People make mistakes. If you want to suggest you are incapable of making a mistake I would disagree but that is neither here nor there. It is human. Shit happens however unintentional it may be.
Not to mention people can be unpredictable. Do I need to make an assessment of how rational and responsible a person is before deciding they can bring a gun in my house? What if I let you bring a gun in but I decide Argent Towers is a hothead (as an example) and I do not want him to have a gun in my house? Seems far better to just say you both cannot have one than to pick and choose (assuming I could always make a good assessment of who is a risk and who is not).
Perhaps you go to the bathroom and decide the gun is chaffing and take it out and set it on the counter for a moment. Something you almost never do but this time you do it. You leave the bathroom and forget the gun is on the sink. Next person in the bathroom is a kid.
That hypothetical is just that but there are lots and lots of such things. Thousands of gun accidents happen every year. If I have a pool it is a risk to my kids. If you come with a gun to my house you have added to that risk. Why would I want an added risk that is unnecessary? Even a small and remote risk? Leave it in the car…no big deal. The defense you bring with the gun, presuming some attack on the house while you are my guest, is smaller than the danger you represent with the gun.
In the end I do not see how it matters. It is my house. If I ask you to take your shoes off before entering then do so or leave…your choice. Same with the gun.
You presume I know you to be a responsible gun owner who is always rational and a stand up guy. At least I suppose you think this about yourself so my telling you to leave your gun in the car is rude and unmannerly in your view.
My question to you is how do I know you are a responsible gun owner who is always rational and a stand up guy? How am I to query all the guests who may show up to a party I throw, quite possibly unknown to me as they are accompanying someone I invited? How do you go about this? Am I seriously expected to stand at the door and query every guest who enters whether they have a gun and if so then ask 20 questions to assess their threat level?
I do not mean these questions rhetorically. Seems to me the rude and unmannerly thing is to just assume I am ok with you having a gun in my home.
Sigh. For the 10th tine, you are arguing against a position that nobody here has taken.
I think there would be no derision,and that would be correct.
I and others have refuted it several times. I will do so again now, just for your benefit:
I don’t believe anybody knows what the risk is, least of all you. If you do know then show us the evidence by which it was calculated.
There is no rational reason to insist upon carrying a gun to a fricken’ dinner party because the risk posed by the host/turkey is so small as to be near zero.
There’s nothing irrational about not wanting my wife to have a 1 in a million chance of being shot and left paralyzed. It is perfectly rational not to want to put any additional risks on my family, no matter how small.
My home is where I choose to relax. Thanksgiving is when I choose to relax. If you indulge in a risky activity in my house I can’t relax. There’s nothing irrational about asking people not to engage in potentially lethal activities at a dinner party.
So there. Your argument has been completed refuted. None of these refutations are novel to this post by the way. They have been presented numerous times by numerous posters.
And the fact that they increase the risk of my wife becoming a quadriplegic, or the risk of my daughter being blinded isn’t a decent reason?
Once again I ask: who are you to decide what constitutes a decent reason for protecting my family, and upon which basis do you make such decisions?
jtgain, you spout off about things not being reasonable, but you are unable to show that they actually are unreasonable. Your entire positions is based on assumption that you get to unilaterally decide what reasons are and are not acceptable.
Here’s a rational reason–“There are a lot of goddamn stupid fucks with firearms out there, and since I (being unfamiliar with firearms since I don’t own any) have no basis for believing I can successfully vet safe vs. unsafe gun owners, I ban all firearms in my home. Please leave it in your car or at home.”
This is just as uncalled for as the crap the minority of gun owners in this thread are spewing. I hope I never have to draw my gun in an actual dangerous situation–if something that low percentage is going to happen to me, I’d rather have won ten grand or so on the lottery, and I gather most people who carry feel the same way.
Call it “fear” if you want, it’s more or less the same kind of impulse that prompts people to use lightning rods, wear seatbelts, and not let their children pet stray dogs–there is a risk they feel they can mitigate by having a gun on their person. Now, granted, whether or not carrying a gun is like those previous examples or more like “I’m not wearing a helmet when I ride my motorcycle, because I can hear better and reduce my risk of an accident” is unknown, since there’s wholly inadequate data on the actual protective value vs. risk of proper concealed carry.
Which is the way it has always been. Yeah, you try to make your guests comfortable, but you don’t let them do shit to your house. The smoking example is a perfect one. If they are stupid enough to smoke, it’s their problem. Hospitality does not extend to letting them make it be my problem.
Anecdotes can have their place but in this case that is misleading. It is not surprising that someone, somewhere has successfully defended themself or another with a gun. The question is at what price does that protection come? Statistically it would seem more people are injured or die because people keep a gun for protection.
One overlooked point (or perhaps I just overlooked it; it’s a big thread) is that people with concealed carry permits already have a number of places they legally cannot carry, such as police stations, schools, courthouses, civil administration buildings, bars/restaurants, etc.
Responsible CCW holders should already have a “fallback,” as in, “I’m carrying today, but I can’t carry in this particular location, so I’m going to do ‘X’ with my carry.”
Whether it’s locking it in the trunk, or leaving it at home, CCW holders already realize that there are a number of situations in which their privelege is curtailed. YMMV by jurisdiction, of course, but to my knowledge, every CC area has limits to one degree or another on where/when you can carry.
So NOT carrying in someone’s home should be no big deal.
But that dated article is just as flawed, because it only considers deaths: GunCite - Gun Control Web Site: A Gun in the Home There are plenty of times you can shoot an intruder and it not kill them.
Or drive off an intruder without shooting them, or even firing a shot.
I imagine that the vast majority of successful defensive uses of firearms involved simply making the attacker aware that the victim was/could be armed. Next most common would probably be situations where warning shots were fired, followed by situations where the attacker was wounded.
I would expect that defensive situations where the attacker was killed would be very, very tiny, even if a thousand people every day successfully used a firearm to defend themselves.