I dunno, the quote was “unauthorized person in my home”. That includes firefighters, small children, sleepwalkers and drunks who accidentally enter the wrong home, thinking that it is their own. It can also include friends and relatives, which is why I raised the possibility of tragedy.
As for miscreants, my former next door neighbor once met one early in the morning. He was conscientiously removing various knick-knacks from the window sill. She inquired what the gentlemen was doing: he smiled, waved and ran off. If she had a firearm, I trust that she would not have blown the guy’s head off, provided that he kept his distance: most people lack that level of bloodlust or mental instability. More realistically though, a firearm would have enabled her to write a letter to an NRA magazine and further cement the perception that guns help chase criminals off. I’m sure they do, but sometimes the criminal would have run off anyway.
That’s just simply as wrong as can be. Everything the government does involves force. I’ve spent (apparently wasted) countless posts on this here messageboard regarding what I view as the legitimate activites of the government. Therefore, there are lots of government uses of force that I think are perfectly fine (and, in fact, that the government is required to do, due to its very nature as the government).
I will not discuss this any further in this thread (so as not to hijack). I just wanted to point out that you are wrong.
Firefighters announce themselves, not to mention the fact that they typically only come to your house when it’s on fire.
Small children don’t enter my home, ever. Unless you’re suggesting that small children typically burglarize homes?
Sleepwalkers, great excuse. You’re saying that someone is going to sleepwalk their way through a locked door or window, into my home? Yeah, I don’t buy it.
Drunks who accidentally enter the wrong home? By breaking and entering? That’s unfortunate, but I have no idea if it’s a drunk who’s entering the wrong home because he’s so angry at his wife for cheating on him with a friend that he wants to kill the friend, and he thinks it’s me, or he’s genuinely a nice fella. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, but his mistake is not my responsibility to correct – if he seems aggressive, I’ll shoot him.
My friends don’t enter my home unless I’m present, and my relatives both live too far away and have enough respect for my private property not to enter my home unnannounced.
Yeah, and I’d not shoot him unless he seemed a danger to me.
However, if he seemed a danger to me, he’d be quite dead, and I reserve the right to determine who in my home is or is not a danger to me without you telling me that I can or cannot make that choice myself. If you don’t want that, don’t enter my home without my consent.
You puttin’ me on? It proves that guns are taking far more lives than they’re saving, and it’s not even remotely close. The numbers I quoted were optimistic, and it was still a 172:1 ratio.
Between 1962 and 1997, more than 650,000 people were killed by handguns in the United States. If that’s “not even worth considering” to you, I shudder to think at the mayhem and genocide that would give you pause. I’d like you to go meet 1% of those dead people’s families and tell them that their loved one is not even worth considering. It shouldn’t take you more than a few years.
I hate to break it to you buddy, but those two sentences contradict each other.
I believe that there exist responsible gunowners who value human life over human property. Specifically, if the guy is 15 feet away and you tell him to get out of your home and he follows your directions to the letter, Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Buddhist-Hindu morality demands that you not shoot the guy in the back. Not all people share Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Buddhist-Hindu morality: some work off of a model of hysteric threat assessment and believe it best to shoot first and ask questions later.
It’s not unheard of for cops to enter the wrong house, and it wouldn’t surprise me if firemen do the same on occasion. Small children wander and it’s not unusual for people to forget to lock their doors. Surprises happen. Luckily most people aren’t so paranoid as to fire away at every shadow that appears at the edge of their room.
Now, let’s google “Wrong House” and the keywords, “Police”, “Firefighter” and “Drunk”:
I’m not sure why you think anecdotal evidence is going to convince me of anything.
I didn’t deny that these things happened, what I denied was the likelyhood of them happening to me, or for them to be likely enough for them to happen to me and I not be aware enough to know before shooting something exactly what it is.
The first rule of gun safety is “always know what you’re shooting at, and what’s behind it.”
Last guy who tried to break into my old house was not to be disuaded by the sight of me standing there holding a butcher knife in one hand and calling 911 with the other hand. I had to tell the 911 operator that I was hanging up to get my gun (something she strongly objected to, but fuck her!), then walk upstairs, find it and load it before coming back down. The sight of that firearm caused the drugged up thug to to take off like a rocket, jumping over my 4’ fence rather than going through the gate.
The cops rolled down the alley FORTY FIVE MINUTES LATER and kept right on going.
I’m pretty sure that if the sight of the knife and the 911 call wasn’t enough to make the guy stop trying to break my door down, that he wasn’t just there to steal my TV and leave me standing. I’d have been dead on the floor while he ransacked my house.
They are anecdotes (some entertaining) and I wholeheartedly agree that anecdotes are not data. But the probability of home invasion (as opposed to burglary) is also pretty low. I think I’m on safe ground when I oppose shooting first and asking questions later – nobody has argued explicitly for this, but responsible firearm owners should issue caveats when they talk of killing unauthorized visitors: I opine that most of the unauthorized do not pose a threat to life.
Yes. Responsible firearm owners promote responsible firearm usage: they don’t just share their homicidal fantasies.
Interesting that you chose the number 1% as that is the total percentage of handguns involved in fatalities using the numbers on your cite. In other words, 99% of all handguns have never been used in a crime resulting in a death.
Should one also share the caveat that they don’t plan on accelerating into a green light, if there’s an old woman in the middle of an intersection, when they share the fact that they plan on going to the store?
This is really the root of the issue, you believe that if someone owns a firearm, they have homicidal fantasies.
I dread the very idea of ever having to shoot or kill someone.
There are other reasons to own guns besides shooting people (self-defence) or animals (hunting)- Sporting use (such as target shooting) and “Collecting” spring readily to mind.
And if we’re going to talk about making entire sports go away because some people don’t like them (which is what the anti-gun brigade are proposing), then I’d like to see Rugby League (substitute with “Gridiron” for US context) made to go away because some of its players get drunk and act up off the field.
The evidence for this being, of course, that he did not in fact kill you, despite the delay it took you to brandish a knife, call 911, hang up, go upstairs for your gun, and come back down.
Oh, wait, that’s evidence against the idea that he was trying to kill you. Why do you think he didn’t just shoot you before he broke down the door?
Perhaps the underlying issue is that HE has homicidal fantasies and that this increases his fear of firearms, because they would make those fantasies SO EASY for him to indulge. Therefore he projects these fears onto the people around him, turning gun owners into the demons of his own personal nightmares.
So, assuming this guy really wanted to end your life, and you couldn’t have ultimately stopped him with the butcher knife . . . in 1990, you’d’ve been one of the 93 people saved by a gun. What about the other 15,907 who were killed? Fuck them?
Also, to clear up a few things:
Knives, cheeseburgers, cars, etc, serve purposes other than to stop a human heartbeat. Handguns do not. That’s why analogies comparing those things fail.
Guns and ammunition cannot be readily grown or made in a bathtub the way drugs and alcohol can. Sure, a skilled guy could turn out a gun here or there, but it’s not going to be a Desert Eagle, and he’s not going to make 10,000 of them per year. My cousin is borderline retarded and he grows pot for a living. That’s why those comparisons fail.
Define “some” and “act up.” How many thousands of people die per year due to this acting up? How many tens of millions died from unruly rugby players in the 20th century?
That’s patently not true. Pistol sporting competitions are some of the most active firearm competitions in the country. They’re also fantastic for use as a backup firearm if your primary fails when hunting (as mentioned before, being gored by a boar isn’t fun).
Are you kidding me? Firearms are ridiculously easy to manufacture. I could make one out of spare junk I have at my house. And if I was to go to my grandparents house, I could mass manufature the things like they were going out of style. And it’s not like they have complex equipment, he has a few simple tools that about 1/4 of all rural houses have, and a few more complex ones that are required if you’re going to do any kind of mechanic work.
Have you really never heard of Zipguns?
The fact of the matter is that you’re putting firearms on some kind of pedestal. They’re nothing complex or hard to make.
Not so. I’ve encountered plenty of firearm owners who don’t display that. I think I’m being realistic: many males are pre-occupied with violence to an extent not supported by the data. And the homicidal fantasies that I alluded to are in this very thread.
I believe that most normal people are that way, and many normal people own firearms.
I don’t take that argument especially seriously. People with itchy trigger fingers exist. In a country with the highest homicide rate in the western world, it is an obligation not to boast how you are going blow away invading unicorns and other statistically minor threats. I understand that most homicides are conducted by people who know one another.
You keep harping on about the fact that firearms were used to kill X amount of people last year.
Banning firearms wouldn’t have prevented those deaths, it would’ve just made the majority of them be attributed to different weapons.
In the UK handgun crime went up, despite the ban. And that’s in a country where handguns were already registered, and banning them was a relatively easy task.
Of the 20 police areas with the lowest number of legally held firearms, 10 had an above average level of gun crime.
And of the 20 police areas with the highest levels of legally held guns only two had armed crime levels above the average.
I don’t think some of you can even comprehend the devastation of a loved one dying a violent death at the hands of another human being. Try to imagine it for minute. Now multiply it 100. Now multiply that by 100. Now multiply that by 50. That probably doesn’t even come close to how many times this has happened since you’ve been alive.
Our homicide rate alone is several times higher than the total number of gun deaths in almost any other developed country. We’re talking thousands upon thousands here compared to just a few dozen in some countries.