Birdshot’s not sufficient. How about we go look at someone who’s tried all this for you?
You can read it as a dig, but it was intended more to point out how the best laid plans can go awry in RL.
Cuckoorex, let’s have a look at your examples and see if we can learn anything.
Good ol’ Walmart!
Those guns were helpful.
Vague as hell.
4.
Unless your name was John Rambo, I don’t think being armed would have helped here.
Not very helpful.
Yes, because a shoot-out with 5 people is definitely the safest approach.
A gun MAY have helped here, but guns and babies are a shitty combination.
Another less than ideal scenario for a shoot out.
All we seem to be learning from these links is that ‘Home Invasion’ covers that wide a range of scenarios, it is an almost useless definition. But, they all seem to indicate that security awareness before the fact would serve better than defensive awareness after.
The entire point of that list was to compare the number of instances where someone was misidentified as a threatening home invader and shot, versus the number of times that a home invasion situation has led to harm or death for the homeowner. Whether or not the homeowner had or used guns or how many assailants there were is not relevant to this point. The point is, IF a home invasion incident appears to be occurring, the potential for the intruder to commit violence against the homeowner is far, far greater than the chance that someone innocent is going to be shot by mistake.
Your record is skipping again. Please indicate the exact quote, and who wrote it in this thread, who ever even HINTED that prevention via various security measures would not be preferred. Show me. Please. I’m begging you. Show me where anyone has suggested that preventive security is unnecessary or foolish or not to be desired. Please show me where someone has stated that they absolutely would prefer to shoot an intruder rather than to have NO intruder thanks to effective preventive security. If you can’t then kindly STFU already about your goddamn preventive security soapbox speeches. Make your own goddamn thread about preventive security if you want to expound on their merits. Otherwise, back under the bridge with you.
:rolleyes: This is not a No True Scotsman argument, because the status (a person being a responsible gun owner) is a result of specific behavours on their part (using due care when wielding a firearm). The NRA appears to agree that this is not an unreasonable standard:
(emphasis mine)
Of all the phrases I would use to describe American police officers, “highly trained” ranks extremely low.
At least it’s not stuck in a groove whereby a gun becomes the foolproof solution to all “home invasion” problems.
Show me where I said that, tro—ivan. Show me. I’ll pay you a billion fucking dollars if you can show me that I said that a gun is a foolproof solution to all home invasion problems. No, a trillion. I’ll pay in steady increments over your lifetime. Show me, or SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Also, you never did address my challenge for you to show where anyone said that preventive measures are not preferred over using a gun in home defense. You completely ignored that part.
In this and also the other thread, you completely ignored the fact that the thread was not about how to best prevent home invasions from happening, it was about the proper response WHEN A HOME INVASION HAS HAPPENED. Regardless of how much or how little security measures were implemented, the scenarios were about what happens when those security measures were breached.
Either you address this, or you are, in fact, trying to get a rise out of people. You got a rise out of me, congratulations, but either you actually address the issue at hand, or you are just trying to get a rise out of people.
Then I’ll throw the weight on the pro-gun side.
You saw my cite above where the guy tried to break in and only the sight of a gun stopped him. That was the FIFTH attempt to break into my house in about 6 years, all stopped only by the sight of a gun.
It isn’t just shooting people that is the resolution. Merely having and displaying a gun has been a peaceful resolution for me to those five incidents and one “in the middle of bumfuck nowhere” mugging attempt.
Okay, we’ll forget about how the person intent on deadly violence to you and your family has got into your property - are we now to imagine that the homeowner with a gun and the preparedness to fire it, is going to have a significant advantage in most imaginable scenarios, or just some of them?
Can you identify which particular scenarios are going to favour the homeowner and not the potential homicidal madmen?
Do you want to try and provide me with a few cites where the homeowner has successfully fended off determined armed robbers, or ANY ‘home invaders’, just to see if there are any corroborating factors?
And please point to which poster in this thread has taken such a stance.
Suppose we all promise to open our eyes when shooting? Not only will it allow us to recognize our own children, to notice when people are dressed up as police, and to detect when people have obeyed our command to freeze and aren’t making threatening moves…it will also make our aim better!
Just because a homeowner points their gun at someone doesn’t mean they have to shoot it blindly without identifying their target. DUH. Even with the handful of examples of idiots firing their guns off half-cocked (heh), this is still a fantastic strawman when applied to gun owners in general.
You might as well argue that because some people have insufficient mental or physical command of vehicles to be able to drive, that nobody should be allowed to drive because they might be one of those people.
I agree whole heartedly. Knowing when not to shoot is just as important as knowing when to shoot.
This was reported yesterday and is a fine example.
Not to commandeer your post, begbert, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the next issue to be raised will be something along the lines of, “Yeah, but we license people to drive!”
Yes we do license people to drive. On public roads.
Just like we license people to carry weapons concealed, in public.
But we don’t (typically; some jurisdictions do) license people to possess firearms in their own home.
Depending upon locale and zoning restrictions, we don’t even make it illegal to discharge firearms on our own property. This may cause some folks (urban types) head’s to asplode, but believe it or not, not everyone lives in a crowded city or suburb.
I know several people who live “in the wilds” of Missouri with no one living within at least a mile of them. They have set up their own home firing ranges with solid earthen berms for backstops, and we merrily, legally, safely “blaze away.”
If it weren’t too onerous to commute, I’d dearly love a place “in the country” with sufficient isolation to safely set up my own pistol range.
Thank you. Here’s a page chock full of exactly the kind of cites you just asked for. The site that collected these examples is clearly in favor of the use of handguns for self-defense, however the articles that are linked to are from independent sources, as far as I can tell.
No it’s not.
I was raised in a house with firearms. So were many of my friends.
It’s no more a shitty combination than “Cars and Babies.”
No one said that, either.
You continue to misrepresent the other side of the argument because you can’t argue your own.
There is no situation in which the potentially dangerous madman gains an advantage by you having a firearm to defend yourself, unless you don’t fire the firearm.
And now you’ve changed the scenario. Home invasions are not typically done by armed robbers. They’re most often done by individuals, occasionally by small groups (two or three), which are typically unarmed, and rarely, or armed with blunt or tipped objects.
I think a quarter of them were related to the discussion we are having. The trouble is, the details are so sketchy they are of very little use for determining how best to combat this problem.
Let me be more specific then; how many cites have you got in which a homeowner was disturbed by someone after they had locked up for the evening, and was then able to establish control of the situation?
I imagine there must be plenty of them for you to be so convinced of the efficacy of such measures?
You’re like a creationist that keeps demanding more and more “transitional forms” aren’t you?
Please note that at in at least one example listed, an alarm system DID go off, but the armed intruder was not scared away by it.
“How best to combat this problem?” Well, of course that depends on your definition of “best” doesn’t it? You seem to keep adjusting your criteria to account for any examples brought up, so could you please take this opportunity to clearly define what to YOU would be a reasonable goal in regards to how home invasion situations should be handled.