If an intruder is in your bedroom, it’s hard to argue that anything is better than a gun. But did you have any early warning systems such as an alarm or dog? An alarm or barking dog is likely to chase off just about any intruder. How many burglars would instead stay in the house and try to kill the homeowner once an alarm has been set off?
I’m glad you’re okay, but it seems like the intruder could have easily killed you if he was able to get all the way into your bedroom before you noticed him. An intruder has the upper hand since he is aware there may be a homeowner. As long as he can silently enter your bedroom, he can kill you no matter if you have a gun or not. Your gun may be giving you a false sense of security if you are not taking steps to be alerted of an intruder.
Wow, I had no idea that firing a handgun with a little flashlight attached bestowed so much worldly knowledge upon people. Consider me a dunce! Flashlights and boomsticks for all!
In my case I didn’t have an alarm or a dog. Until about a week before my invasion I really didn’t think I was much of a risk and it was fortunate that I took a gun that used to be unloaded and boxed and kept it loaded beside my bed right before it happened. I did hear the guy coming through my front door, but he was in my bedroom before I could get up.
You are right about that, he easily could have killed me, so I was very lucky to have awakened, and very lucky to have my gun nearby. I’m not at all against the idea of people having alarms or dogs.
I think there is a difference between being law abiding and being responsible. I don’t think gun owners who break basic safety rules are particularly responsible.
On an “abstinence only” basis? Yeah, OK. They aren’t listening anyway.
An what of Mr Pastorious, the famous double-amputee who shot his girlfriend? Would a little flashlight on his gun have helped? Most likely, he will be charged and convicted. Doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
Wayne la Pierre and company are gun nuts. The NRA’s executive board is run by gun nuts, has been for almost 40 years. When you go to the NRA annual meetings, you don’t find yourself surrounded by the Joe sixpack NRA member. The gun nuts are overrepresented and THEY are the ones who pick the executive board.
The kidnapping statistic is misleading. Most of the people who got kidnapped (criminals and illegal aliens) couldn’t legally own guns. But it wasn’t obvious from the NRA statement. it doens’t do our side any good to twist the truth to try and make our argument. It undermines credibility.
Using numbers least favorable to my argument, guns are fired (not just brandished, fired) in self defense over 16,000 times a year. Accidental gun death injury is about the same.
At worst, having a gun is a waash and that assumes that every defensinve use of a firearm involves firing the gun in self defense, it also assumes that none of the accidental fischarges were actually intentional (e.g. suicide attempts).
Suicides count because guns make suicides much more likely to be successful. Fewer guns in homes means fewer successful suicides.
Accidental discharge includes true accidents as well as misidentified targets.
Intentional discharge includes shooting a family member or guest in the home.
Those are what you need to take into account. I understand nobody thinks they’re going to shoot themselves or a family member, or thinks that a family member is going to shoot them, but that’s how the numbers work. Take Population A with guns in the house, compare it to Population B without guns, control for various factors and find out who winds up dead more often. (It’s A).
But the cops in that video put themselves into that situation, were well trained, had the appropriate number of lumens, and still managed to shoot someone accidently.
Compare that to a homeowner who isn’t as well trained as the police and have someone (possibly) breaking into their house in the middle of the night. Your advice is that if they could just increase those lumens a bit, a tragedy could have been avoided.
But it didn’t work in the link I submitted, did it? Those lumens didn’t do crap to save Todd Blair’s life.
Shooting in the dark is a bad idea. I have a flashlight built into the pump on my shotgun (I think the sound of a pump action shotgun is widely recognized as the universal sign for “get the fuck out of my house or tell me who youa re”) but I generally like to just turn on the light in a room if I want to see whats in there.
I’m familiar with that paper and if you get rid of the impact that suicide has on the equation, your argument falls apart.
Any home defense class will tell you to hole up and stay in one place and cover the doors if there is an intruder. You are much more likely to see them before they see you. This might mean they get away with your laptop but at least you didn’t have to shoot anyone.
BTW, I think dogs are superior to alarm systems and guns are superior to golf clubs in case a barking dog doesn’t do the trick.
You’d need to see if the drop in gun suicides were replaced by other methods. If gun suicides went down by 10000 but suicides as a whole didn’t go down at all, then you know that all those gun suicides switched to other methods. But if total suicides also go down, then some of those gun suicides were not replaced by other methods.
