Alive.
Indiana Jones facing the flamboyant scimitar swirler comes to mind.
And no less, either, by you standards.
So, what do we have? Two lives that are worth the same. One is is your child, the other is, oh, let’s just say for sake of argument, a sociopathic, axe-murdering sadist.
Now what? Just, whatever?
If the net sum of lives lost or saved is the same in the end, do you really not have any inclination whatsoever to effect the results in your favour?
What if crazy pants has decided he wants to slay everyone in the house? How does that tally up?
So if one of your children was attacked by a serial killer, you’d see no moral difference between your child being strangled by the serial killer or the serial killer being killed in self-defense by your child, as a life is a life and all lives are equally precious.
Sorry, but that’s sick. It is, in fact, a profoundly immoral stance.
Civilization is based at its core on respect for others’ lives. Those who lack such respect, such as murderers, MUST be excluded from society (by violence, if necessary) if the society is to survive.
Ted Bundy’s life was not entirely worthless; he was a human being. But his life was worth much less than the life of even one of his many victims. Anyone who would argue otherwise is a moral monster.
I agree. And so does he, thirty-some years later.
I won’t even go the Ted Bundy route. If someone breaks into your house, while you are in it, knows you are in it and continues to advance (as you have posited in your own previous scenario) then THEIR LIFE IS WORTH LESS THAN YOURS.
They have already decided against the rules of society - and now either YOU get to pay the price for that, or THEY do. If you decide to pay that price, you and your family suffer for…what, exactly? If they pay the price, they suffer for…the crime that they committed.
That seems fair to me.
As for me… Yes to everything except the last question. I have a pistol in my nightstand for things that go bump in the night. But we are also consolidated in the master bedroom - kids are all in college, nothing but TVs and couches mostly outside the bedroom.
My wife does not like pistols or guns in particular. She cannot rack the slide on my nightstand gun. Which is why I have a shotgun for her when I am on a trip.
The thing about Texas is - almost every house has a gun or guns in it. Thus criminals are smart enough to not try to rob a house when someone is home. If they start to break in and find someone home, they usually turn tail. Because the odds are that now they are much more likely to get shot. My wife knows that burglars (especially around here) are looking for an easy score. One racking of a 12-gauge shotgun will send them running. If not, a round of 00 buck through the bedroom door will give them the message. If they keep coming, then they deserve what they get.
Also, you would think a border town would be dangerous. You would be wrong. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an FBI, DEA, DHS, CBP or local cop in many neighborhoods. I’ve lived in many places in my life (including overseas) and this is the quietest, safest place ever. Because we all have guns, obviously. 
A good friend of mine was stabbed to death in his kitchen early one morning last year.
He lived in a very up-scale neighborhood, if that matters to anyone.
Another friend of mine was at home in the country one evening with her daughter and grandson when someone tried to smash his way through her back door. When she pointed her 12 gauge at him through the window, he fled.
As much as we might like to believe otherwise, these things happen.
My feelings are this:
I’m too old and crippled up to roll around on the floor with some asshole who may or may not have a deadly weapon.
I don’t owe anybody a fair fight.
I’ve owned and operated firearms for 45+ years and I haven’t shot anybody by accident yet.
If the cops can get here in time, great. I’m glad to let them deal with it. If they can’t, I will do my very best to put any assailant(s) down myself.
Well said, Sir.
And I’m too damn small to fight them, 5’ and 110 lbs.
I have several guns for many uses, but I also have a hand gun for home and personal defense. Why? Because the police are great at follow-up and eventual capture of criminals but are almost never actually in the right place, at the right time, to *prevent *a crime.
The county I live in is over 1000 square miles, mostly forest but there are about 40,000 people living around the edges. At any time there are 2 state patrol officers on duty. Their duties are mainly highway patrol. The 3 largest towns have their own small police forces but I don’t live in one of these towns. We do have a well staffed Sheriff department but after midnight there is often only one officer on active duty.
If I am in trouble, they aren’t going to get here in time to do anything but make a report and start a case. The ones I know have told me so.
I also have one neighbor on either side of me about 200 yards away. We help each other and get along well, but we also leave each other alone. If either neighbor heard gunshots in the middle of the night I doubt that they would even call the police. They would assume it is my business and stay out of it. They probably wouldn’t even hear anything.
I am more than a little dubious that rural Canadians in sparsely populated areas are not keeping weapons for home defense.
But as I have said before in other gun threads, while the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, may on the surface seem to have similar cultures, the US is really different. The 2nd amendment is part of the foundation of the idea of the country.
There are guns in most of the homes in my area, a lot of the cars too. In a recent article in the local newspaper, our state senator was asked by some school children about her view on guns. She is a Democrat, NRA member, is a Class 3 holder, and owns an actual machine gun. She is not a gun nut, she is very good at being a representative for her constituents.
It is very simplistic to view the US as being Red or Blue and this being a Democrat vs Republican issue, it is not. It is a big country.
In Canada, “scaring him off with a gun” will attract criminal charges. See Criminal Code of Canada (CC) s. 85, and others. You cannot threaten another with a gun; that is illegal. It may rankle Americans, but there you go. That’s what our law says.
It is true that baseball bats are perfectly legal in Canada, but their use has not been curbed by the Criminal Code or other statutes. You can use a baseball bat however you like. I have–both on the baseball field and in defending my apartment.
But guns? No. Defending yourself with a gun is statutorially illegal. Use a gun to defend yourself, and you run afoul of crinimal charges. This is so ingrained in Canadians that I am not surprised when the OP asks the OP: “help me understand the ‘home defense’ argument” in the context of gun ownership and use. It is a simple question; I am unsure why the OP is being called “wrong” somehow for just trying to understand something that is totally foreign to him.
To provide some more context to the OP’s question, I will say that in Canada, you can grab your baseball bat, your lamp, your chair. Take a swing against the intruder; hell, go for it; whatever it takes to stop him. Within reason, no court will convict you of assault. But do not use a gun. If you do, you might end up being more of a criminal than the guy breaking in.
Of course, our gun laws work both ways. Being as tough as our gun laws are, it is a safe bet that the intruder is unarmed. He has no gun. On the very rare occasions that he does, he’s unlikely to use it (hell, one of my criminal clients preferred to use a knife rather than a gun; a knife only got him eight years in the pen, as opposed to 14 at a minimum for using a gun). That doesn’t stop determined criminals from using them, of course; but because firearm-equipped criminals are so uncommon, incidents involving them tend to make the national news, as opposed to just another filler item on the local news.
As I said, different countries, different attitudes. You Americans may wonder why we do as we do; and think we’re wussies, or dumb, or wimps; but for us, we figure that our system works pretty well.
Canada crime rate in 2006: 7500(per 100K). US crime rate in 2009: 3500.
If you try to adjust the Canada crime rate by subtracting 3000 of “Other Criminal Code offences” (who knows what they include under that), it still works out 4500 Canada rate to 3500 US rate. So it may be working “well”, but in terms of overall crime rate it is working worse than in the US.
I know what they include under that. I defend those charges. (IAAL.)
Fraud. Drug possession. Shoplifting. Soliciting for prostitutes. DUIs. Overall, small stuff. Hardly the kinds of things you need a gun for.
Absolutely. I also have a CCH permit and carry.
You only need to be raped or beaten to a pulp (or both…) once to realize that you don’t fucking need to ever have that happen again. And as someone else said, I don’t owe anyone a fair fight if they start it.
I don’t even understand the indecision - if your life or safety is threatened in the clear-cut case in the OP, the attacker has violated the laws of society by creating the offense…why is there even a question?
Amazingly ineffective tactics when you are a small, older woman. I have some physical fitness and a small amount of martial arts training, but without a weapon in hand, any large male is going to pretty much do whatever he wants with me.
Seriously, questions like this, and many of the responses, make me wonder. Some people really have grown up very sheltered.
Why do I care whether the intruder has a gun? He’s not significantly less dangerous to me if he doesn’t. Even if I arm myself with a baseball bat or a kitchen knife, I’m likely to lose the resulting fight against a male who’s almost certainly larger, stronger, and more experienced at both meeting and meting out violence than I am.
Not being Canadian, I have no reason to care about what laws Canadians prefer to govern themselves under. But I am glad I live in a country which hasn’t made the only genuinely effective self defense tool available to me illegal to deploy.
As I said, I’m 5’ and dress out at 110Lbs, so I must agree despite the advantages for larger guys in Canada.
Too cold for me to move there, anyway.
um, you can’t do that here either. That’s either considered “brandishing” or could even be construed as ADW. Now, if you produce a weapon in response to a legitimate thread against yourself, that’s another thing entirely.
Then the OP is simply asking an impossible question. If the idea is that foreign/alien to you/him, then it’s not something which can be explained.
citing the law as justification for the law is circular. Like saying the Bible is the word of God because the Bible says it’s the word of God.
I see far less of that than I see/hear Brits, Australians, Canadians, etc. telling us what we should do or how we should be. usually starts out like “you lot need to…”
'course I’m willing to accept that there’s some confirmation bias in play here.
I think that’s a symptom of a problem we all share (including me): we tend to think the “average person” is pretty much just like us, and that he way we live is the way everyone lives (or at least should want to live). Most people suffer from a paucity of imagination, and generally don’t realize it.
A poster started a thread in Great Debates called “Why do you need a gun?” not long ago. Before the thread devolved into the usual mess, a half-dozen gun owners had replied, listing reasons such as living in a dangerous neighborhood, being physically infirm, having a very long police response time, needing to travel very late at night, having a stalker, etc., that the OP later admitted he’d simply never thought of when he posed his question. He’d unconsciously assumed that of course everyone lives in a safe suburban neighborhood and never faced personal risks substantially different from his own.
People are a lot more different, both in preferences/tastes and in abilities, than we often realize. The same is true of societies and cultures. And a person or society with Preference A is not necessarily better or more civilized than one with Preference B. it’s just different.
Well said, Sir.
The odds of someone finding your loaded gun and shooting someone by accident are easy to manage. Guns should be in one of four states. 1) In your holster and on your person; 2) In your hands and pointed at a target; 3) Disassembled for cleaning; and 4) LOCKED IN THE DAMN GUN SAFE. I can possibly see removing the gun from the safe at night and keeping it on the nightstand, but as I’ve written elsewhere, if I think someone’s broken into the apartment in the middle of the night, first priority is to make sure the bedroom door is closed and locked.
It’s true that stupid, reckless people leave their guns unattended, and that can cause tragedies. There was a case in my city not long ago in which two kids were playing in a room in which a gun was kept unlocked, and one boy killed his brother. But stupid, reckless people do stupid, reckless things anyway. They drink and drive, they text and drive, they stick forks into live toasters. That’s not an argument against intelligent, cautious people owning guns.
If I can afford to have guns (which I can), I can also afford to buy and use a gun safe (which I do). No one but me knows the combination–not even my wife, because she doesn’t know how to shoot and thus has no need for that information. (She chooses not to know, incidentally.) When my 14-year-old nephew visits, he is in no danger from the gun because, since he’s forbidden by his parents from learning to shoot, it’s always either on my hip, disassembled for cleaning, or locked up in his presence.
It’s not hard.
I agree, it’s not hard. That’s why my guns are in one of four states: 1) On my shoulder and unloaded; 2) In my hands and pointed at a target; 3) Disassembled for cleaning; or 4) LOCKED IN THE DAMN GUN SAFE.
My point was that if I follow those rules, my guns are of no use in case of a burglary while I’m home. I can’t believe that I’ll have time to find my gun safe key, get to the room where the gun safe is, open the safe and take out the gun, lock the safe to get the key out of the door, unlock my ammo cabinet, find ammo in the correct caliber for the gun I took out of the safe, load the gun and get back to wherever I’m making my stand. Before I’ve managed to do this, the hypothetical burglar with the hypothetical wish to rape and kill me and my family probably has had plenty time to hypothetically rape and kill me and my family. Thus, my guns are useless for self defense against a hypothetical burglar in the middle of the night.
Where I live, carrying a handgun anywhere else than on the shooting range would put me pretty fast behind bars. And also cancel my gun licenses quicker than I could say “Yes, Officer”. And I’m lucky enough to live in a country where I don’t need to walk around carrying a handgun for self defense, even if I were allowed to.