Actually I was thinking of shooting him in the face. The messy part is when it explodes out the other side. And somehow I don’t think the cops will nitpick where I happen to shoot him. If a robber pulls a gun and I pull a gun, we are in a gunfight. If he happens to get shot in the back diving for cover, it is still self defense.
Of course, in NYC I think you get in trouble just for having the gun in the first place, so I would check local laws.
He’s also close enough to get punched in the head or shoved away long enough for me to draw my hypothetical Glock.
In reality, I think it totally depends on the situation and the individual.
It’s very hard to have a serious debate with someone who insists on framing the discussion in terms like this. You are projecting the worst possible motives on to people you don’t know, for absolutely no reason.
I’m not necessarily a gun “advocate,” and I don’t own a gun myself. I have been the victim of violent crime, though. It’s a pretty horrible feeling, to be helpless at another person’s mercy. I can understand why someone would want to have a way to defend themselves in that situation, even if it may come at the cost of a statistically lower chance of surviving a violent criminal attack (which has not been adequately established, in my opinion).
I wouldn’t say that person has a bloodthirsty murder fantasy. I wouldn’t even say robbers have bloodthirsty murder fantasies. How horrible do you think people are?
I’m not sure that I am. I intended to make an observation that these gun threads get interspersed with startling comments like, “Assuming the story is true, he did a good thing, and deserves an ecology award for cleaning garbage out of the environment.” I see that a lot. I consider it bloodthirsty. What would you call it? Maybe it’s worse. I don’t think non-Deities have a right to call people “Garbage”, “Scum” or make similar comparisons. But others have differing points of view. At any rate I addressed the statements, not the persons.
Statistically, owning a firearm is a net loser, life-expectancy wise. But gun advocates note correctly that this applies to a varied population and furthermore may not sufficiently control for confounding effects. I have not come across a good treatment of these problems.
I agree that some may want to accept a greater net risk of death if that is indeed the case, which is by no means clear to avoid humiliation at the hands of an adversary. It’s a legitimate preference. Furthermore, it is entirely possible to be a responsible gun owner and to consider killing another an absolute last resort.
But my observation remains. Let these threads rattle on long enough, and you will get these bloodthirsty comments. I paint with no broad brush: most gun owners will kill nobody. The US has a pronounced and consistently elevated murder rate. I’ll venture to say that those who value human life more will on average kill less ceterus paribus.
I speculate that the guy who robbed me was most interested in my money. I don’t think people are intrinsically one way or another, but most are capable of pretty evil acts. Cite: Milgram (1974), the Stanford Prison Experiment and the unfortunate history of the 20th century.
This isn’t the first time in this thread that I’ve seen this – and I’ve also seen the correlation between gun ownership and crime rates raised. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any backup data. I normally stay out of gun threads, so forgive me if this has been covered a zillion times, but when I look at Wikipedia, it shows that the U.S. is #1 in gun ownership (measured as number of guns in the country divided by citizens), but down around #89 in intentional homicide (assuming I counted right).
What’s the problem with those numbers? Well, first of all, there’s a clustering phenomenon in gun ownership. I would be willing to bet that with 88 guns per 100 citizens in the U.S. (per the cite above), that a solid majority of U.S. citizens don’t own guns. I know very few gun owners with just one. Many people around here have a dozen or more. Is there a study that shows percentage of households with guns in them? Wouldn’t Switzerland, for example, be higher than the U.S. in that case?
I found an interesting chart from the Guardian about U.S. gun-related crime by state. I find it fascinating that states with very high gun ownership and loose gun laws (e.g., Montana, Wyoming, Vermont) seem to have very low gun crime rates per capita, while states with rigid gun laws (e.g., California and New York) have higher rates. The District of Columbia, with very stringent gun control, has the highest gun crime in the country by a huge margin.
I know it’s darned-near impossible to find an unbiased study, but I’d sure love to see something that did a real statistical correlation between gun ownership and overall crime rates (not just crime rates involving guns). Gun owners, for example, may say that if guns were outlawed, muggers would just use knives or some other weapon (or illegal guns, for that matter). Is this speculation, or can it be verified?
My problem is that there’s so darned much data that it would take me months just to read it all, and since I haven’t been involved much in the debates, I don’t know which sources are biased which way. In the interests of full disclosure, yeah, I own a gun. I bought it when I had a ranch and there were a lot of problems with large predators in the area. Even though I obtained a concealed carry permit so I could carry it in town, I never have. I just didn’t want to worry about being legal if I did happen to go into town and forget to put it away.
To bring it back to the OP, are you safer if the robber or mugger thinks you have a gun? Are you less likely to be jumped if you’re open-carrying? Are there fewer muggings in areas with high gun ownership and loose gun laws, or in areas with low gun ownership and strict gun laws?
I’ve heard that quote, Boyo Jim, but I’ve also heard people explain that criminals wouldn’t stop being criminals just because they didn’t have guns. They’d find other ways to hurt or kill people. “If I can’t shoot him with a gun, I’ll just use this bow & arrow, or beat him with a baseball bat, or stab him with a knife, or poison him, or blow up his car, or set his house on fire, or run him over with a car, or …”
Gary “Wombat” Robson: I try to keep my claims limited to what I know. I once commenced a casual study of some of the literature, but my attention was drawn elsewhere. From my limited exposure, I was disappointed in its quality: it didn’t ask the tough questions. But then again I was reading all of 3? articles taken from the internet and published in 4th tier journals. [1]
As for the murder data: take another look. All of the countries with higher murder rates are middle or lower income countries and presumably have weaker rule of law. Among higher income OECD countries, the US has the highest murder rate - consistently. Now admittedly Mexico is an OECD member. But Mexico is a middle income country, not an upper income one. So the US is an outlier within upper income OECD countries both with respect to gun control and with respect to murder. (There have been threads here addressing the Swiss experience, which I have not read.) My hypothesis is that you can reduce murder with gun control and you can reduce it by locking up lots of people and giving long prison sentences. The latter is more expensive. Both have diminishing returns.
The standard pro-gun argument is that confounding factors make the US more violent - it has a violent history and what about unemployment? Well the latter can be controlled for. And Germany and Japan have rather violent histories as well. Still, I would prefer a more systematic treatment, though in my experience strong univariate relationships tend to be weakened but are ultimately upheld after you control for additional counter-explanations.
Still, we got what we got. There’s a case to be made that given the multitude of firearms circulating in America, and the fact that they hand them out like candy during gun shows (with registration laws easily circumvented) that CCW could lower crime under such circumstances. That hasn’t been conclusively shown. But it’s plausible and there is some statistical evidence for it, although I understand it doesn’t pass the most rigorous tests.
Specifically, Lott showed a statistical relationship between CCW and lower crime, by county. The relationship passes the standard tests, but not the most rigorous ones (which involve cluster sampling). And he has made claims that call into question his professional honesty alas. The same can be said for a certain historian who made gun-control friendly claims. It’s all a little embarrassing, frankly.
As for state-level bans on handguns, their effectiveness is blunted by the fact that they are readily available in other states.
Politically, I’ve thrown up my hands. The US has a sizable number of voters who will swing on this single issue. And the gun lobby has a solid and recent SCOTUS decision to back them up. But there’s the personal safety issue that still intrigues me: how does one glean whether purchasing a firearm is in fact a safety-enhancer or not? And what are the alternatives, the best practices? Applying scrutiny I don’t find the answers to be obvious. If anything the self-defense literature is even more laden with anecdote, AFAIK and I may be wrong.
I can say one thing. By far our biggest threats involve autos, seat belts, an expanding waistline, a sedentary lifestyle, alcohol, cigarettes, sugary and fatty foods. The risks you should care about are common and mundane and therefore don’t appear on the TV news.
[1] I have boatloads of ignorance. I trust you had good reason for buying a handgun rather than a rifle or shotgun, but…
You make some good points. I think that we’d never be able to try the “very low gun-ownership” (like Japan) experiment in the U.S. - with a few hundred million guns in private hands right now, they could never be eliminated.
The state-by-state information is still rather interesting. It appears to show that in today’s environment in the U.S., stricter gun control seems to correlate with higher murder rates. Obviously, there are many other factors to consider: crime rates are higher where population densities are higher, for example. I haven’t seen any studies comparing prevalence of safety training programs to firearm-related deaths, either.
As for the politics, I’m with you. Between the people who vote totally single-issue and the people who blindly vote down party lines, it’s amazing we get anything done at all.
It’s more portable. I wouldn’t be likely to shoot something unless it was close enough to be a physical threat, at which point having a highly-accurate long-range rifle isn’t going to be much help.
I’ve heard that quote, Boyo Jim, but I’ve also heard people explain that criminals wouldn’t stop being criminals just because they didn’t have guns. They’d find other ways to hurt or kill people. “If I can’t shoot him with a gun, I’ll just use this bow & arrow, or beat him with a baseball bat, or stab him with a knife, or poison him, or blow up his car, or set his house on fire, or run him over with a car, or …”
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I think the point is that outlawing guns will do absolutely nothing to take guns out of the hands of criminals, so they will have absolutely no need to find any other ways to hurt or kill people. Presumably this applies to habitual criminals – a spouse killer acting out of passion may indeed have to resort to a knife or something else, but not your typical armed robber.
Totally different. They have violent histories in terms of leaders using the population as a collective mass to carry out violent goals, but they have zero tradition of individual people committing individual and unrelated acts of violence. The people in those countries were all working together for what they thought was the greater good. America is far, far more fragmented and factional, with many wide and varied groups of people with totally different reasons for committing violent acts.
In short, the Japanese and Germans have a history of being violent to other peoples. The Americans have a history of being violent to each other. Totally different kind of violence.
Samurai had the right to kill any peasant that looked at them funny. At times they did so. Okinawa in particular didn’t enjoy being ruled under such arbitrary individual power. Drunken samurai were a real threat.
Also, the European state in the 17th and even 19th century wasn’t exactly a force that promoted the commonwealth: that idea was only invented during the Enlightenment. Murder rates were quite a bit higher, exceeding 10 per 100,000 in the late 1500s in Jolly England. I’d say that they declined with the expansion of rule of law, something that was in shorter supply in 19th century US.
Admittedly, UK murder rates in the 1800s were a lot lower than the US.
That is certainly one point. A point that is falsified by the European experience, where the bad guys use knives and pick pocketing.
I’ve heard that quote, Boyo Jim, but I’ve also heard people explain that criminals wouldn’t stop being criminals just because they didn’t have guns. They’d find other ways to hurt or kill people. “If I can’t shoot him with a gun, I’ll just use this bow & arrow, or beat him with a baseball bat, or stab him with a knife, or poison him, or blow up his car, or set his house on fire, or run him over with a car, or …”
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Guns however are more efficient at killing, and more likely to kill you even if the criminal isn’t actually trying to do so. A criminal who shoots you once and runs away is more likely to kill you than one who punches or clubs or stabs you once then runs away. A relatively common form of gun crime, I understand.
Of course, in reality it would and in more than just this country. America is the criminal arsenal of the Americas; the US is awash in easily accessible guns and they provide a ready source of weapons for criminals in both North and South America. Mexico, for example; we complain about drugs and illegal aliens crossing the border into America, but we don’t care about our guns crossing into Mexico and killing Mexicans. But then, American gun lovers typically don’t care about anything but their guns.
Less access to guns for the general public means less for the criminals themselves. Less for them to steal, less for them to purchase at gun shows and so forth. They don’t make their own guns, after all.
Such a claim is debatable and unprovable at best at best, and completely wrong at worst.
How did you calculate the number of times criminals shot at someone once and ran away? How many of those incidents resulted in a miss with no injury at all? My SWAG would be that >95% of such incidents result in no injury whatsoever, simply because of the accuracy of weapons fired in this manner.
How did you calculate ow may times criminals stabbed someone once and ran away? How many of those incidents resulted in a miss with no injury at all? My SWAG would be that <5% of such incidents result in no injury whatsoever, simply because it’s damn near impossible to miss with a knife.
But since you presented this statement of fact in GD, you will be bale to provide us with this evidence, won’t you?
IOW: CITE!
:rolleyes:
CITE!
When you look at places like Australia, where handguns have been always heavily restricted, criminals have no problems whatsoever obtaining handguns
So I would like to see some evidence for this claim that reduced access to firearms by members of the public is correlated in any way at all to firearm use by criminals.
The state-by-state information is still rather interesting. It appears to show that in today’s environment in the U.S., stricter gun control seems to correlate with higher murder rates. Obviously, there are many other factors to consider: crime rates are higher where population densities are higher, for example. I haven’t seen any studies comparing prevalence of safety training programs to firearm-related deaths, either.
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I am willing to bet you’ll find the correlation to higher murder rates is with drug use, poverty, and population density, but not necessarily firearms regulation.
Yes. IMNAL, but a self-defense plea only works if you are in immediate danger of death or serious injury. That doesn’t include shooting someone who’s walking away from you in the back, even if he did just rob you. Please tell me you don’t own a gun.
Excuse me pilot, I need you to take this plane to Minnesota, I want to go to the world trade fair or: Excuse me pilot, I want you to fly this plane into the Pentagon.
Not all robberies end with the criminal letting the person go, nor do all rapes, kidnappings etc…