MODERATOR DEMANDS ATTENTION.
I don’t care who started it. I don’t care if I missed someone to wail on.
You will ALL STOP this hijack of this thread which is in IMHO NOW.
Failure to follow this direction will gather you a warning.
Need to Pit someone–take it to the Pit.
samclem Moderator.
I’ve never really felt the need for a gun, but until I had a conversation with a stranger at a party a few weeks ago, this is something I never considered. Somehow the topic of guns came up and she said she’d never have one because of the same reason you cite. I was gobsmacked, but it made a lot of sense.
This argument doesn’t make sense to me at all: if someone wants to commit suicide they will find a way, regardless of what’s conveniently lying around. Should we not have knives or razors in our houses because some people use them to slit their wrists? I do believe that there is an increased risk of accidental death when guns are in the home, but that’s hardly the same thing as suicide.
Anecdotally, I’ll just note that sometimes you can get too depressed and amotivated to seek out a more questionable and difficult method of suicide. Swallowing the barrel of a gun sounds pretty easy in comparison to many other methods. Plus it’s a lot easier to discover someone who’s trying to die via pills or cutting their wrists before things get too far gone.
While I certainly won’t argue the bad luck claim, I will tell you that these incidents are not common or frequent everywhere. These are from a 30+ year time frame, mostly in the lovely city of Atlanta, GA.
The property crimes **are **common to all neighborhoods, and my job as a cop (as well as my residence) put me in proximity to a higher number of those people who consider armed robbery as a legitimate form of income than you might expect to encounter in the 'burbs.
Also, if I see something criminal going down, I’m more likely than not to intervene, simply because of my training, experience, and abilities.
I’m really a nice, average, laid-back guy with a wife, kids, dogs, cats, etc., but I do not tolerate those who victimize others very well. If I encounter a situation where I can help someone, I generally do so.
To the OP, sorry for the tangent. Perhaps I was conflating the 3 previous posters including C3 who don’t want guns with someone from another similar thread.
I’m elderly and get confused easily. 
We don’t own a single gun. But my son has nunchucks!
You’re absolutely right I value $100 watch over some humans lives. If someone is willing to break into a home and steal, they’re already saying they don’t value their own life or anyone else’s. They decide whether they should be shot or not by their own actions before the event.
How do you group the poll choices like that so that seperate groups have distinct percentages?
I think that’s probably more true for adults who are suicidal. Both of the boys that I knew (one, the little brother of a good friend of mine and the other, the son of a childhood friend) were teenagers, in that time of their life when you can’t seem to think beyond the next year and when every drama seems to be huger than anything else in the world. Knowing their circumstances, it’s likely that if a gun hadn’t been so near at hand, a day or so of gaining perspective or even being observed by their parents/friends/teachers might have saved their lives. I’m not saying that they didn’t have real issues that they were dealing with, but that they were both typical teenagers dealing with typical teenager stuff. Neither of them was gay (that I know of), but the recent videos with the message, “It Gets Better” would have been very relevant to them.
I have depression. For that reason, I will not keep a gun in my house, or allow Mr. Neville to keep one here. I don’t want myself having easy access to a gun on a bad day. I’m glad my parents didn’t have a gun in the house when I was a teenager. I don’t know that I’d be here today if they had.
If you’re on a diet, it’s a good idea not to keep snack foods and sweets in the house. That makes it harder to satisfy an impulse to eat something unhealthy. Not having a gun makes it harder to satisfy the impulse to kill yourself. Some depressed people have suicidal impulses sometimes, just like almost all people have impulses to eat unhealthy food.
I wish they had had those when I was in high school. Or that somebody could have told me that being in your 30s, unemployed, and starting to feel some signs of aging still beats the pants off high school, at least for some people. Instead, I had parents who said that high school was the best time of your life. Not for me, it wasn’t.
Previous to June of 1989 I did not own a firearm. I didn’t (and still don’t) have any poblem with either perspective of gun ownership. For Fathers Day that year I received a rifle, to be used mostly for “plinking” and/or target practice.
Couple of months later, our daughter came frantically running into our bedroom at 1:00 AM saying someone was breaking into her bedroom. Long story short, the perps were two convicted and armed felons (attempted murder) and no one else will ever have to worry about either one of them.
We lived in an average suburban neighborhood leading avergae lifestyles. Nothing unusual one way or another. The detectives catagorized it as a “one in a million” type invasion.
Had I not owned a firearm and/or hesitated to use it, the probablility is that I would not be responding to this post. I cannot imagine anyone convincing me to give up ownership. As my experience demonstrates, you just never know.
My situation is a bit difficult to encapsulate with the options. When I was younger and still living at home, my younger brother had gotten mixed up in a bad crowd and, as a result, the house was broken into at least twice to my knowledge, but in both cases when no one was home. Knowing who those people were and what their intentions were, I strongly suspect that the very reason they chose to do so was because they knew that my father owned guns and knew that no one was home. Also, as part of the same general situation, while it wasn’t an attempted break in, they had come by to start some trouble and I made them leave by obviously carrying a rather large knife… odd though that that was enough to make them leave when the other person with the shotgun wasn’t enough.
Anyway, though I do have various weapons as collectibles (primarily medieval and Asian types), I do not currently own a gun. Whenever I do go target shooting, which granted isn’t often, I’ll just use one of my friends’ guns, so the only real incentive to owning one myself is for protection, and I just don’t feel the need for it currently. I may reconsider at such a point that I live in a situation that I feel I am at greater risk for a break-in (ie, live in a nicer house) or have family to protect, but for now, it’s not really worth the money for me.
Anyway, with regard to the poll, I answered it with regard to the previous situation since I had, in fact, faced home invasion and, based on the content of the OP, I figure that is more relevant.
To you, perhaps. I think actually pulling a trigger would be way more difficult than taking a bunch of pills, for example – especially if I wasn’t that motivated to kill myself in the first place.
“Might” is a pretty key word, there. And I had teenagers in mind when I wrote my post.
Do you allow knives or razors in your house? What about prescription medications? If so, what you’re saying is that you would be more likely to shoot yourself than slit your wrists or OD. Doesn’t mean that “someone might commit suicide with it” is a valid reason why no one should keep a gun in their house.
That’s true, but I think their parents would take it at this point.
…which has nothing to do with the point I was making.
Okay. Not sure what your point was, then.
Good question, but I didn’t do anything. I believe the percentages are based on the number of individual responders. Each person would normally only respond once in each group, although some said they marked multiple choices in certain groups because it expressed their views better.
Since this is multiple choice and there isn’t really any way to correlate the different responses to the different groups of choices, I wasn’t really expecting to get any sort of analysis out of this data.
Roddy
:eek:!!!
Have you posted about this before? I don’t think any other Doper has said they’ve actually shot an assailant/intruder before.
Notwithstanding military and/or police-related situations, it has to be very rare. With the aforementioned exceptions, I don’t know anyone else who has.
This is my first opportunity to ask someone who successfully intervened in a home invasion with the use of a gun as to how it went.
Tell us everything 
Stuff like this just doesn’t happen in my world.