I can’t believe this but I think I’m actually agreeing with Terr, at least partially. I don’t have my own children yet but if I did, I would easily kill someone else to protect their lives, if it were the only way to do so. I feel like by bringing a child into the world, you should be making an implicit promise to do anything and everything you can to protect them, even if that means killing someone else.
I’m an anti-death penalty liberal and all, but… I can’t imagine holding so strongly to an ideal that I would let my children die to hold to. I’m not going to go as far as Terr and call it perverse, or whatever… but I certainly cannot relate or respect the position very much.
I honestly wonder if I handed a loaded gun to someone who held this conviction, and then lined up his children and said “shoot me or your kids will die.” I believe that he would shoot me before I kill any of his kids, but say he lets me kill one of them first, then I say, “You have 10 seconds to shoot me before I kill your next kid.” I just can’t imagine anyone, no matter how strong their convictions, would let me go and kill their kids one by one while giving them a chance to stop it by shooting me. It’s just… unthinkable.
I don’t get your math here. Where is the 1 in 4 coming from?
To me, the most important part of this quotation is the last sentence. Burglary-related homicides are very rare. The idea that anyone needs a gun for home defense due to that tiny chance of home-invasion murder is silly to me. The people I know who have guns may say they have them for defense, but they really have them cause they like guns.
Same logic: “assault rifle” homicides are very rare (a lot rarer than burglary-related homicides). The idea that you have to ban them due to that tiny chance of assault-rifle murder is silly. Agree?
How about burglary-related woundings? Beatings? Rapes? According to the numbers given in the post above, those are about 27,000 a year (an injury that is not a “minor injury”). Do those justify having a gun for home defense?
The reality is that no one knows how they are going to react in that situation until it actually happens. Fear and adrenaline are wildcards. An elderly peacenik grandma may spring in to action and fire. A big tough guy may stand frozen and wet himself. We all like to think we would behave a certain way but you just don’t know ahead of time.
Really. As part of the series of discussions about education, religious instruction, medical care, inheritance, etc. that many spouses have when they’ve made the decision to have kids. Our families both have a fairly serious generational bottleneck, so amendments to our “run away” self-defense doctrine were necessary. No big whoop, we also have rather pedstrian plans for fires, medical emergencies, and natural disasters, among other things.
It’s funny. In the United States, baseball bats are seen as sporting equipment. When dealing with a home intruder, I’d prefer to scare him off with a gun; it would never occur to me to get a baseball bat.
I wonder, at what age, should one of your children voice his or her opinion that you are wrong on this, that you might consider his or her opinion sufficiently informed to give you pause.
What good would biting, scratching, or punching (something I don’t have the physical capability of doing anyway) do against someone with a knife, blunt object, or even another gun?
Be honest, would you feel that way while being raped, or while bleeding to death?
I live in a country where I can’t have a gun, but I do have a big heavy pole to beat them to death with by my bed, and when I had a car, I had a pick handle under the seat.
That’s fine if the police live nearby. What are you going to do if you live half an hour or more from a police station, ask the intruder to have cup of tea while the police get there?
This is also the general Euro perspective, and if the few Kiwis and Aussies I’ve met are fairly representative for their respective countries, it’s also pretty close to the attitude there.
What I have a bit of a problem wrapping my mind around is the “what if you live in the sticks and it takes the cops half an hour to respond” argument. Well, as far as I can understand, violent crime (except for drunken brawls) is less common in the sticks than in urban environments. So, while the risk of a home invasion in an urban area is small, it should be insignificantly different from virtually none in the sticks. Which takes me to the conclusion that either are the US boonies still violent frontier areas, like the ones we see in western movies, or quite a few US citizens are rather paranoid about a phenomenon that happens very rarely.
I’m a gun owner and I know how to handle a gun. I’m not at all afraid of guns. And I use my guns regularly for killing clay pigeons, paper targets, birds and deer. However, a simple risk assessment tells me that the advantage of keeping a gun so available that it is of any use in a home invasion/burglary scenario is more than outweighed by the risk of an accidental shooting due to having an operative gun so easily accessible. Especially since I have children, and children are naturally inquisitive. Especially my kids’ friends whom I have no possibility of teaching proper gun handling and behavior. So my guns are securely locked up in a safe, unloaded. With the ammo locked up in another closet. And as such, my guns are virtually useless for defense in a burglary scenario as the one drawn by the self defense types here.
How can you know what the intruder’s intentions are?
That the intruder wanted to steal only a few things?
That he intruder was going to leave after stealing a few things?
That the intruder was not going to rape your wife, daughter, or even you?
You have no idea what the intruder’s intention’s are, other than s/he intended to unlawfully enter your house because that’s clearly what they already did.
