So you would only use it if you didn’t need to? Curious.
Because you’re carrying concealed, not open. The “bad guy” has to be able to see it to know you’ve got it, right? He’s only deterred if he doesn’t start. So, again, why is that not your first option?
If it means he feels safe in drawing first, how is that to *your *advantage?
How are you in fear of something he doesn’t do? Please explain. Do you feel justified in taking the life of someone who hasn’t presented a threat to you?
Given the above, how would you make such a case? “He was black and I was scared” does work sometimes, but usually only if you wear a blue uniform or are in Florida. Don’t count on your deity to buy that shit at all.
But not you, no. You’re trained and disciplined, an expert marksman, cool-headed, able to quickly and accurately assess any situation you might be thrust into, truly a superhero among mortals, always on the side of Justice, a Good Guy by your own definition. Not like all those *other *schmucks who get in the news every day. Who besides yourself is convinced by that claim, and why should they be?
Yes I would consider disallowing access to guns for young adults on certain drugs.
What country is that?
Really? I use it only as a last resort.
He can be deterred once he starts, when his actions are clear. It’s a deterrent because I will have prevented him from inflicting more harm.
It is to my advantage to be armed. If I wasn’t armed, I’m at a huge disadvantage. And that is true whether he has drawn a weapon, or not. But if he is pointing a gun at me, this is now a very precarious situation.
I said… if he acts such that I have reasonable fear for my life (or my wife’s life), so he has already done something.
Silly.
The situation has to be such that a reasonable jury would also agree that I was justified in defending myself. If the situation is not, then use of deadly force is not warranted.
If the dangerous situation has presented itself, and it’s just you and your family and the criminal, and you have no means of escape, and he is doing bodily harm, would you want a means to defend yourself and your family? I answer yes. How do you answer?
I think this is the hole that Nikolas Cruz fell in. He was a mentally ill minor but once he turned 18, the slate was wiped clean, he can refuse treatment and he could do whatever he wanted until he did something that harmed someone else. Unfortunately, what he did was extreme.
An extremely high%* of owners of legal guns don’t commit crimes with them either. This doesn’t, or shouldn’t, preclude any proposal for gun control. Rather, very high % of X doesn’t result in harm isn’t a convincing argument against worrying about either over- medication or guns.
*no need to pull a figure out of the air like you did, the % who don’t is obviously very high in both cases. Gun crimes, in general not limited to the small % of them which are mass shootings, have the additional characteristic of being committed overwhelmingly with illegal guns; illegal abuse of psychotropic drugs is significant but not as large a part of the problem with them. Anyway the fact that ‘the great majority’ of legal possession or use of either doesn’t result in harm isn’t a convincing argument by itself against revised regulation of the possession or use of either.
I don’t own an AR-15. I don’t own a gun period. But if any serious legislation comes down the pike to ban their sale, either at a state or federal level, you can be damn sure I’m going to pick one up.
I have no fantasies about zombie apocalypse, or some home invasion, or what ever. Hell, I may not even fire a shot, though I might plink at a range. I think a compact shotgun is better for home defense any day of the week. If I’m every feeling I’m needing home defense I’m gonna pick up one of these puppies. I do think we have a right to bear arms, and I think targeting current legal guns is completely stupid as I allude to in my previous post. You want to completely eliminate shootings long term, you’re going to have to ban and confiscate every gun in america. 2nd amendment advocates know this, and “gun control” advocates know this too. Some are even coming right out and saying it. Fortunately I don’t think that will ever happen, so I likely will never buy an AR.
I have absolutely zero concern about killing somebody accidentally or falling into the wrong hands.
Pick a country, any country. Literally pick any country that isn’t some 3rd world shithole. You’re pretty much guaranteed to pick a country with a murder rate 50%+ lower than in the US, and with far more restrictive firearms laws.
If you’re interested in where Isamu lives, his posts indicate that he’s in Osaka, Japan, where there’s a reported homicide rate of 0.31 per 100k people, vs. the US with 4.88 per 100k
Neither do most prior to killing someone accidentally or having their weapon(s) fall into the wrong hands. The fact that you would have zero concern after acquiring this weapon is exactly what concerns me about your acquiring it.
I don’t get fear from the OP. All I get is awareness. I get the feeling that some of you envision Bone walking around his house wearing a holster with a gun that he draws and has at the ready every time the doorbell rings. I don’t think that is the case AT ALL.
One which you could have prevented right at the beginning, if you had wanted to.
You have an unusual understanding of deterrence, then. For most, it means keeping something from starting.
And not made him scared enough to escalate it, especially when he has the advantage? Seriously?
If there’s a gun pointed at you by somebody willing enough and scared enough to fire, and yours is still in your belt, that doesn’t seem to be an advantage for you. If you then expose it and give him more reason to fire, the situation would seem to have turned against you even more so.
Only after you let it get to that state, when you could have prevented it. Tell the jury.
Does that mean you can always find a way to tell yourself you were in the right? Yes, it’s human nature to justify one’s own actions in a way one will believe. But that doesn’t make it correct.
True. Are you going to think that fast or that accurately, with the adrenalin pouring?
Don’t let it get to that point. You don’t need to.
Why? All that money for something you’re not going to use?
There are people in the news every day who thought the same thing. What makes you different?
Quite simply, because I can. An AR-15 easily fits in my budget. The only reason I don’t have one, and most likely never will, is because buying one is easy. I have lots of things I don’t need. I’m no more gonna destroy a perfectly good gun like these other bozos than I would a Dodge Challenger because it ran over a protester.
I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m saying I have zero concern about it. It’d be in a gun safe gathering dust unless I wanted to plink around with it. Like I said, if actually get concerned about home safety I’m buying a shotgun.
If there were only 5 people? Surely that would be better from a overall crime point of view. But this posits something sufficiently unrealistic it may as well be magic.
Of course each event is situational. What sort of circumstances do you think I’m ignoring? But yes, most cases of service disruption don’t descend into the LA Riots. Even when Oakland periodically riots, it doesn’t descend into the level of mayhem that LA did. Or that New Orleans did. But it’s not like local civil unrest doesn’t happen - it does. Is it worthwhile for people to be prepared to meet force with force if necessary? That’s up to the individual, IMO. Lots of things can be done before arming up that may have more utility. For me, and my situation, the marginal cost is low enough that it’s worth my while.
The person I was responding to seemed to be correlating drug use with gun violence. Since he is okay with preventing people on these drugs from getting guns, his views are consistent, and I have no argument with them.
As for the percentage argument. A very high percentage of drivers never hurt anyone, yet we still license them. A very high percentage of DWI trips don’t result in accident or injuries, yet we try to prevent them. It would seem the absolute number of gun fatalities is enough that some sort of licensing or regulation is reasonable. That’s the case for near every other risk factor, isn’t it?
If we made these drugs as easy to get as guns, we wouldn’t have to worry about illegal use of them, would we? Just the impact of their use. Lucky there is no constitutional amendment about the right to take drugs.
The number was chosen to demonstrate the extreme. You seemed to be implying hordes of bad guys with guns against a helpless unarmed population. But any effort to get all the guns (something I’m not for, btw) would get the guns of a lot of bad guys also. So I think you were engaging in a bit of scare mongering.
I don’t live that far from Oakland, and am quite familiar with the riots. They happened mostly in the business district (where these things do) and not in residential districts. I don’t recall the LA riots affecting many residences either. Louisiana is a gun-friendly state - do you have links to stories about lots of people using their guns to fend off looters in their flooded houses? Hell, if my first floor was flooded, I’d welcome the looters to steal my water-logged valuables. Save on the cleanup bills.
Monetarily you can probably afford all the guns you want, but that isn’t the issue. The cost to you is more the risk, including that of killing yourself if you get depressed. I’d say the benefit of protecting yourself from incredibly low probability events is less than this.
It isn’t just guns. The people who owned my house before me were Mormons, and when they build the addition they added a separate room, accessible from the outside, where they stored emergency supplies which seems to be mandated by the church. (Mormons, let me know if this is wrong.) The first thing we did when we bought the house was to smash through the wall expanding a tiny bedroom into a nice office suite, where I am typing now. In 21 years the utility of the room they way they intended would have been 0, the utility of my office is high. We do have emergency supplies in our garage, being close to the Hayward Fault.
If I had been brought up being told in church about the coming apocalypse I might have considered the benefit of emergency supplies much higher, but that would have been just from being scared. I submit your actions come from you being scared. Given the way the news media works, it is not surprising. But I still contend that you are making a choice that increases your risk instead of decreasing it.
Also, consider that your view increases the number of bad guys with guns, since screening them seems to put an unacceptable burden on the good guys. That increases your risk also, as well as those of us who choose not to own guns.
An AR-15 is more than “just a tool for murdering people” It’s an excellent tool for home defense. I’d much rather have an AR-15 than a Magnum to defend my home considering how wildly inaccurate handguns are and how ungainly any handgun with decent stopping power is.
I do lots of things that have a lot greater statistical chance of potentially getting someone killed than a gun locked up in a gun safe gathering dust. Not gonna lose sleep over it.
Ex here. Not mandated, but suggested. A year supply used to be suggested. That’s also gone down to 3 months I believe. It was never specifically about an apocalypse. Early mormons were subject to a lot of hardships that would make something like this a reasonable idea.
Defending your home against what? What is the level of suspicion-of-threat that leads you to head directly for the gun safe to remove your rifle? Do you advance through the house with it at your shoulder? Supposing you don’t have spider-sense, how does this play out if the intruder stumbles upon you before you know they’re there?
Are you concerned about damage to your house from errant gunfire?
Then why waste your money “just to prove a point”? Do you plan on telling people you have it? If not, what does your secret protest move do for whatever it is you are promoting here? If you plan on telling people about it while letting the rifle collect dust in locked storage, why not just tell people you did it and forgo the actual purchase-who would know the difference?