Of course, making even a slight miscalculation about whether they “are away” or not could select against that sort of thief, too.
The two teens shot by a Little Falls, MN homeowner a couple of years ago miscalculated. Of course, the homeowner is in prison now for murder. He recorded his own activities, and shot the unarmed teens one by one as they went down into his basement. Didn’t just incapacitate 'em, executed them.
As a parent, I would have welcomed a map showing who the guns owner were so I would know, without asking, before I let my kid go play at someone’s house.
Also, having guns at the ready seems to me like a recipe for disaster if one has kids. And if guns are locked up how does one have the time to get the gun after someone breaks in to your home. Does the owner say, "excuse me while I go get my gun and load it?
I think all this need to have a gun to protect oneself/family is bs - especially given the stats that the gun is more likely to cause accidental shootings or suicide than protect someone from an intruder.
The real reason gun nuts were having a hissy fit about published info/ gun data bases is they have an irrational fear the goverment will show up at their homes and confiscate their guns. They also think they need them to stop some rogue goverment takeover.
As far as property crimes in the UK, are they done at gun point? Is the property owner shot by the robber? I’d bet not.
I don’t even lock my doors. Seems to me we have an inordinate amount of paranoid people in the US and zillions of people who have guns who shouldn’t.
I wonder if we should mandate stickers on women who have CCPs indicating clearly they can defend themselves, so the attackers can attack the women who cannot defend themselves. No different than all these other stupid sticker ideas.
intpartent,
You made me want to look up that case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_David_Smith_killings
While MN follows the Castle Doctrine which allows a homeowner to shoot an intruder, that case was different in that the homeowner essentially laid in wait for the intruders, planned to kill them, and used excessive force. It was basically premeditated murder, which he was ultimately convicted of.
I don’t want more answers, Bay. I want the first answer: why do you assert that the UK has higher property crime than the US because the UK has fewer guns, when other countries with fewer guns have lower property crime? If countries with lots of guns have low property crime, then the US property crime rate should be in the basement compared to every other first world country.
These types of cases are reviewed in my CCP class. In short, even if you have a CCP, you cannot “wait” to shoot someone; it must be a purely spontaneous, defensive position. Cannot even run after the person if you miss and he runs away, which makes sense.
Its a theory based on reading I have done, CF, and if you don’t like it, no one is forcing you to adopt it. In the gun debate, you can find plenty of conflicting information about just about every aspect of it, so choose which ideas make sense to you.
I’m at work and can’t go through the last 50 posts that I’ve missed, so I may be commiting the unforgivable sin of posting something that’s already been posted, Bay. But even if it has been, it bears repeating because once in a while, gun nuts accidentally tell the truth.
A prominent public figure said this about the Umpqua victims:
So it’s their own d*mn fault they’re dead. They didn’t get organized quickly enough.
Even more horrifying, this person revealed the thought process behind gun fetishism. He said that he:
So there it is. Guns are more important than human lives.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ben-carson-appears-guessing-oregon-shooting-victims/story?id=34310265
I realize that people do not get how class-based all this is especially for congress people and public figures.
I had an ex-senator tell me that he had to support a CCP bill in his state when he was governor because, unlike me and others at his support dinner, he could not afford private security if he needed it.
And given the decisions etc. he was involved in, e.g., two intelligence committees (read as authorizing the killing of people during war), he needed to make sure he and his family could have some usable level of safety and personal comfort after leaving office. I know his adult kids, years later, still carry guns, as they should. It would really stupid to out these people and their families, who all gave service to the country in public office. Just plain dumb.
Fang, it’s a bit like trying to nail jello to a wall, eh?
The Little Falls guy has a stong and fairly sizable group of local supporters who think he shouldn’t be in jail for this. Our County Attorney was asked to prosecute, and one thing he said after the trial was, “You can kill somebody coming into your house if you believe they’re going to commit a felony, but do you want to?.. You are going to live the rest of your life with the regret that you killed somebody over property.”
One thing this highlights is that most breakins aren’t “home invasions” where the thief has harming the homeowner in mind. They want your stuff, and aren’t armed most of the time. You’d do better to lock yourself in the bathroom & call 911 than get out your gun.
You misread my post. Just households where someone under 13 used one of the guns to commit a crime.
To my knowledge no one on this thread is a recognized expert in gun control, so I don’t know why anyone would be seeking definitive answers about it from other posters without doing the research themselves. I don’t take anything anyone asserts as fact on this entire site at face value, unless they disclose their credentials, which no one has. Especially in this debate, the biases are glaringly obvious.
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Listened from about 2:30 seconds. And then found this:
After the White House announced this week that the president would “visit privately with families of victims,” conservative journalist David Jaques said that Obama was ** not welcome ** in his state because it would be “a campaign stop for agenda to take away American citizen’s right to own firearms.”
“Imagine a politician politicizing something,” Carson quipped to the hosts of Fox & Friends on Tuesday. “When do we have people that actually want to solve our problems rather than just politicize everything?”
“But, Dr. Carson, would you go?” host Brian Kilmeade wondered. “If the people of the community say don’t go, would you still go if you were president on Friday?”
“Probably not,” Carson replied. “I mean, I would probably have so many things on my agenda that I would go to the next one.”
I think the Pope nailed it when he said “What are YOU going to do?.”
What will it take to get you to take a stand and not just talk about it? What action are YOU willing to take to make a change?
It is a question each one of us can ask ourselves. Your own answer lets you see your own personal commitment to this cause.
My own answers disappoint me. I would vote to change the law. I would not start a crusade to make this happen. I would throw some money at it but I would not spearhead a funding campaign. I would attend a rally at my county courthouse but not drive to the state or to Washington. I would not stop what I am doing to make a change in gun laws a priority in my life.
I wonder how many other people are like me? This is why nothing happens. I am waiting for someone else to fix it.
awc, Would you support a law that required anyone with guns in the home to have them locked up or on their person? This would do nothing to solve the mass shooting problem, but it would do a lot to deal with the problems of other gun violence, like children getting hold of loaded unsecured guns, thieves stealing unsecured guns, other household members not the gun owner using a gun for suicide. Maybe make an exception for sleep: the gun owner would be allowed to have a gun within arms reach if they were sleeping, but, let’s say, the gun owner would have to be able to grab the gun in 5 seconds. Seems like there might be an agreement we could come to. You and I disagree about the value of a gun in personal defense, but we probably agree that we don’t want eight year olds getting loaded guns.
How about penalties for carrying/using a gun while under the influence of alcohol? Would you agree to that? We don’t let people drive while drunk; should we let them brandish guns when they are incapacitated? A scary amount of gun crime, especially domestic violence, is committed while the shooter is drunk or high.
At least you admit you are choosing who is a victim. not that there is reduction in victims. Therefore, the issue is not saving lives or having less crime, it is that the crime with a gun to you is seen as swore, even though mass shootings and accidental deaths are rare, as compared to rape.
Most interesting, you seem not to be aware that you are implicitly advocating an increase in the number of victims, as societal good.
Let’s put some numbers to your position:
Average number of rapes / attempted rapes per year in the US: 300,000
Average number of mass shootings per year in the US: 12
Average number of people who die per year from mass shootings: Less than 120
Average number of accidental shootings of a child per year: 100
Number of women with CCPs: **3,200,000/b
Number of times per year women use a gun to defend against rape and sexual assault: 210,000
Putting it all together, I think it is the extreme gun control “nuts” who think that taking away the effective defense of 210,000 women (and increasing) against rape and sexual assault, thereby, having an increase in rape is a worthy trade-off to save 100 kids from accidental shootings and 120 lives from mass shootings. That is exactly what the numbers say. (And the 210,000 does not include the number of men who use a gun to defend a women against assault, e.g., his wife or girlfriend)
So much for fighting for the lives and rights of women to take their safety in their own hands. Some women have been doing just that, but now other women see no problem making rape the alternative that they have to live with. If I were a cynic, I would think these gun control “nuts” have stock in rape crisis centers.
I have heard it all now - a policy (gun ownership) giving women the right to protect their bodies (and in many cases, their lives) takes a back seat and is less important than some people’s aversion to guns.
And these are just the numbers for women who defend themselves with guns annually. Not even worth figuring out how many men who save their own lives with guns each year - let’s just say it is a very big number.
It should be obvious now why it is difficult to get the votes - the pols also know the numbers above and do not want to be responsible for the ensuing crime wave. They may be incompetent and untrustworthy, but every so often they get it right when the numbers are staring them in the face. This is why even the most lib of states and towns now have CCP laws.
As for the accidental child shootings, clearly there must be better solution than exposing more women to sexual assault and rape. And men to more physical assaults as well.
NOTE: These are the numbers are from memory, but pretty sure I am in the ballpark. I will corrected, I am sure, if any are wrong.
@Sax - I really like your post #595. I am afraid that I am the same way. Dead children, dead churchgoers, dead movie lovers - they all make me incredibly sad, but what am I willing to actually do?
I may be coming to a personal tipping point, though. I’ve been thinking about volunteering or marching, and I am so not a marcher!
Would not matter anyway because even experts are often wrong.
What is it about salt and heart attacks and butter being bad etc? Yep, government and other experts said all that stuff for decades using scientific data that they stood by until proved wrong. Oops…
And this illustrates the biggest, intractable problem that gun control “nuts” have - no study could convince the couple hundred thousand women who defend themselves with a gun annually that they were better off being assaulted.
And as this successful defense number by women increases, the gun control “nuts” just seem nuttier and crazier, and the pro-gun people they call bubba and redneck seem a whole lot smarter, while having to visit the rape crisis center a whole lot less. Gotta the love irony of that.
Reality trumps any study every day of the week.