Not for me. I’m not gonna kill a young father of four when I’m 82. I’d rather die than have that on my conscience.
To each their own.
If he’s trying to kill me IMO his kids will be better off as orphans than raised by a violent jerk like their Dad. Shame he didn’t start this before he’d passed on his violent genes.
I’ve owned firearms for over 50 years.
I’m already armed and will defend myself and mine if necessary.
No intention of hijacking with the following, but why does it seem gun fetishists always say “firearms” while non-gun people just say guns? Is there a difference of jargon I’m missing?
Then without a cite i am going to assume you are mistaken. Because an awful lot of data suggests you are more likely to be harmed by your gun than be protected by it. God knows there are a lot of accidental firearm deaths and firearm suicides in the US.
Fwiw, my family has both a suicide and an accidental gun death, and no cases of guns helping anyone in their home. And the suicide was a fit of depression shortly after his wife died of cancer. Without the gun handy-by, he would probably have been okay.
No doubt the risk varies from family to family. Depression runs in my family. Hell no i won’t own a gun.
Anyway, i own a bb gun that i bought to kill squirrels, but i haven’t had the heart to use it. (It is not powerful enough to kill a person unless you got absurdly unlucky.) Next time i see a rabid animal in the yard I’ll call animal control quickly instead of waiting for the next day. (They chewed me out for that. The animal died on its own, though.) And one of my life ambitions is to avoid killing another human being. So i don’t think a gun would give me any value.
I went to a shooting range once with friends and shot a semi automatic rifle and a couple of pistols. It was kind of fun. And scary easy.
As Der_Trihs pointed out buying a firearm and thinking you can take on an army or even the FBI is silly. Joining a lawful militia might not be. I would only do the latter if I had the realistic option of storing the weapon outside of my home - otherwise I wouldn’t trust the risk assessment capabilities of the militia group.
But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Note to self: read about my state’s National Guard and control of it depending upon future political developments.
As for rando magas, I’ll take my chances in my neighborhood.
The study in question is Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home by Arthur L. Kellermann et al.
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
Despite valid criticisms by reputable scholars of his previous works (including the 1986 study), Kellermann used the same flawed methodology and non-sequitur approach. He also used study populations with disproportionately high rates of serious psychosocial dysfunction from three selected counties known to be unrepresentative of the general U.S. population.
For example, 53 percent of the case subjects had a household member who had been arrested, 31 percent had a household history of illicit drug use, 32 percent had a household member hit or hurt in a family fight, and 17 percent had a family member hurt so seriously in a domestic altercation that prompt medical attention was required. Moreover, the case studies and control groups in this analysis had a high incidence of financial instability. In fact, gun ownership, the supposedly high-risk factor for homicide, was not one of the most strongly associated factors for being a murder victim. Drinking, illicit drugs, living alone, a history of family violence, and living in a rented home were all greater individual risk factors for being murdered than having a gun in the home. There is no basis for applying the conclusions to the general population.
Most important, Kellermann and his associates again failed to consider the protective benefits of firearms.…These errors invalidated the findings of the 1993 Kellermann study, just as they tainted those of 1986.
Does your (the generic your) household have members who use illegal drugs or are domestic abusers? If so- dont keep a gun in your home.
https://guncite.com/gun-control-kellermann-3times.html
Kellermann’s first response to the students was incorrect: “Ninety-three percent of the homicides involving firearms occurred in homes where a gun was kept, according to the proxy respondents.” In a follow-up letter (four years later) Kellermann acknowledges his error, but still fails to directly answer the question.
Kellermann’s own data suggests that for all gun homicides of matched cases no more than 34% were murdered by a gun from the victim’s home. (GunCite’s analysis of Kellermann’s data.) (The data, such as it is, is available at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/cgi/archive.prl?study=6898). 34% is probably on the charitable side since it assumes all family member or intimate homicides were commited by offenders living with the victim which is highly unlikely given that not all intimates (as defined in the Kellermann dataset: spouse, parents, in-laws, siblings, other relatives, and lovers) were likely to have lived with an adult victim.
A subsequent study, again by Kellermann, of fatal and non-fatal gunshot woundings, showed that only 14.2% of the shootings involving a gun whose origins were known, involved a gun kept in the home where the shooting occurred. (Kellermann, et. al. 1998. “Injuries and deaths due to firearms in the home.” Journal of Trauma 45:263-267) (“The authors reported that among those 438 assaultive gunshot woundings, 49 involved a gun ‘kept in the home where the shooting occurred,’ 295 involved a gun brought to the scene from elsewhere, and another 94 involved a gun whose origins were not noted by the police [p. 252].”) (Kleck, Gary. “Can Owning a Gun Really Triple the Owner’s Chances of Being Murdered?” Homicide Studies 5 [2001].)
Additional analysis of Kellermann’s ICPSR dataset shows that just over 4½ percent of all homicides, in the three counties Kellermann chose to study, involved victims being killed with a gun kept in their own home (see derivation). This supports the conclusion that people murdered with a gun kept in their own home are a small minority of all homicides, precisely the opposite of what an uncritical reader of Kellermann’s study would likely conclude. The mis-citations of Kellermann’s study serve as examples: “In homes with guns, a member of the household is almost three times as likely to be the victim of a homicide compared to gun-free homes (source).” … The risks are different. Stated another way, murders in the home of victim residences are a subset of all murders. Kellermann’s study claims a murder is roughly 3 times more likely to occur in this subset (the victim’s home) to gunowners rather than non-gunowners. That is quite different from claiming a gun in the home triples one’s chances of becoming a homicide victim.
So Kellerman said that 93% of the time someone was murdered- it was by a gun kpet in the home. That would make guns kept in the home quite dangerous. But he lied. it was only 4 1/2 %. See, that sort of lying makes his studies suspect. In other words, when people are murdered in their home- 96% of the time it is by a gun brought in from outside.
That does not mean that a gun kept in the home is 100% safe, by no means. A gun is a dangerous thing, and needs to be kept locked up safely.
If that were the only study you might have a point, but it isn’t.
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M21-3762 ( Homicide Deaths Among Adult Cohabitants of Handgun Owners in California, 2004 to 2016: A Cohort Study).
I definitely, without question, do NOT wanna shoot anyone. Ever.
But if I have to protect my loved ones I won’t back down. And I can shoot.
I’m not worth saving, but they are.
Yeah, i hadn’t even heard of that study. But I’ve seen others, most of which point to the increased risk of accidental homicide and suicide in homes with guns. Which is why i mentioned those things.
There are more gun deaths from suicide than homicide.
And a very large fraction of suicides are basically accidents. A moment of despair. Most aren’t people who assiduously and persistently sought death. If a gun hadn’t been handy, the moment would have passed.
The propensity towards suicide is somewhat predictable. Maybe you know that risk is low in your household. It’s not low in mine. Hell no, i don’t want any gun that’s short enough to use on yourself within reach of my family members.
And i rather suspect that household that contain drug addicts and domestic abusers are pretty common, too, although that’s not an issue in my home.
Continuing a not-quite hijack - the OP asked whether we’d arm ourselves. Essentially every reply has assumed that meant guns…or More Guns. The Next American Revolution may well be fought with keyboards, ledger books, and weapons of Mass Communication.
And so far in fact it has been. The problem is murdoch/koch/trump have been winning about 99% of the battles to date.
Ultimately the Right has found a way to make revolutionar-fomenting propaganda self-funding and in fact profitable to produce. The Left has no corresponding capability and given the standard left-leaning psychological makeup, it’s probably impossible as a matter of human nature to create such a self-funding profitable wave.
One’s a technical term; one’s a colloquialism. It doesn’t get any deeper than that.
I also have a soldering gun, an air gun, and a heat gun. I used to have a squirt gun. All of those are “guns” in the generic sense. None are firearms. “Firearms” is also the term used in law and for the same reason. It’s the right degree of specific.
The word “gun” means a lot of different things beyond something that shoots bullets powered by small contained explosions.
ETA: The US military doesn’t call them “guns” either. A lot of firearms owners were first introduced to firearms in the service, with their well-known and oft-derided penchant for stilted overfly formal terminology.
Reading this thread it sounds like everyone is preparing for a zombie apocalypse.
Moderating: Good rule of thumb, if you start your post with No intention of hijacking, you probably are. Please don’t do this again, ask in another thread instead.
To create a linked thread, do this:
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
That is actually the best method.
Moderating : No more from anyone about gun violence studies please. This is not the thread for it.
I’ve owned one sort of firearm or another for various reasons ever since I was about 12 years old. I was also in the military for 20+ years and spent a year in a war zone. Despite those facts, I’ve never shot an animal nor a person and don’t intend to start at my advanced age. I still have a .22 Sig-Sauer handgun, but am planning to get rid of it, as we no longer live in a stand-alone home and the odds of someone intruding into our apartment are infinitesimally small. Trump winning has no bearing on any of it. While I believe that he will be a disaster for the country, me owning a gun will not affect that in the least.
Looking back, I suppose that bit wasn’t really necessary to my post.
As for why, because I like shooting. It’s an activity that I find soothing because it helps me focus my attention. I own guns, not for self defense, primarily, but because regardless of how people in general interpret the constitution, right now it’s a right of mine and I feel it is important to exercise rights lest the government take them away. That’s why I plan to buy more. I need as many guns as I want to own.
Why all the apocalyptic thinking, though? You want to bring down the government hard and force a new Constitutional Convention, the first step is a general strike, not a violent civil war (also, buying a gun does not destabilize the government).
It’s not about the apocalypse or even fighting the government. In 2016, I could scarcely have imagined a sitting president using violence in an attempt to retain power. When I saw it happen in 2021 I did not believe the American people would stand for it. But a good number of them supported the violence or ignored it for one reason or another.
I’m not worried about law enforcement or the Armed Forces of the United States. What I am worried about are the Gravy Seals type deciding to mess with me for one reason or another. I’m worried some jackhole is going to get violent when he sees my wife go into the ladies’ room because she doesn’t look feminine enough to him. You may think this is unreasonable, but look around. We are not living in reasonable times and we are having to contend with a lot of unreasonable people.
Maybe you’re right. Four years from now it’ll turn out I was worried about nothing. That would be fantastic. But I don’t know what the coming years are going to be like and cannot predict if they will get better or worse. Three years from now maybe some of my neighbors will knock on my door at midnight to have a little chat with me about my opinions on teaching the Bible in public schools. If that happens I’d rather be prepared than unprepared.