girl upstairs!”
I was working an additional part-time job that summer as an armed security guard. I wore a standard police belt and holster and the the gun was hanging in the bedroom closet, snapped into the holster. (I originally slept with it under my pillow, but stopped after dreaming that I was firing it at a shooting range and woke up with my hand under the pillow and wrapped around the gun. :eek: :D)
I had been out that night and got home about midnight. Around 2:00 a.m. something woke me abruptly and I was instantly fully awake, which is unusual, especially since I’d only had two hours sleep at that time. I listened for a bit but didn’t hear anything and decided to go back to sleep. Then I head a light sound of tinkling glass. So I opened my eyes again and just as I did the silhouette of this guy came creeping past my open bedroom door. A small lamp was on in the entryway and it cast light into the living room and dining room, which is where he was when I saw him, but not into the bedroom where I was. He went on into the back part of the house, circled around through the kitchen, and came into my bedroom from the opposite direction that I thought he’d gone. He came up to my bed and looked it over. I was able to watch him by squinting. There was just enough light in the room that I thought he might be able to see if my eyes were fully open. He turned and left and roamed around and came back into the room several more times after that, going so far at one time as to bend right over me while he was looking the bed over, with his face no more than six inches from mine.
It’s funny the things that go through your mind at times like that. I found myself thinking “I bet this guy is scared as I am! I wonder what would happen if I suddenly sat up and went ‘BOO!’” Then I pictured him flying backward into the bureau and was actually having to stifle a laugh. The police said later he was probably trying to see if a woman was in bed with me.
Anyway, he had no weapon in his hands and while I had no way of knowing whether he had a knife or gun, I felt less threatened than I would have if he’s had one, and finally, after twenty minutes or so of this, believe it or not I began to get sleepy again. So I decided it was time to do something. So I slowly crept out of bed, snuck in all my bare nakedness (where you always feel most vulnerable) over to the closet, snuck the doorknob open, and sloooowly pried the strap on the holster, which eventually went “SNAP!!!” I’m not sure where the guy was but he hit the front door almost simultaneous with the snap.
I pulled on some pants and some loafers and darted out the door after him but he was gone. Turned out later from fingerprints on the broken glass that it was the son of the elderly couple next door who’d fallen off a half-track while in the Army in Korea and had never been right since. He had a really sweet 14-year-old daughter and a couple of smaller boys and they all lived next door. The guy wound up being sent to a mental hospital for a year, and I wound up happy for the sake of the old couple and his kids that I hadn’t killed him. The cops still thought he was after the girl though, and there’s no telling what might have happened if he’d been able to carry out whatever it was he was really after.
Your anecdote indicates that your presence successfully scared off the intruder. Now, if your gun had been more available to you (and good for you that it wasn’t under your pillow or something) and you killed this guy, you might have convinced yourself that you saved a life by doing so - but as it turns out you would not have.
BTW here is a cite saying that guns in the home increase the risk of homicide. The cite is from the American Journal of Epidemiology and so I hope can be counted as politically neutral.
And of course there is the increased risk of suicide. It is not true that people who attempt suicide and are stopped do it eventually. Studies of people who have been prevented from jumping off the Golden Gate bridge have shown that very few ever make a suicide attempt again. I believe there are studies showing that the suicide rate in England went down when you could no longer do it with a stove. (Think Sylvia Plath.)
ETA: Okay, forget about the compliment about you not sleeping with it under your pillow.
So, you came really close to killing this mentally ill neighbor. If you had a baseball bat (like I do) you might have broken some of his bones, but that would have been it. Much better for all concerned. Not to mention I assume you had some training. A random gun toting paranoid would have done a lot worse.
Also, think of what could have happened if he had opened your closet door, found your gun, and took it. Sorry, this far from convinces me that guns in the home are good things.
Isn’t it amazing that Starving Anecdote has experienced, or has a friend who has experienced, every point he tries to drive home at this board. It’s like he’s a living, breathing cross-section of the American public.
Either that or he makes shit up left and right to serve his arguments. Nah, couldn’t be.
Well, you assholes like to denigrate me due to the number of years I’ve been on this planet, but the fact is that the more years you’re on the planet the more things you experience. And when you experience them personally, oftentimes they take on a heightened importance, even more than one gets from an impassioned lefty professor or political tome…or Piers Morgan or Anderson Cooper, for that matter.
Thus when a subject near and dear to you due to your personal experience happens to come up, you are quite happily able to speak truth to bullshit about it not only from common sense - and as illustrated by the case of my town’s murder rate, actual point of fact - but also from personal experience.
Experience makes life richer, it does. And it makes some people wiser, which of course explains the well-known (and recently but unpersuasively disputed) phenomenon of people growing more conservative as they get older.
Yeah. I can’t wait to hear about the time you were a hockey player dealing with union issues, or when you were at that embassy in an unnamed African country when it was attacked that one time, or possibly that odd occasion when you and a friend were all embroiled in negotiations to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. I mean, is there nothing you can’t do?
Yeah, this mentally ill neighbor who didn’t take anything and spent twenty minute either looking for a woman in my bed or trying to get to the one upstairs. Who knows what his true intent was or what would have happened if he’d pulled off what he was up to.
Yeah, unless he’s have pulled a gun himself, or a knife, or had enough knowledge which even I do to come in close and get inside where your bat is useless, whereupon knife stabbage and headbutts and nadknees and all sorts of disabling things can be done to you.
Actually, no. But I read up on it a lot and knew quite a lot about gun safety, even when having to fire (aiming in such a way that errant bullets or bullets that go through their target aren’t likely to hit someone in another room or another house, etc.).
Random nuts can do a lot of damage with anything. There’s absolutely no reason to ban anything because of what random nuts might do.
Yep, if he’d have risked waking me - which he was evidently trying to avoid given his stealthy behavior - by opening the door, looking into the closet which would have been absolutely black inside, and seen the gun strapped into its holster and hanging on the wall farthest from the door, and been able to get to and figure out how to release it from its holster before my panicked twenty-two year old and considerably more fit ass got to him first, things probably wouldn’t have gone so well.
Still, the lesson was learned and I slept with the gun beneath me under the mattress from then on.
Why do I suspect that no successful home defense story involving a gun would? :rolleyes:
You friggin’ loon! You can’t even keep track of your own accusations. The answer I gave was to your allegation that I seem to have personal experience to back up so many of the arguments I make. And now you’re trying to refute my answer to that by raising posts I’ve made where I said nothing at all that was based on my personal experience!
So you’ve blown your own point two, two, two times in one!
Looks like I missed this post prior to answering the last one. How can you say that? How can you or I or anyone say whether I’d saved a life or not? He may have wound up killing me, or the young woman upstairs, or both of us.
I agree that with guns in the home the risk of death is greater due to accident or suicide. But I think that to arrive at the belief from that that guns should not be allowed in the home is both myopic and wrongheaded. Why should a person deliberately decide to deprive him or herself from the most effective way of dealing with an intruder who may very well rape, torture, abduct or kill him or her and/or whatever children may be in the house because some other people elsewhere may misuse them? We don’t take cars away because some people drive drunk or ram themselves into bridge abutments. For that matter we don’t even take away alcohol, and it’s responsible for far more innocent deaths than guns in the home have ever been, improperly used or not.
The reality is that you’re simply opposed to the idea of guns in the home and all the rest of this is just window dressing.
