Politically, it seems likely a good idea since it undercuts the constant attempts to portray Democrats and women as both “anti-gun”, and as “weak”. The right wing stereotype would be that she’d helplessly let herself be killed out of sheer cowardice.
People are more likely to kill themselves or an innocent than to use a gun to defend themselves, owning one puts you in more danger, not less. Also note that the “road rager” might well also have a gun, and be more likely to use it.
I have faith that – to the extent Kamala Harris is “campaigning in poetry --” she’d “govern in prose.”
Not ceding the flag, the Bible, or the NRA vote entirely to Donald Trump has very little downside … if done with a deft hand and in moderation.
Swing voters. It’s what’s for breakfast!
All you have to do is to convince the intruder to enter the escape room. While they’re working out the puzzles, you can summon the authorities.
Agreed completely.
This is a good point. I am against private gun ownership, but not if there is valid reason for you to own that gun. For example, farmers should be allowed the sorts of firearms that are resonably used for perst control. An armored truck driver for a bank may need the sort of firearm you could use for personal defense. And someone like a district attorney, who may make a lot of dangerous enemies as part of their job, may likewise have a valid reason to own a gun.
I’ve always owned guns, and while I have no problem with Harris owning one, I do have a problem with her statement. IMO, a weapon in the home should be used as a deterrent and only fired as a last resort. A burglar no more wants to be shot than to shoot you, and the loss of a few items is not a reason to take a life. I told my wife that - assuming we know someone is in the house - that her job was to shut the bedroom door and plop herself down with all her weight against it. I, in the meantime, I would grab the shotty out of the closet and dial 911. If someone tried the door, I’d say in a loud voice that I am armed and that the police have been called. Now that’s an ideal situation. If I feel my life is in danger, then all bets are off.
Our circumstances have changed, of course, and when we decided to move into a senior living facility I sold my shotgun and gave my .22 rifle to my grandson. I still have my .22 pistol, but the chances of it ever being fired are pretty nearly zero, as are the chances of anybody breaking into the apartment. I just haven’t figured out what I want to do with it. Probably turn it in to the cops for destruction at some point.
How do we know she wasn’t referring to an intruder being shot by the Secret Service? Has she stated that she is a gun owner?
We dont know, but yes, she has stated she owns a small pistol.
Just found something on this. Yes, revealed in 2019.
And that is a personal choice, knowing the dangers, that a person should be allowed to make for themselves without judgement from those that choose not to have guns for self-defense.
ETA: It’s interesting that many that believe in certain levels of libertarianism draw a line at letting people own a gun that stays at home to be used as a last resort during a personal threat.
So this an absolute no brainer. I realize the case of a burglar is a bit of a harder sell, but in a road incident absolutely 100% it is better for everyone in almost all cases that no one has a gun. Like not even close, even if you only consider the legal and physiological well being of the shooter, let alone passers by, and the jackass who was just killed for having poor anger management, it is absolutely the best outcome for all the belligerents (and everyone else) to GTFO without any starting shooting.
Didn’t answer the question. You OK to be beaten up by a road-rager to stand on principle of not owning a gun? And you think everyone else should be beat up too? Even if the road-rager has a weapon? Sorry (not sorry), you don’t get to decide if my wife and I get beaten with a baseball bat or tire iron because YOU prefer not to defend yourself.
See my ETA above. If a person is anti-gun, what gives them the right to determine the self-defense strategy for everyone else?
Same here. Some real pearl-clutching over this.
Yes, if you live in a house with felons or gang members. That is what the study said.
What study?
This one?
Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home
Results: During the study interval (12 months in Memphis, 18 months in Seattle, and Galveston) 626 shootings occurred in or around a residence. This total included 54 unintentional shootings, 118 attempted or completed suicides, and 438 assaults/homicides. Thirteen shootings were legally justifiable or an act of self-defense, including three that involved law enforcement officers acting in the line of duty. For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.
Conclusions: Guns kept in homes are more likely to be involved in a fatal or nonfatal accidental shooting, criminal assault, or suicide attempt than to be used to injure or kill in self-defense. - SOURCE
Road ragers are completely different. If a road rager is trying to beat you up, they’re out of their vehicle. If you have any sense, you’re still in yours. Escape at that point is trivial.
I’ve seen cases where the person is trapped since they are blocked in stopped traffic. And the points still remain:
If you (anti-gun person) are being assaulted in your personal space, are you OK with that?
If you (anti-gun person) truly do not want a gun to defend yourself, why do you judge others that do?
I live in a very big city and, as a matter of habit, I always leave enough room between me and the car ahead to be able to maneuver away. I can tell you that it is rare I would actually be able to do so. Traffic is simply too heavy (most times) to be able to get away if someone is coming for me.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199310073291506
http://www.tbuckner.com/KELLERMANN.htm
They conducted their research by limiting their cases to people murdered in their own homes, thus excluding any instances where intruders were killed by the homeowner. They did not ask the victim’s proxy (from whom they got their data about the victim and his or her household) whether or not the victim had previously defended him/herself with a gun. Thus their conclusion that a gun provides no protective benefit flows from their failure to consider cases where it might have.
In order to provide a control group they selected another person from the neighborhood of the same sex, race, and age group as the victim, and asked them the same questions they had asked the victim’s proxy. While matched on the demographic variables, the control group was stunningly different on behavioral measures. Compared to the control group the victim group was more likely to: rent rather than own, live alone, drink alcoholic beverages, have problems in the household because of drinking, have trouble at work because of drinking, be hospitalized because of drinking, use illicit drugs, have physical fights in the home during drinking, have a household member hit or hurt in a fight in the home, have a household member require medical attention because of a fight in the home, have a household member involved in a physical fight outside the home, have any household member arrested, and be arrested themselves. Thus the victim group and the control group had very different lifestyles, with the victim group living a very high-risk lifestyle.
In fact, Kellermann found that having a gun in the home ranked fifth out of six risk factors in the victims’ lives. Using illicit drugs lead to a 5.7 times risk of being murdered, being a renter 4.4 times, having any household member hit or hurt in a fight 4.4 times, living alone 3.7 times, guns in the household 2.7 times, and a household member being arrested, 2.5 times.
The entire “gun in the home is risky” analysis depends on one crucial figure, the percent of the control group (35.8%) that have guns in their homes. If this figure is underreported, the findings are false. There is good reason to assume this figure is low. First, many, many surveys report that around 48% of Americans have guns in their homes. The victim group, as reported by their proxies, had 45.4% gun owners. This figure is unlikely to be false: the victim is dead, in 49.9% of the cases by gunshot wound, the proxy cannot really lie about it. The control group actually reported owning more rifles and shotguns than the victim group, (fewer handguns) but they may well have not reported having a pistol in the home because it is illegal, or nobody’s business. There is considerable evidence (Kleck, 457; Newton, 6; Erskine, 456; Kennett, 253; Stinchcombe, 115) that over the past three decades an increasing fraction of survey respondents have incorrectly denied gun ownership. In a pilot study, Kellermann tested whether people reported their gun ownership correctly by asking REGISTERED gun owners if they owned a gun, and found that their replies were “generally valid (1089).” The official records of the members of the control group were not checked to see if they had “registered” guns, and likely many had guns that were not registered and not reported. Thus even the finding that gun ownership is the fifth most important risk factor is subject to considerable doubt.
My conclusion is that this study is seriously flawed, and that the conclusions were driven by ideology more than research.
An example of biased research on which the CDC has squandered taxpayers’ money is the work of prominent gun-control researcher Dr. Arthur Kellermann of Emory University’s School of Public Health. Since at least the mid-1980s, Kellermann (and associates), whose work has been heavily funded by the CDC, has published a series of studies purporting to show that persons who keep guns in the home are more likely to be victims of homicide than those who don’t. Despite the “peer reviewed” imprimatur of his published research, his studies, fraught with errors of facts, logic, and methodology, are published in the NEJM and JAMA with great fanfare (advance notices and press releases, followed by interviews and press conferences)—to the delight of the like-minded, cheerleading, monolithic pro-gun control medical establishment, not to mention the mainstream media.
In a 1986 NEJM paper, Kellermann and associates, for example, claimed their “scientific research” proved that defending oneself or one’s family with a firearm in the home is dangerous and counterproductive, claiming “a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder.” This erroneous assertion is what Dr. Edgar Suter, chairman of Doctors for Integrity in Policy Research (DIPR), has accurately termed Kellermann’s “43 times fallacy” for gun ownership.7
In a critical and now classic review published in the March 1994 Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia (JMAG), Suter not only found evidence of “methodologic and conceptual errors,” such as prejudicially truncated data and non-sequitur logic, but also “overt mendacity,” including the listing of “the correct methodology which was described but never used by the authors.” Moreover, the gun-control researchers “deceptively understated” the protective benefits of guns. Suter wrote: “The true measure of the protective benefits of guns are the lives and medical costs saved, the injuries prevented, and the property protected—not the burglar or rapist body count. Since only 0.1 percent-0.2 percent of defensive uses of guns involve the death of the criminal, any study, such as this, that counts criminal deaths as the only measure of the protective benefits of guns will expectedly underestimate the benefits of firearms by a factor of 500 to 1,000.”8
CDC leaders were not shy about their intentions of banning guns from the public. Sure enough, they acted on their desires. In October 1993, The New England Journal of Medicine released a study funded by the CDC to the tune of $1.7 million, entitled “Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home.” The leader author was Dr. Arthur Kellermann, an epidemiologist, physician, and outspoken advocate of gun control… owever, the research was beyond flawed. For one, Kellermann used epidemiological methods in an attempt to investigate an issue dealing with criminology. In effect, this means he was treating gun violence the same as, say, the spread of West Nile, or bird flu.
It provided no proof or examples that the murder weapon used in these crimes belonged to the homeowner or had been kept in that home.
Furthermore, the gun victims he studied were anomalies. They were selected from homicide victims living in metropolitan areas with high gun-crime statistics, which completely discounted the statistical goliath of areas where gun owners engage in little to no crime.
Other factors that lent to the study’s unreliability were: It is based entirely on people murdered in their homes, with 50 percent admitting this was the result of a “quarrel or romantic triangle,” and 30 percent said it was during a drug deal or other felonies such as rape or burglary; it made no consideration for guns used in self-defense; it provided no proof or examples that the murder weapon used in these crimes belonged to the homeowner or had been kept in that home.
These problems prompted objections and questions from leading scientists in the field of criminology, such as Yale University professor John Lott, Florida State’s Gary Kleck, and University of Massachusetts sociology professors James D. Wright and Peter H. Rossi. Their research had come to vastly different conclusions, and they found the methodology unsound.
So, that famous study started out admittedly biased, and was bogus. Still, people quote it, mostly due the the fact the NYT keeps harping on it.
Sure…ignore my study.