Aw Christ, now I’m a gun nut too! I was freaking KIDDING about the soccer game! It’s a completely ridiculous place to openly pack a firearm!
But I stand by the rest of my post…and no, bup, it isn’t only in “very specific” situations where a firearm in the hands of someone trained to use it (key disclaimer!) can save yours or someone else’s lives.
Nobody’s ever heard of shootings happening in schools? Banks? Restaurants? Convenience stores? These are all places where packing a gun would make sense for a law-abiding, trained citizen (don’t think you can carry in a bank under any circumstance, though, so toss that one out if so) where in the case the one and a million situation happens to you or your loved ones, you may be able to take action and wrest the situation from a criminal or random crazy person by use of force, deadly or otherwise.
But then FoieGras would be taken out by all the other gun toting soccer moms out there well before getting to devilsknew. Of course, some of them will take each other out, because, once the shooting starts, who can tell who is shooting at who?
Of course I have. Have you ever heard of a situation where a bystander who was packing *prevented *one of those situations? That’s what you need to support your claim.
I agree, that would be ideal. I’ll be frank, though, and say that it’s unlikely that I would confront such a person at my (fictional) child’s soccer game in order to have that conversation and find out how receptive they are. If they’re a nut, the odds that they are a nut with a gun is 100%. Then the only thing that I can do is have a gun myself, and hopefully get the jump on them, but that’s not a world I want to live in.
The idea of a sign or a sticker or a t-shirt or something is a bit more appealing, though, in that it at least makes inroads towards mitigating the inherent threat of violence that I perceive in a firearm. Even a police officer’s sidearm, to me, is a threat of violence. In the case of a cop, the uniform says a lot about how the person got the gun, what they’re doing with it, and at least ideally about what their perspective is on using that kind of violence. All I know about a person at a soccer game is that they have that capacity for immediate and catastrophic violence; nothing about the rest of it. So anything the person carrying the weapon can do to communicate a similar level of restraint would be a comfort, certainly.
All that said, my baseline perspective is that I don’t believe the threat can be completely disclaimed. If somebody’s carrying a gun, they can kill me no matter what I do. That’s a pretty big deal to me, and I don’t think that my aversion is irrational. I can understand the frustration on that point coming from a gun owner’s perspective, since it seems like I’m saying there’s nothing that you can do to make me accept your exercise of your rights as unremarkable, but it is my position.
Yes I have, but they are few and far between, because most people don’t carry guns, for a variety of reasons, and this thread is demonstrating some of them, like fear, stigmatization, etc.
And while you may think I am a gun nut, I am not. I support the idea of bearing arms in a responsible manner, and I sure as heck believe that in any manner of tragedies that someone like I described (responsible, gun-carrying) could have altered or averted the outcome of them without a shadow of a doubt (but not necessarily always…it just increases the odds).
I had extensive gun training in the military, but I cannot own the guns I trained with in the Army legally. I have fired a few shotguns and handguns over the years, briefly owned a shotgun, too.
Now I have small children in the house. Two curious little boys and a teenaged stepdaughter. I live in a relatively quiet, Indiana suburb of Cincinnati. There’s absolutely no reason I can think of right now to own a gun given the risks associated with it because of my kids, and the relative lack of a threat in my neighborhood.
I only hope that if I’m ever in a place of business, etc that suddenly finds itself under armed criminal threat, that there is someone there that can avert or alter the outcome of an ugly situation in mine and every other law-abiding citizen’s favor by subduing or shooting the perpetrator if necessary. The police can often be too late to be helpful.
I do not think you’re a gun nut. I never said you were.
Well, I don’t know about good stats on that. Suffice it to say that I don’t believe it. I do recall a news article several years ago (no cite) that in 200 investigations of break-ins in gun-owning houses in Georgia, exactly one homeowner was able to get a gun in time and defend his house.
Anyone who’s drawing and firing better damn well have a good idea of what their target is and why, or you can lock 'em up for life for all I care. “I shot a bystander thinking I was helping engage a threat to myself” is not an affirmative defense to a murder charge the same way as “I shot someone actively shooting at me first” is.
And the basic difficulty for liberal gun nuts like myself (:D:cool:) is that your feelings are absolutely reasonable–there is no way for you to tell that I’m in the 99.6% of Americans who don’t commit a felony in any given year, you can only tell that if I’m in that 0.4% I’m going to be able to unleash a lot of short- and medium-range harm–more than some schmuck with a tire iron, at any rate.
Can you think of any way I, as a gun owner, can mitigate or reduce the perceived threat–keeping in mind that I personally have no intention of shooting anyone and would frankly prefer never to have to unholster a firearm except in a range or hunting context–while still being able to advertise that I am armed, or is this a case where concealed-carry is pretty much the only polite way to go about this?
This is exactly why I don’t own a pistol or a shorty barrel for my shotgun, nor do I keep the guns anywhere accessible (hell, all my ammo is in my car, I was planning on shooting some skeet before it started fucking snowing)–I live in the safest neighborhood of the second-safest town in the US, parents think nothing of letting their 14-yr-old daughters jog in entirely too little on poorly-lighted roads after dark, and the average home invader is a lost or drunk idiot who can best be rousted with a broom and strong words.
It’s hard for me to say because believe it or not, I can’t think of a single time that I’ve ever seen a person open carrying except in a pretty clearly unauthorized context. I’m right outside of Philadelphia, though, which changes the odds pretty significantly. I think that it’s a contextual thing. Out in a suburban or rural area – say Lebanon – I’m not really sure what my reaction would be to another person with a gun on his or her person unless I think of it in a particular case. At a soccer game: negative reaction. Taking the dog for a walk? I feel like in that kind of a situation, you have a lot less responsibility to put me at any kind of ease in the first place. If there’s an apparent, plausible, and non-threatening reason for you to have a gun on you, (again, I think, but it’s never happened) that would feel more like a “police officer at the Dunkin Donuts” context, where the gun’s a little imposing but nothing to write home about.
Does that make sense? In a context where the risk/reward kind of speaks for itself, it isn’t an affront that someone’s exercising the right to carry. I recognize as I try to construct this that it’s a bit of a catch-22, since I’m leaning heavily on subjective cultural comfort levels to do so, and since it doesn’t solve the basic dilemma that gave rise to this thread. It’s in exactly the situations where the risk/reward is not obvious that open carrying could serve as a political statement. Carrying for protection is reasonable enough to me. Carrying as a political statement puts me on edge because, by virtue of the circumstances that make the statement apparent, the gun is more of a threat when it’s carried that way.
While that’s certainly problematic (since most homeowners are asleep when the break-in occurs, presumably, putting them at a distinct disadvantage), aren’t we talking about people that are carrying guns on their person while…awake? Going about their daily/daily?
I wonder if there’s stats out there somewhere that show the likelihood of being the victim of a home invasion rather than a random occurrence of crime wherever else someone might find oneself. I’d like to believe that home invasions are the rarer encounter.
No cite but my friends who are cops (5 of them) don’t lock their doors. They’re pretty convinced that only a few select groups of people are ever likely to be victimized by a home invasion.
And even then, only by rabid Browns fans looking to deface Steeler paraphernalia. I know, I know, it’s certainly illegal for them to do so, and yes, they are Browns fans so I’m certain they will get sympathetic treatment in Pittsburgh courts, but still…I secretly applaud their efforts.
Once someone has self-identified as the type of hothead of concern (e.g. by committing a violent crime), we most certainly can control hotheads.
Now, of course, we can’t control “hotheads” before they’ve committed a violent crime, so, presumably you’d like to assume we’re all guilty until proven innocent and deny everyone their rights… and who cares, eh, it’s not like you were using that right, right?
You know, I’d also observe that “hotheads” usually have an argument before things get to the shooting stage. It would probably be a good idea to restrict everyone’s access to free speech, too. Y’know. Just to be safe.
If you’re asking about a situation where a crime-in-commission was stopped by a private gun owner, there are blogs devoted to that sort of thing.
Mostly just drug dealers or those in the same circles. Their message to elderly folks is that the average person doesn’t need to worry about home invasions. The cops I know are only in Canada so it may not extrapolate to other countries but I found it interesting.
I still fail to understand how anyone could scoff at the idea that someone that’s responsibly armed that’s in the “right place at the right time” as opposed to the oft-quoted opposite situation, couldn’t possibly thwart raging asshole criminals.
Most of us see more arguments gone excessively violent in the news than responsibly armed citizens thwarting crime. Media bias, confirmation bias, true, not true? I don’t know but I feel less safe in a crowd of armed people, not more.