I was going to say the same thing. But you still haven’t laid out the details on your Master Plan to Arm Women ™.
Your experience is similar to mine growing up in Iowa, which is to say, largely irrelevant to the drift of the discussion.
(I notice nobody’s touched the distinction I made between longarms and handguns, perhaps because nobody wants to het up a concealed carrier even on the Dope.)
I would respectfully disagree with you that it’s unethical to kill someone who’s raping you. For one thing you don’t know how far it’s going. Will he rape, then kill you? Has he raped before? Killed before? If he walks away, will he rape more and more women and girls? Should you give the sonofabitch the benefit of the doubt?
I am confident that God would regard you as justified, Kalhoun, if you shot and killed the guy before, during or after he raped you. You weren’t created to be the plaything of a bad man.
It’s precisely because you don’t know how far it’s going to go that you don’t kill your attacker. Most rapists do not kill their victims. In fact, most rapists are that nice boy who’s dating your daughter. For the believers in the crowd, how can this possibly be an “eye for an eye” situation? You’re not judge and jury.
There is no god to judge me; there is only me having to live with myself. Most people survive rape, their minds and bodies intact. It is not in my best interest to kill my attacker unless he’s trying to kill me.
Okay.
ExTank,
You’re better than this.
There are few issues that are more prone to hyperbole and extreme silly statements by both sides than the gun guntrol/rights issue but, unless my memory serves me exceptionally poorly, in the past you’ve been rational and recognzed the hyperbole from both sides. Your cite in no way shows that carrying does significantly better than any other form of resistance. Nor it does it show that the possible benefit of carrying is not offset by any additional risk.
Few lives are saved and few rapes prevented by gun ownership. If any depends on whose stats you want to use. Few deaths are caused by legal gun ownership. Both are non-zero but on the scale of deaths associated with gun use in this country both are small. Concealed carry by qualified people is also associated with few deaths and little protection. These are small scale effects that are likely a near wash.
The bulk of deaths by guns continue to be caused by guns that find their way into the hands of those who have no legal right to own one. If anything is to be done it is to impact this. Putting resources in place to enforce the laws we already have and maybe rationally closing a few loopholes (if that is what they really are and it does not significantly impact the rights of those who have a legal right to weapons, and the burden of proof is on those who want the laws to prove those points) would go a long way. To me the rest is asinine posturing from both sides. And again, I think that you at least know it.
{Checks forum, decides not to comment on some others’ posts. Moves onto other subjects.}
I find the changes in gun ownership demographics fascinating. Fewer people (although still a sizable American minority) own guns but those who do own more of them. To hear Martin Hyde tell it “hunting seems to be a dying hobby” and guns are increasingly the realm of the more well heeled enthusiast. Still some who percieve a sense of increased security from having a weapon available. And probably the occasional person who feels they need to stock up to defend themselves when society breaks down. How does this demographic change slowly change the dynamic of the debate? Or does it?
I wanted to add that it is much more difficult to get past killing someone out of fear rather than necessity.
The problem is that you can’t very well wait until you find out if the rapist is going to kill you or not until it’s way, way too late. Not being a woman, I’m not exactly at a very high risk of rape, but I sure as hell would never subject myself to the power of an attacker simply because he “probably won’t kill me.” I will do everything in my power to stop the attack, up to and including the use of deadly force.
Yeah, the very idea of having to kill or injure another person with a firearm is horrible. I hope to any applicable deities that I never find myself in such a situation; that’s why caution and prevention make the best self-defense bar none. But if you’re made the victim of rape or other serious assault, you’re already in a lose-lose situation. One way or the other, you’re going to be dealing with the consequences of the event for the rest of your life - either the guilt of taking a life, or the irrational shame of being a victim. I just don’t feel like taking the chance of only having a very brief and terrifying time in which to regret my decision.
Interesting questions. Personally, I hunt very little any more. Haven’t really since I moved back to California. But when I lived in Alaska I hunted regularly. Kept meat in the freezer. But since my return I have acquired a substantial number of weapons. You know how it goes…once you get into building a serious collection it just kinda…grows. A friend once noted that I wasn’t going to be happy until I owned a Mauser from every country that ever issued them. I am well on my way. 
Sure wish we could have proven Czarcasm wrong, but looks like he was right again.
Hey, I apologized for my extremely foot-in-mouth post. As I said, I chose my words very poorly. What I was trying to say was that women, like men, have a choice when it comes to physical assailants: submit, or resist. Basic human physiology says that an average woman will have less physical strength than an average man. In order to level the playing field and allow a chance at effective resistance, the average woman must either:
-
Be a more skillfull physical combatant;
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Possess, and effectively employ, a weapon capable of inflicting sufficient pain or damage to deter the assailant.
Without one or the other of these advantages, the average woman is at a disadvantage to an average male assailant.
I meant to imply that Kalhoun’s anti-gun stance would likely deprive woman of the choice to arm themselves with what I believe to be potentially the best rape-stoppper available: a handgun.
And before this tired canard is trotted out, I will stipulate: no firearm is a magic wand, that you wave at Bad People and make them cower in fear until the police arive to take them away. Training, knowledge, and the correct mental mindset are all necessary prerequisites to effectively employing a firearm in self-defense. Without those, you may very well be more danger to yourself, or loved ones, than to any notional assailant or intruder.
Krikey! Signal before changing lanes!
My non-partisan cites made no mention of hard numbers, so I consider this a bit of a strawman, DSeid. We can rehash the Defensive Gun Use arguments again, with a reminder that a DGU /= a death. Nor does every one of them represent a murder, rape or assault that has been prevented. Many (I’d hazard maybe a simple majority, but can’t say with any certainty) are just as likely to be mere property crimes such as theft.
I have consistently shown over the years, with hard data from the C.D.C., that the bulk of deaths by firearms are suicides. I have also shown, several time sin multiple threads, through the only known study of its type, that the rate of firearm ownership among a given population has little, if any, correltaion with suicide rates. In that study, Japan has almost the exact same suicide rate as the U.S.A., in spite of Japan’s .01% gun ownership rate.
While a single study is hardly conclusive, amongst most gun owners it is generally intuitively held that if a person truly wants to die, the lack of a firearm isn’t going to stop them.
At least one non-partisan study bears this out.
I’d heard gun ownership was on the upswing after 9/11. Maybe it was just a few nervous nellies who had visions of blowing away Osama as he crawled over the backyard fence. I dunno.
I know I have absolutely no pretensions of combatting TWAT with my small collection; I don’t even keep any of mine loaded anymore for home defense. My neighborhood is pretty safe. Should J. Random Bad Guy come through my front door in the middle of the night, they’re more likely to encounter this or this before encountering this.
I lived in New York City for some time and it’s news to me that guns are illegal. To my knowledge, what was illegal was owning a hand gun or carrying a hand gun, except for a very small portion of the city’s population that were given permits (usually ex-law enforcement.)
But getting a permit to own a rifle or shotgun was pretty easy. You had to keep it unloaded and most people I knew who owned them did so and kept them secured legally in the trunk of their cars when they took them upstate to hunt.
Because you have a right to defend yourself with lethal force if you reasonably believe you’re in danger of serious harm or death. You don’t have to be assured that you’re going to die in order to defend yourself with lethal force. If you can just demonstrate that you had a very good reason to believe you were going to suffer grievous harm you have a right to kill to stop it from happening.
You might morally feel you have to take whatever anyone wants to do to you up to but not including killing you. I however like the law the way it is across the country, I don’t have to let someone beat me into a coma and leave me in a wheel chair for the rest of my life, I have a right to use lethal force to stop that.
That’s a personal decision. Personally I’m glad the law does not reflect this thinking.
Also “eye for an eye” refers to punishment post-incident. If you take someone’s eye, your eye is taken from you. If you build a shoddy house that collapses and kills people, you are put to death. The Code of Hammurabi was a legal code, and it involved the government meting out punishment after the fact.
In the case of self-defense from rape, serious injury, or death, it is not “eye for an eye” because you aren’t trying to do unto someone as they are doing unto you. In fact, in the case of trying to defend yourself from an attempted murder, you’re trying to stop the person from murdering you. If you kill them in your attempt to stop them, it’s self defense. In general it’s not a good idea to say you were trying to kill them, as based on where it happens and who is the prosecuting attorney in your jurisdiction that could land you in trouble. But in general, self defense isn’t a legal exception to what would normally be a felony because it allows “eye for an eye” type behavior, but because it recognizes people have a right to stop someone from seriously harming them, and that if the attacker is killed as a result of it, then the person who did the killing was acting out of preservation of life and limb, not out of vengeance (how can you act vengefully for being raped/murder if you incidentally kill someone PRIOR to them completing the act??)
I worked with a guy who was a hunter and a gun lover. His house got broken into and he thought the guy would come back. He waited in the dark for him a week later and he arrived. The guy was climbing into the bedroom window. …He couldn’t shoot him. He brought the barrel of the rifle down on the guys hand as he reached into the window. He is sure he broke some bones. He later said I always thought I could in those circumstances, but I just could not do it. A baseball bat would have served as well.
Gonzomax you’ve posted this story before, haven’t you? Pretty sure I said about the same thing then - For his sake, I’m glad he didn’t pull the trigger. I suspect that if the facts came out he would not have gotten off with self-defense. While I have an imaginary line past which an intruder stops being a problem for my insurance company and starts being a threat to my family, ambushing someone and killing them as they come in the window is a terrible idea, morally and legally. Ventilating a rapist in the act is deserving of a medal but using no more than a reasonable amount of force to protect property is prudent.
Kalhoun may think me a bloodthirsty monster ( 
) but I don’t own anything that’s worth the taking of a life. I would, however, wipe out whole counties to protect my family
(Not for revenge, mind you. And no, I can’t think of any reason why an entire county would be trying to hurt my family. That was a bit of hyperbole intended to demonstrate that I consider my wife and kids to be more important than the life of anyone that means them harm)
Since ExTank started it - here is my first line of defense. Anyone can make it past that is obviously a serious badass.
I too grew up in Iowa. I have even moved back. I grew up in the city rather than in the country. My experience, especially the distinction you draw between long guns and hand guns was completely opposite. Handguns were treated as the tool that they are, defense, recreation etc.
To the OP, I have 42 firearms split evenly between handguns, shotguns, and rifles. MY friends and family all own guns. It is the non owner that strikes us as strange here. For the record I live in a city with around 400k people.
I imagine Gonzo’s friend would be in serious trouble in Michigan. Some states have very loose self-defense statutes, though. In Louisiana there is a strong tradition of being able to use almost unlimited force on an intruder. Louisiana is the birthplace of the “Kill the Carjacker” statute as well as the “Kill the Burglar” statute.
A Louisiana man was acquitted of killing Yoshihiro Hattori, a Japanese foreign exchange student who was looking for a Halloween party at the time. Yoshihiro and a friend rang the door bell of the home, believing it to be the residence where the party was being held, no one answered so they went back to their car. When the man who owned the house came out (after his wife looked out and told him to get his gun), Yoshihiro stepped onto the carport to explain they were there for the party when he was fatally shot.
Louisiana’s carjacker/burglar statutes do not require any attempt to retreat. The burglar statute only requires the person acting in self defense has a reasonable belief that the burglar will use illegal force against anyone in the home.
Florida has similar legislation and passed a “Stand Your Ground Law” which likewise does not require retreat in self-defense situations.
I agree that many people would consider rape to be a kill offense (I don’t). I also agree that if a woman thinks this way, she should be allowed to carry a gun to protect herself. However; that doesn’t mean it’s the best course of action and it doesn’t mean that gun ownership won’t be detrimental to other aspects of her life. The depression/suicide factor, the “kids found the gun” factor and the “fucker used my gun on me” factor far outweigh the one in a million chance that the woman would be raped by a stranger and have the planets align precisely so that she could use the gun on the perp effectively.
Sigh ExTank. The hijack began when you questioned the veracity of stats from The Brady Institute. That quote had basically just said that few rapes are committed with guns and concluded that guns can be turned on the victim while physical resistance could not. Your “stats to counter” was a quote that said how women should resist and followed that as if that countered any of the quoted stats or provided evidence of a guns net protective effects. In it countered nothing that Brady had said since they also said that women should resist, using “self-defense”.
No change of lane made, no signal required. And certainly no desire to engage in yet another debate about gun control/rights. They are tiresome and one of the reasons is the silliness that both sides engage in. And discussions that imply how wonderfully massively protective DGU would be, with every women having a concealed carry, are part of the inanity. That others engage in it is understandable, but you are better than that, that’s all. Your correcting my misstatement is duely noted: most deaths associated with guns are indeed suicides. A fact that is often trotted out by gun control advocates who believe that less easy gun availability would force people to atempt with methods less likely to be as effective or at least as effective and readily available. Maybe yes , maybe no, and the stats associating suicide completion rates with gun availability have been debated before … my personal take is that the effect is real but not tremendously large and have no desire to rehash that either.
I’m not sure if you meant to answer my question about the effect of the changing demographics. I’ll ask again. Does the apparent transition of the gun ownership backbone from working class hunters to more well off collectors change the nature of the debate in any way?