Look, they’re Girl Scouts! You can’t let your guard down with Girl Scouts!
And, yes, I’m assuming it counts as “hurt” if anyone gets raped.
Homeowner or intruder.
Of course. There is a difference between a girl scout ringing your doorbell and 4 drug addicts breaking into your home.
Sure, and if I know for a fact that there is only one of them and I am otherwise safe from immediate harm, I rack my shotgun slide in the international signal for “get the fuck out of my house” and if that doesn’t work and the intruder approaches me anyway, I’ll try to aim for the gut.
If two guys bust into a house and come at the homeowner with a tire iron, I think the best outcome there is any one where the homeowner doesn’t get hurt even if that means both of the intruders get shot and killed.
Agreed?
If three teenage boys break into a house where a single mom is watching over her kids, the best outcome is one where the mother and children don’t get hurt even if it means the teenagers that broke into her home get shot and killed.
Agreed?
The story about the woman is the garage is not clear. It could have been the garage owner for all I know. But if she were in her own home, I think the best outcome would be one where the woman is not hurt, even if the intruder with the gun gets killed.
Agreed?
In fact the scenario where the home intruder gets hurt of killed is so much worse than the ones where they do that (IMO) dead intruders are almost irrelevant in the analysis compared to hurt or dead homeowners.
I heartily condemn the shooting, killing or menacing of girl scouts that are trying to sell you cookies.
I am confident that every gun nut on this board would agree.
“Friend, I mean thee no harm, but THOU ART standing where I mean to shoot!”
I agree that nothing justifies the rape of a home intruder. Its really hard to justify rape as a form of self defense.
So far, I’m with you. However:
Any outcome where the intruder gets hurt and the homeowner does not is more desirable than any outcome where the homeowner gets hurt and the intruder does not.
Agreed?
It’s nearly impossible to tell whether the person who just smashed your deadbolt with a crowbar is going to use that crowbar on your face or your safe next without being psychic.
Agreed?
The best outcome remains one where nobody gets hurt.
No, Quakers say “thee” but not “thou,” for some reason.
Umm, no. The first desirable outcome is that anyone forcibly inside my home leaves not breathing. I guess we could try and weave friendship bracelets together while we discuss BrianGlutton’s idiocy. But alas, that person will die.
From post 3997
(http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=17152124#post17152124)
[Numbers mine]
Disagree.
2 and 3 have no deterrent value at all. The intruders have no reason not to try again. How can that be desireable?
3 actually rewards the behavior. :smack:
Similarly, 4 is also not good because there is no deterrent value for the intruders.
I am not arguing for injury to the intruder. Death or serious injury to the intruder, when compared to theft or damage to homeowner possessions, is not a desirable outcome. However that presupposes that if the homeowner encounters the intruder during the break in, that the homeowner knows with certainty what the intruder’s intentions are. Is it only to steal a few bucks? Or is it to rape my wife and kill me?
One cannot know that until after the fact, and even then intentions are difficult to determine; further, during the course of the intrusion things can go wrong and if that happens one doesn’t know how the intruder would react, even if their intention was to only steal a couple of bucks.
Avoid confrontation as much as possible, I believe, but be prepared to defend my family and me if the confrontation is imminent? Definitely.
Hypothetical situation: If I’m upstairs, it’s late at night and I hear a commotion downstairs, I first make sure my wife is upstairs with me (it’s just the two of us here), then prepare to defend myself (baseball bat, knife, whatever), then call the cops and sit tight.
Well…there are thousands of cases of assault with a deadly cookie…
And you never know - perhaps she was going to…uhmmmm…
I got nothing
An 8 year old boy was shot by a brother who thought the gun was a BB gun (they were visiting an uncle):
So they won’t wake the kids when they blow away the burglar:
No. The best outcome is one where no home invasion takes place. Any other course of action should work towards that goal.
In my magical hypothetical - there is universal possession of a free nefarious intruder detector. This device will also vaporize any who enter forcibly with nefarious intent. As such every single person knows that if they attempt to invade a home they will summarily die and because that would be foolish all home invasion is eliminated.
Until then I’ll use a gun.
And on weighing the value of the intruder’s safety vs. other things that have been mentioned - sure it’d be nice if no one got hurt. But I value the the cost of the ammo I’ll expend greater than the safety of a home intruder. Other things that rank higher than the safety of a home intruder include but are not limited to the 30 minutes of lost sleep because I potentially had to get out of bed, any cleaning supplies necessary to clean up the mess (spatter you know) the newtons of energy that I have to expend dialing the police since that’s probably prudent.
Well… every single person except young children, people with dementia or mental disability, or those who simply forget for a moment about the existence of this human bug-zapper. But society is better off rid of these burdens anyway, and in the meantime we’re doing a pretty good job culling them the old-fashioned way—lock and load, and assume that everyone has nefarious intent.
It’s kind of a deceptive by omssion article, wouldn’t you agree? All it does is allow citizens of the state who comply with the already stringent NFA regulations to own silencers. I believe the number of crimes committed with NFA-licensed silencers over the 80+ years since the NFA was passed is around “0”, but I confess that lack of finding data doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I noted that an incredibly anti-gun Salon article in late 2012 couldn’t find a single murder committed with an NFA-licensed silencer. I suppose the legal eagles here can post the stats on the number of NFA-licensed silencers involved in murders?
The silencer issue is one largely driven by two things in my opinion - a driving want for something which isn’t really all that effective, and a fear of something which isn’t really all that effective. Silencers only reduce a weapon report by 20 dB at best (Paulson) and when attached to a handgun reduce its concealability tremendously.*
I considered getting one briefly for one of my target handguns, but realized quickly that they’re not all that great and kind of a pain in the ass. There is one maker who sells a .22 rifle with an integral silenced barrel (so the entire weapon because an NFA weapon) but…why the hell do you silence a .22 in the first place? The dealer selling it said “so you can shoot squirrels in your backyard without anyone getting upset,” and I said “but it’s illegal to shoot animals in the city no matter what you do to silence the weapon, and why are you killing the poor squirrels in the first place?” and he just blinked and gave me that look…again, for a law-abiding citizen, the utility appears pretty useless. Add to this the fact that they wear out, and need either repair of the baffle material, or replacement…
Then we have the fact that bullets which travel though a silencer can typically be identified by ballistics (see People v. Ewell (Cal. Ct. App. 2004)), which means that once you’re in the NFA registry you become a suspect any time a murder is committed with an (ostensibly) illegally silenced weapon.
This is going to be another case where BOTH the NRA and anti-gun people waste their time and effort on something which doesn’t really impact public safety nor weapons utility to any significant degree in order to score a “moral” victory.
Paulson, Adam C. 1996. Silencers: History and Performance, volume 1. Boulder, CO: Paladin Press.
There is no equivalence between intruder getting hurt and the homeowner getting hurt. IOW, the safety of the home owner is SO much more important than the safety of the intruder that I would not even engage in minimal risk to ensure the safety of the intruder. The difference between noone gets hurt and the homeowner doesn’t get hurt and the intruder dies is marginal compared to any scenario where the homeowner doesn’t get thurt and the homeowner gets hurt. That’s not to say that avoiding confrontation might sometimes be the safest course of action, but if I was ever in doubt, I think the best reaction would be to shoot for center mass and hope the intruder doesn’t die.
They will still be subject to the laws we have for registering machine guns.
As an aside, I have never seen a “silencer” actually silence a gun, they just suppress the sound. The thwip thwip sound you see on James Bond movies is pretty hard to achieve. I have fired a suppressed 22 lr and it is still about as loud as a clap. I have fired suppressed rifles and frankly I would still use earplugs. I think we should deregulate all suppressors, short barreled rifles, and short barreled shotguns especially on most high caliber rifles. I have a shotgun that has a shorter overall length than most short barrel shotguns and an Israeli rifle that is shorter than most short barrel rifles. If you want concealability, you just get a handgun, or if you are a criminal, you just saw off the barrel of your rifle or shotgun and polish the crown as smooth as you can. I wouldn’t have such a problem with the NFA is it didn’t take 6 months to get something registered (it might even be longer now).
Did you miss the part where the machine can read your mind? I don’t know how a mentally disabled person with nefarious intentions is any better than a sane person with nefarious intentions.
An Ohio 10 year old boy was suspendedfor making his finger like a gun and putting it to the head of a classmate. This seems to me to be equal parts stupid and disturbing. The school overreacted just a bit even though they had warned the kids about doing things like this, but it is disturbing that the 10 year old pretended to hold a gun to the head of classmate.
Maybe the kids are watching too much TV or perhaps this is normal schoolyard games, but this is kind of creepy to me.
NRA campaigns against elephant-poaching ban.
:rolleyes: Seriously, guys?
Mmmmmm. Elephant. Gristle?
This kind of beyond-zero-tolerance stuff is the anti-gun equivalent of the Stand Your Ground law for pro-gun types–the ONLY thing it does is galvanize the other side and make the moderates think your team is crazy.
…and yes, I am fully in agreement that SYG’s bad OUTCOMES are much, much worse.
I’d be much more inclined to not want to shoot an insane person. Then again, I don’t think someone who’s mentally disabled can HAVE (morally speaking) “nefarious” intentions–as opposed to disordered intentions that happen to be harmful.
In any case, the magic intent-sensing machine is an idiotic argument, because it gets away from what I personally think is the elephant in the room regarding the Castle Doctrine and home-defense scenarios.
Namely: how the hell do I, as a gun-owning citizen, balance the risk of *not *shooting a burglar/murderer/rapist vs. the risk of shooting, say, my kid’s boyfriend or someone who’s just honestly mistaken about which door he’s banging on? This is why I cannot take the position as espoused by you that the safety of the homeowner is effectively infinitely more valuable than the safety of the home “intruder”–the set of possible reasons that an unknown-to-me-at-3am person might be in my home encompasses a panoply of minor crimes and errors (both theirs and mine) that do not merit death. Hell, suppose my college-age kid comes home unexpectedly after I go to bed and lets herself in, and I wake up to the door closing and the creak on the stairs. My course of action MUST encompass an assessment of the situation that includes the possibility of an unexpected friendly person in the house–and that inherently increases my risk of being harmed by an actual malicious home intruder by reducing my reaction time.