True, sometimes.
Again it’s usually a case of the correlation is there when you look for it.
Basically, no clear correlation can be made for higher or lower rates of violent crime to gun ownership, same for suicide.
If you compare one state to another or one country to another, it can seem to say one thing in this instance and another in that instance.
Take Japan’s suicide rate for instance.
Overall US crime rates have been in serious decline for decades. I’m sure there are a multitude of contributing factors there.
Essentially, what it all tells us is that all of these things are determined far more consistently by other factors.
Humans have a long track record of trying to push some simple answer though, so instead of taking a hard look at all of the social complexities , we focus on things that we’ve proven over and over again either don’t matter or are insignificant compared with other contributing factors.
Dogs are a great deterrent, they are also at least as likely to cause your child to be admitted to the hospital and far more likely to cause an injury. In both instances we are looking at waaay less than 1percent so are either an imminent threat to child safety, nope.
Assuming the police were code 3 (lights and siren) then it’s easy, you show your hands.
But, say it was a no knock warrant. Then we can look at this few ways. And as a bonus we’ll assume they got the wrong address and you know you have done nothing to cause to police to raid your home.
You could show them your hands
a. If they are armed crooks who are pretending to be the police, well, we know is extremely rare in the first place but we know they want you alive at least for the time being. Otherwise they’d just shoot. In that case you’re at the mercy of the crooks.
b. They are the police, again they want you alive. And you end up in cuffs and odds are in the back of a police van.
You could decide to take go for your gun and there might a shoot out. You might die, you might kill the intruders, officer or not, you might get wounded, or they may flee. Of course if they are real police they will surround the house. You then could call 911 where you find they are the police and surrender. Of course swat could decide to rush your home and kill you, but odds are you’d have enough time to call 911.
Now let’s assume you’re unarmed, don’t own a gun at all.
1, You show them your hands. There is no option 2.
The difference between having a gun and not having one is you have options. While you might end up showing your hands and ending up at the mercy of the crooks or the police (thus in the same boat as a person with no gun), you have the option of trying to defend yourself if you own a gun.
I’m in the camp of I’d rather have a gun and not need it, then need a gun and not have it.
You do realize that in your description, in Option 1, you are dealing with people who “want you alive”, and are presumably not currently interested in killing you. In Option 2, you are, in both possible cases, in a gunfight with people who, even if they are not inherently interested in killing you, are now really keen on putting a few bullets in you.
Maybe it’s actually safer to not have the option to start a gunfight, cuz gunfights are dangerous.
Unless you need to buy a gun NOW. So unless there is a way to bypass the waiting period, you could end up hurting people.
Say your a woman who’s trying to get away from an abuser, who had said he will kill you. Yes, you have a restraining order that says no contact, must remain x yards away at all times, etc. But you know a paper won’t stop him, so you go to get a gun to protect yourself and you’re told, come back in a week. Now what?
BTW, I knew a woman who left an abuser who was shot and killed, and yes she had a restraining order. It didn’t protect her.
What could have saved your friend’s life is if her abuser had a harder time getting ahold of a gun.
Unfortunately, with guns as prevalent and easy to get ahold of as they are, if someone wants to kill you, you pretty much need to accept that they are going to do so, and there really isn’t much you can do about it.
Were you there? Maybe you are psychic? No? You are neither of those things? I guess, then, the certainty with which you declare what would have happened if the woman had had a gun has no basis in anything except you wish it so.
I’m pretty confident that the dude who shot her had a gun, though I suppose I could be wrong about that.
I am not even slightly convinced that the supposed ‘defensive gun use’ business works as well when the person who wants you dead has a gun and is there specifically because they want you dead. They have the element of surprise, they can get the drop on you, and while you’re going for your weapon they can go for their trigger.
Well, given the number of movies and TV shows that constitute your body of knowledge on this topic, we must surely give your opinion the weight it deserves. I will simply note that those whose jobs may put them in opposition to opponents armed with guns overwhelmingly choose to arm themselves with guns.
Would he have even come near her if he knew she was armed?
I can say the whole thing would have been avoided if she had a gun and he knew it, not wanting to get shot himself and all.
Or that he would have just strangled her instead if neither had a gun.
That would just be conjecture though, as is your claim.
There are no facts in this case , other than she was shot. So all the what ifs, and opinions on the case at hand simply have no ground to stand on.
Waiting periods do make sense, of course if it’s a race to arms well ,this is why you don’t wait until it’s too late and maybe it would be prudent to have exceptions that could be granted by the Sherrifs Dept …just as they used to do for individuals in current danger.
Nope , its considered critical safety equipment, or as simply mandatory to the “protect” aspect of “serve and protect” and as such is mission critical equipment
You’re the dude who’s wildly claiming based on no facts whatsoever that her being able run out and buy a gun without waiting would have had some plausible chance of increasing her survival. If there’s anything stupid about speculation, you are the one who brought the stupidity to the table. I’m just pointing out how your stupid speculation was stupid.
So, on the subject of stupid speculation:
You’re proposing that if this woman who doesn’t own a gun and may not even know how to use one competently had bought one and secretly owned it then the psychic knowledge that she had it would have prevented the man from approaching her. And you’re also pretending that having a gun probably didn’t increase his chances of successfully killing her, because as we all know guns are entirely harmless in the hands of anybody who’s not heroically defending themselves. After all, in the movies bad guys never shoot straight!
Yeah. Suffice to say, your new stupid speculations don’t hold up any better than your first stupid speculation did. And since your entire (strange) “Waiting periods are bad because all persons become badass and invincible if they can immediately get a gun” argument is entirely predicated on that stupid speculation…
So your rebuttal is a chain of wild assumptions.
With links of changing claims that i called conjecture in the first place from " if she had a gun and he knew it" to " if she had a gun and he didn’t know it"
Nice.
Btw, im the one who’s repeatedly said waiting periods make sense.
First a gun might have protected her. So we don’t know what would have happened if she had a gun.
Why do people think that someone who is willing to kill someone, isn’t willing to break the law to get a gun? In this case he used a shotgun, something that most gun control law don’t restrict.
My rebuttal is that everything you’d said on the subject is speculative nonsensical crap, up to and including the bizarre idea that he’d somehow know she ran out and got a gun with his psychic powers.
It might be best to stop arguing for the opposing position, then.
However, here is the fact related to whether a gun would help her if she had one.
According to 2013 national research counsel study;
whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gun-wielding crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual
defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.
While it also says this on gun prevalence;
Between 1986 and 2010, the domestic production of firearms increased by 79 percent, firearm exports increased by 11 percent, and firearm imports increased by 305 percent (ATF, 2012). A December 2012 poll found that 43 percent of those surveyed reported having a gun in the home
Oddly, at the same time
NYT says
The number of violent crimes in the United States dropped significantly last year, to what appeared to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years. In all regions, the country appears to be safer. The odds of being murdered or robbed are now less than half of what they were in the early 1990s, when violent crime peaked in the United States. Small towns, especially, are seeing far fewer murders: In cities with populations under 10,000, the number plunged by more than 25 percent last year
Now, I’m not claiming the massive increase in guns was the cause of the drop, but it certainly didn’t make it trend the other way either.
So as to cause and effect, we will have to look elsewhere.
Even though I’m living in a society where possession of weapons is severely restricted, I can easily see how the right to own them can be considered as important as those you list. A weapon allows you to defend yourself in case of danger, and people would naturally want to be able to do that and could expect that this won’t be denied to them as a matter of principle. Being able to defend oneself seems pretty fundamental to me. “I should be able to protect my life if threatened” doesn’t seem any less important than “I shouldn’t be arbitrarily arrested” (on top of which, one of the arguments in favor of weapons is that they in fact can be the ultimate tool to defend oneself against the curtailing of these other rights, “resistance to tyranny” and such).
Arguments against the right to own weapons are mostly based on it being, on the overall, detrimental for society at large, but deciding that you should be deprived of what would otherwise be a legitimate right simply because, hypothetically, you could misuse it, isn’t an obvious choice to make.
I think that your inability to perceive it as a “true” right is simply cultural and comes from having spent your life in a place where pretty the general discourse is that “of course” possession of firearms should be restricted; so you’re conditioned to see things this way and stating the contrary seems “just ridiculous” to you. But that isn’t an argument. My late mother was honestly thinking that a man marrying a man was “just ridiculous” too, for instance.