Obviously, I was typing that last part BEFORE I saw your clarification of “friends vs. acquaintances”.
I do have a friend that was accidentally shot by a buddy. My dad had his best friend killed by a falling gun in the field. A little responsibility and forethought could have prevented both tragedies.
Well, Czarcasm, at least you didn’t quote the Kellerman study. 
Wait, don’t flame me yet, I have a lot to say here. Seriously, though, I just got up and haven’t had time to see if these cites have been discussed here before - it’s possible they may have, considering that they are from pretty reputable journals. Without even seeing them, however, if Kellerman is the author/co-author of one, or he is cited as the source of the other study, well…then I can reject it out of hand.
If not, then I would like to see how they are defined. I actually had all of those journal issues here, and read a couple of them, but the Ex took them with her. I will not be the one to claim that the studies are questionable in any way - unless Kellerman or his generously massaged data is used in them.
And admitting that there is a higher risk does not bother me in the least, really. Saying that a “having a home with a gun in it is 5 times as likely to end up in the murder of a family member” doesn’t take into account my personal situation. I certainly don’t lump my actions in with the rest of society, and thus a statistic like that is meaningless to me. Just as meaningless to me is one that would say “having a home with a gun in it is 5 times less likley to end up in the murder of a family member”. Either way, the majority of the time it is my own actions, responsibilites, etc. that lead to my consequences.
All of the freedoms we exercise have risk, and the thing that doesn’t get discussed much here, which I brought up ages and ages ago, is: “How many children must die in accidents from firearms misuse by others to justify Anthracite not being raped again?” Now, on the surface this is a specious argument. But let’s think about it, because maybe it is the core of what the whole argument really is about.
So…how many innocent children is my protection worth? It’s a hard question to ask, and even harder to answer. We know there will always be accidents, so I know as long as I can have a gun like other people, the risk must be non-zero. As long as there are firearms, there will be accidents. Experienced police officers, military personnel, Olympic-class target shooters make mistakes. The rate is miniscule, but not zero.
It’s also akin to saying "How many children must be exposed to hard-core pornography so that Mr. Weird Al can buy his lesbian skin magazine (sorry Weird Al 
)? The difference is that “Being exposed to pornography” is not really as bad as “being shot”. The magnitude is different, but the principle is the same. Freedoms with costs - sometimes terrible costs. How does one balance keeping the Freedom with reducing the costs? 
How much is a child worth? A hard, or possibly callous question, but this is the SDMB, where we are used to asking the hard questions. In an impromptu debate at work, over lunch, this question was put to my co-workers. The answers ranged from “I’m not going to answer that” to “Infinite”. Really? I said “so your child is worth more than the lives of everyone else in the World, including mine?” and the answer was “Yes.” Hmmm… I’m guessing that few people will ever be able to agree on the cost of the life of an innocent, especially if it is their own child.
How much is my right to protect my body and life, with a means that actually has a chance of success, worth? How much is it worth if a woman is not raped? The woman might say infinite - but how does it compare to a child-life of value? Is it 1/1000 child? 1/100? And please, the wanna-be Bruce Lee’s can stay out of this. No 5’ tall, 120 pound woman is going to have a serious chance of defending herself against the 6’4" 280-pound linebacker who decides that he didn’t get enough sex today - unless she has an equalizer. I doubt if I could swing a baseball bat hard enough to not have it taken away from me. I doubt that a stun gun will actually deter someone, plus it puts me too close to them. I doubt that if I went to a Shao-Lin monastery for 20 years that I would be able to do much against a determined, much larger and stronger man out for his nightly-rapin’. But I’m skilled with using my handguns, I’m practiced, and most of all, in the darkest of the night, all alone and pondering, I have come to the answer that I have the will to kill someone who is attacking me. If I had a person at gunpoint who seriously threatened me, and I demanded they stay put, and they pulled that stupid-ass “Hollywood trick” of walking slowly forward, hand out, talking in those patronizing male tones of “Now, give me the gun…” I would shoot them, and they would get a .44 caliber hole in them, and they would die. And as I posted earlier, I know what the consequences will be. And I have accepted them.
And this is why this question can never be answered, and why these debates will continue. It is impossible to define the value of my right. And it is impossible to define the cost of my right.
I hate to agree with moderators, but in this case I simply must abandon my anti-authoritarian principles to say that I cannot understand why everyone has such a problem with what Czarcasm is saying. I understand that Billy Ruben is a god among men and will never use his gun in an irresponsible manner. But I don’t think that many gun-owners are anywhere near as responsible as he is. And he claims he would want his family members to know where his gun is kept so that they could defend themselves as well. Which is not a bad idea, but how can he really be sure that his family members are always as responsible as he is?
And regarding all this talk of suicide, I have no figures or statistics but I am convinced that if I owned a gun I might, in some angst-ridden mental crisis, decide to take a fast, easy, irreversible way out and this one second of madness could cost me my life. I think other methods of suicide allow for more contemplation while one is preparing, say, the poison gas. Plus a greater possibility of resuscitation than a bullet to the head. So anyway, that’s my opinion on the effect of gun-ownership on suicide.
If we’re talking about gun laws, I understand the fear of taking guns away from the people who only want to protect themselves, while criminals continue to flaunt their illegally-obtained guns to their hearts’ content. I share Czarcasm’s horror of guns and I would never want such a powerful and effective instrument of death in my house. But I know that there is no easy way to get rid of them.
If we’re talking about ethics and morality, I guess some people are willing to take the risk of killing someone who did not intend to harm them, or even the risk of someone in their family turning out to be a “moron” and having a gun-related accident, while other people, such as myself, are not.
I miss America a lot but I will not live there because I feel so much safer in Europe.
Okay let’s take this one step at a time:
However,
Why? Because I have no desire to own a gun, not (I suspect) unlike you, Czarcasm, for exactly the reasons that you mentioned and cites that you posted.
So just to be clear, I am not one of these people trying to discount what you’re saying just to justify my ownership of my firearm. In fact, I believe that if I were to own a firearm, then I would strive to be as responsible as superBilly. In fact, if I were shopping for a gun, I must admit that I’d be be pretty much sold in getting his signaturegun/magnetoring safety. But that’d be a decision I would make for myself weighing all the pros and cons. And, sorry dude, but I’d study my own feeling on the matter before I looked into other people’s opinions.
But I digress.
The situation you described about innocent people innocently crawling through windows was the only statement that left me giggling, and you tried to justify it by stating that mistakes DO happen. Fine. I can accept the fact that mistakes do happen and people are likely to get hurt or dead, but when you tried to back it up by talking about increased chances of suicide, I just felt that it became a silly discussion. I never argued against your facts and figures, I dismissed them because they held little relevancy the point that I was trying to make. What does somebody crawling into your house in the middle of the night have anything to do with suicide? What does MY life have anything to do with suicide? I’ve had my share of depressing bouts, but I gotta tell you, I’m just not the kind of person that’s willing to say “It’s all not worth it, I’m outta here, babes”. Maybe I’m just a different breed of cat.
I wasn’t clear, perhaps.
The fact is that in my life, the need to crawl through a window has happened so rarely that the situation you describe was laughable. I wasn’t saying that forgetting/losing your keys was not something that happened, but as I tried to point out, you put it together with a number of other calculated factors and “What ifs” to create this sense of imminent disaster like a badly written script that we’d all laughingly critisize on the CS board.
Well, I’m telling you right now that in the event that someone gets locked out of the house/apartment in MY life, the first reaction is to knock on the door or ring the bell.
IF there’s nobody answering, then we have to go for other measures.
Then you bring a neighbour into the equasion who happens to be a gun owner and decides to be a hero for me by trying to shoot me as I enter my own home.
That’s just laughable to me. Maybe that’s an ordinary day in the Bronx or South Central, but not were I live. And if I WERE to live in those areas, you can assume that I’m going to know my vigilante neighbours by name. Heck, from what I can gather of American culture, people generally keep to themselves. If my neighbour saw someone sneaking around the house, I’d like to think she’d call the police before doing anything else. If she decided to come out and play hero with her pearl-handled .44 she got for Valentine’s Day. I’d like for her to say “Hey asshole, I have a gun. Don’t move!”
To which the conversation would probably goes something like this while either moving verrrrry slowly or not at all:
“Hi, Mary. I hope you’ve got that safety on that minihowitzer of yours…”
“Darq?”
“Yeah.”
I would imagine that getting to know your gun-toting neighbours would be paramount.
It’s just one of the many precautions I would take in my new environment. It’s called “common sense”. And praticing it does NOT obliterate accidents, but certainly reduces the likelyhood of their happening to a much smaller measure.
But that’s just me.
So, the point that I’m trying to make is this:
If somebody’s going to start crawling in through the window of MY place while I’m at home in the middle of the night, you can assume that SOMEbody’s going to get hurt real bad. And I can tell you right now that I’m going to try and reduce the chances of that somebody being me by all means necessary using whatever tools I have available.
Anybody who knows me knows that, and will no doubt make a quick announcement of their intentions once I make my presence aware. Because if they’re a friend of mine, then they’d know I have a gun.
This is why it’s fair for me to assume, then, that they’d knock.
THIS is why I find the situation laughable.
I’ve never had to crawl in a window before (although I’ve had to jump over gates to get into my house), but I think the point was that it could happen. Of course, this wouldn’t be a problem for those people who say, “Hold it, I have a gun” before shooting since the person could probably identify himself then. But apparently some people would just start shooting immediately since anyone climbing through a window is a potential threat. Well let’s say that in 999,999 out of a million cases, that person is a threat. Some may feel that this is a risk so minimal, it isn’t worth thinking about - and that would be quite a valid conclusion, especially when you consider that it’s quite possibly your life at stake. Personally, I don’t find the thought laughable, though.
okay, if ever a gun should rest in my hands then i will know how to shoot with a degree of accuracy. my gut instinct would be to shoot him in the leg.
GUT INSTINCT DAMMIT.
You know some of you have made an assumption about me that is not true. I am not “anti-gun”. Though I do not currently own a gun, I have in the past, and probably will again in the future. When I do, the weapon is locked up securely in a safe, and the ammo is locked up securely in a place I will not mention, because my child is a Straight Dope fan. I just feel that when you compare the extremely slight chance of some bad guy breaking into your house in the middle of the night to the risk of firing the weapon accidently or in anger, or your children finding said weapon, it just doesn’t add up. If you were truly doing it for “safety”, you would wear a helmet when you drove your car, and you would install guard rails in your bathtub. Do you really thing the third poster had safety in mind when he wrote “Blam! ‘freeze’”??
I don’t think so.
There have been countless cases of children using guns which the parents kept for protection. One such case involved a thirteen-year-old boy who was showing his mother’s gun to his friend. It went off accidentally and killed the friend.
The boy’s mother had kept her gun loaded and “hidden” somewhere near her bed, which would make sense if she was afraid of intruders in the night. I suppose if she had had that special magnetic ring thing it might have made the gun harder for her son to fire. But it made me wonder whether there is really any point “hiding” the gun. My parents hid the key to the VCR cabinet in lots of different places when I was young and my brother found it every time - and that was just a key. Maybe it’s better to actually show the child the gun and explain how dangerous it is. We do that with a lot of other things e.g. electric sockets, stoves, etc.
NRA people always talk about the days when ten-year-olds were taught how to use hunting rifles but didn’t go around shooting their classmates. I always thought that argument was a bit ridiculous because even if it is society which has changed, how do we just change it back? But now I wonder… if one really has to have a gun in the house, maybe it would be better to follow that approach.
Just wanted to know if anyone has any thoughts on this.
I’ve heard similar stories of people who have a collection of guns throughout the house with children who
My thoughts would certainly revolve around training the child about the gun and the dangers and resposibilities involved. As well as rules (like NOT showing it to friends).
I’d take my kid out the shooting range for sure, just so (s)he understand the gun, rather than play the ignorance or denial game.
It’s certainly the better of the two options, IMHO.
Just try to remember that even the best-trained child does not have the experience or sense of responsibility an adult has. That is why a good parent locks the poisons away.
How do some of you secure your weapons when you are not at home, to prevent the increase of “black market” weapons? I certainly hope you don’t the “hide them where only I can find them” approach, because the pros know all the hiding places.
True, and I would hate to have to entrust my child with this kind of responsibility, which is why I would rather not have a gun in the house at all. But for those who feel that they must… I think I agree with Darqangelle.
I’m a bit confused about one thing, Czarcasm. You say that there’s very little chance of a burglar breaking in to your house, and that when you have a gun you keep it in a safe with the ammunition somewhere else. Can I ask you what you use it for?
Except for the two pistols I have out for immediate protection, all my rifles and shotguns are in a 600 pound vault to “keep them off the street.”
As my 10 month old daughter begins to come of an age when she’s more mobile, the two pistols will go in there too.
As my situation changes and the risk increases of having an accident, I’ll re-evaluate how we’d address our response to lower that risk accordingly.
When I have a handgun, I use it strictly for target practice at a shooting range. If the local range allows it, I store the gun and ammo there. Some private ranges have lockers for that sort of thing, as long as you don’t try to store your whole collection there.
Yeah, this is where I’m in agreement (again). I have an interest in firearms. An ‘interest’ mind you, nothing more. If I was intent on using a firearm for target practice only, then I’d make sure than the firearms is stored at the range.
Otherwise, why risk transporting it/storing it when it’s only use is at the range? Why not keep it at the location as well?
Could you please tell me exactly what the risk of a “bad guy” breaking into one’s home is, expressed as a percentage? Since you appear to know that it is “extremely slight,” I have to presume that you have a number handy. Please control for all outside factors: population, population density, median income, gender, ethnicity, number of arrests per 1,000 population, number of convictions per 100 arrests, etc.
FTR, I do not own a handgun or any other type of firearm. Never have.
I do believe I’ve already given stats on how much more likely a handgun purchased for home protection will kill a family member or a friend then a robber breaking into your home. Whether the New England Journal of Medicine took all of your factors into account, I cannot say.
It seems that most of the other people who’ve written here have guns for protection, though, not target practice. So I guess it isn’t as easy for them to decide where/how to keep the gun.
That wasn’t what I asked. I asked what the chance is of someone breaking into your home at all, not what the chance is of defending yourself against them with a handgun. Are you now admitting you do not have any such information available? If so, why did you say it in the first place?
I can assure you, having seen Dr. Kellerman’s NEJM article thoroughly taken apart countless times, that they did not. Nevertheless, it still isn’t relevant to the question I asked.
Czar:
Billy’s not being contradictory; just not being clear to a non-gunowner.
The NRA recommends that firearms and ammunition be stored separately in locked containers for maximum safety. The NRA also realizes that we the people are not uniform in our domestic situations, and that’s one of the main reasons that they oppose things like HCI’s proposed mandatory storage laws. They encourage safety, and safe habits and practices, but oppose mandating blanket solutions that will not apply to everyone. Every individual gun owner is free to examine their particular situation and need, and tailor their storage and handling habits to themselves and their situation. That’s the NRA line.
One of the basic tenets of firearm safety is to always treat every firearm as if it is loaded. Even if you just took every last bullet out of a 6-shot revolver, and are holding 6 bullets in your hand, you still treat the firearm as if it had 6 live bullets in the cylinder. It’s a safety habit that everyone is encouraged strongly to practice by every firearms manual sold with a weapon, every class of instruction given on firearms safety, and drilled mercilessly by the US Military. Well, the Army at least.
Realize as well that everyone who advocates simply blasting away at a home intruder is merely talking. Until they are confronted with the situation, what they will or will not really do is academic. As Billy pointed out, if someone intends to purchase a firearm for home defense, the first question they should be asking is:“If I absolutely must, can I shoot, possibly kill, another human being?” If the answer is no, get something other than a gun.
That is not an invocation to violence, on my part, the NRA’s, or on Billy’s (most likely); it is the realistic assessment of the worst-case-scenario.
Some may say yes, without realizing that they are fooling themselves and that the true answer is “no.” These are the fortunately rare instances you hear about occasionally of a home owner being killed with their own gun after an intruder took it away from them. It’s not because most gun owners are killing home intruders; it’s probably because most break-ins occur when no one is at home. In the event of a confrontation, any home owner willing to pull the trigger is probably not going to have their firearm wrested away from them. Being willing to pull a trigger does not indicate a personal desire to inflict harm; in self defense sceanrios, exigency dictates response.
[fighting back tears of pain from hole in leg]
Yes your honor I broke in, no I didn’t know they were home. I don’t know why they shot me I put my hands up and begged them not to hurt me. I was just going to grab this stereo to try and hock it to buy food for my hungry children.
[/fighting back tears of pain from hole in leg]
Legally if you use lethal force you will be treated as if you intended to kill. The fact that you hit a leg is not treated by the burglars attourney as indicitive of your skill it will be treated as a “failed attempt to kill.”
If your life is threatened, protect yourself. If he wants the stereo, let him have it.
Below I have quoted my hypothetical scenario from a previous thread.
FTR I was a competition handgun shooter for 3 years, and an EMT for 2. I am intimately familiar with both safe gun handling and the effects of my weapon on human beings.
Czar, I find it fascinating that you seem to feel its ok for Anthracite to have a gun since she has been hurt by an intruder, but not ok for someone else to have one and possibly stop a would be attacker. Why are we gun owners doing wrong by being proactive. As pldennison is insinuating a home breakin is a rare thing. If you have been robbed, your chances of being hit again are most likely even smaller. So why are you asking us to surrender what might be our one chance to save our own lives or those of our family.
In my scenario I would not confront the intruder until I literally had no choice.
To quote the movie pearl harbor
“if trouble comes looking for me I’m ready, but why go looking for it”