I’d have thought he wanted examples of incidents where guns enabled people to defend themselves from bad guys. Surely the distinction is not beyond your grasp, although your last few comments cause me to be less confident of that assumption than I might have been otherwise.
Admittedly this instance falls short of what I believe the purpose of the thread is, which is to highlight the numerous times gun owners have been able to use their weapons to defend themselves and their loved ones from criminal threat. Since you seem confused as to how this particular situation should be described, I’d characterize it as an incident which started out as a negative use of guns that fortunately turned into a positive use of guns.
Oh my dear SA, I don’t think you should be throwing snarks about comprehension around. It ill suits you.
For example, how would you fit your theory around the two cases from the OP of people being pardoned for breaking gun laws. Or the two where unarmed people managed to disarm their armed assailants? Doesn’t it strike you as a bit of a stretch to say that a man using krav maga to disarm his armed assailant was only able to defend himself because of the gun?
Probably best for the OP to spell out his ground rules for this one. Only then can I be confident of being able to help find suitably positive stories!
Oh, I don’t know…it had the effect of getting you to drop the pretense and faux befuddlement and post something serious for a change.
Do you really think you’ve been scoring any sort of worthwhile points by suggesting things like it being a positive for gun ownership in the OP’s mind that a rogue cop committed suicide? Or by pretending it’s a condemnation of gun ownership to observe that a woman shot by intruders wouldn’t have been shot had they not had guns, irrespective of the fact she could have faced a far worse fate had she been unarmed also and they attacked (and likely raped and killed) her with knives or bludgeons or their fists?
I notice you’ve been utterly silent when it comes to answering any of the issues we’ve raised, including the question of how you’d keep guns out of the hands of criminals post gun control or legal elimination. Until you can tell us how victims without guns are supposed to fight off criminals armed with illegal guns (or axes or swords or cleavers or baseball bats) and/or how you’re going to keep guns out the hands of bad guys in your utopian gun free world, you aren’t going to make much headway in getting anyone not already opposed to gun ownership to change their mind.
Why SA, there seems to be some confusion on your part. I am truly not looking to change the mind of yourself, Bone, or anyone else. I am sincerely and honestly trying to understand what the OP believes is a positive gun experience, but I’d also be interested in your position.
So please, there’s no need for you to throw in strawmen about post gun utopias or other such unrelated issues. No doubt the OP will be back shortly to clarify his stance on just what is a positive gun experience, and by all means feel free to continue explaining your own stance.
Your curiosity and desire to, uh, comprehend are indeed admirable. Therefore may I suggest you look at the examples we post as examples of what we find to be positive gun experiences. It’s really not that hard if you put your mind to it.
Why I did look at thosee examples, hence my earlier questions. For example, those two cases of people manually disarming attackers with guns? Not sure I’m really seeing why that’s a positive gun event, as it wasn’t really the gun that saved the day there.
Or is the definition of a positive gun event one where guns were involved, but good people weren’t killed?
I agree that lots of these examples are incidents of desirable, but lamentable, outcomes from bad circumstances. Although it’s unseemly to celebrate them, I do understand the political intention behind this thread.
Sad fact: I did a quick check through the dates and locations for each of your anecdotes, and in every one of the first six cases, there was a murder-suicide committed with a firearm in the same state on or around the same day. Nationally, there would be multiple instances of murder-suicides occuring on or around each of your anecdotes, such as the sad case of the guy who killed his wife and three kids in Minnesota in the beginning of September.
I don’t believe you. If you really were interested, why did you fail to respond to these questions:
So, to clarify for anyone who either didn’t read the first post, or didn’t actually comprehend it: Positive news relating to firearms. You can decide for yourself what you consider to be positive. I think it’s more revealing that yourself and Vaevictis praise suicide as a positive. But in case you weren’t clear, from the first post:
In other news, Second Amendment election results 2015
There were two states that had elections last week where firearm issues played an important role. The result:
And the results? The two candidates that Bloomberg tried to push both lost, and McAuliffe will have little to no chance to advance any gun control agenda. An Op Ed (I think?) from the Washington Post asks, Did gun control cost McAuliffe and Democrats the Virginia election?
Bloomberg has the ability to outspend every single gun rights organization single handedly, and his pledge last year to spend $50M dwarfs anything else out there. This election was a data point that it is not simply a matter of spending.
Not taking a position here, but just to offer an analogy for why some have a hard time understanding the “positive news” angle to the thread:
Many folks here believe women have a right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, and many feel very strongly that this right is under attack. However, most of these pro-choice people recognize that having an abortion is a very serious matter, and would hesitate to start a thread recounting myriad stories of destitute teenagers being raped and choosing to end the pregnancy, and then going even further and calling this “positive news” about the right to choose.
So when we talk about a crime victim ending an assailant’s life, many people may see the justified homicide as the lawful use of a very important right to self-defense, but stop short of calling it “positive news.” I think the term “positive news” calls to mind events that we all wish would happen, as opposed to applying it to an extremely traumatic episode resolved through invoking an important (but controversial) civil right.
“I think we have the capacity to evaluate components of an event, rather than the event in total. Do you think that’s true?”
Yes, I do think it is possible to isolate component parts of an event and evaluate them in isolation.
“Do you think the fact that a victim of a crime was able to defend them self sounds horrible?”
No, I do not think a victim being able to defend themselves is horrible
Now, quid pro quo, Clarice. “A criminal with a firearm, being disarmed by an unarmed person…that’s positive gun news because a gun crime was prevented, right?”
No, it’s not positive gun news in the sense of this thread because it wasn’t the result of someone with legal ownership of a gun using it to thwart an attack. The outcome however was positive in the sense that a gun eventually did allow someone to thwart a lethal attack.
Again we find ourselves faced with your underlying implication that if guns were illegal the bad guys wouldn’t have had guns to begin with, but most of us on the pro-gun side know this will never happen. There’s a saying that goes “If we outlaw guns, nobody will get shot anymore. That’s how we stopped people from using drugs.”
Like drugs, guns are everywhere in this country. It’s impossible to get rid of them all and those that remain can still be stolen and used to commit crime. And of course those already circulating in criminal circles will remain there. It’s also impossible to prevent guns from being smuggled in from south of the border. All that would be accomplished by trying to legally eliminate guns is to create a black market for them in which guns would be as easy to obtain as drugs are now, while simultaneously taking away the ability of law abiding citizens to defend themselves. Surely you would not view this as positive gun news…or would you?
You didn’t answer all the questions in post #148. You’ve also conflated multiple aspects of the scenario, and equivocated on the evaluation of each of them. When you are able to answer the remaining question in post #148, you’ll see that this point was directly responded to. I know, you’re JAQ.
I also agree with what SA states in post #154, however I’m not as interested in the political issues raised since I’m not debating in this thread.
Understood. What is considered positive is subjective. I do think that when a person is able to effectively defend them self, that is positive. The fact that a person was forced to do so is generally negative.
I think this is a great thing you’re doing, bone. It’s not scientific, but at least it provides something to get some kind of read on defensive gun uses. And so far, reaching back to August, you’ve got like 8 incidents or so. Slightly less than one per week. That’s great!
Of course, GunFAIL blog, using the same process (reviewing stories in the media) finds about 50 incidents a week. They don’t include homicides or intentional gun crimes - just times where people fucked up with guns.
This one, also from 2 months ago, is a bit of a dubious example. The shooter was involved in escalating an argument and then fleeing the scene of a shooting. Also, why not just drive away instead of shooting the guy and then driving away?
If this is what you’re having to reach for now, I’m not sure that this effort is going to have legs.