Congratulations! The most accomplished martial artist I knew in high school (3rd degree BB at graduation) did time for assault before he was 21. Anecdotal evidence is not conclusive of anything, and even trends have exceptions. I was part of the Boy Scouts for about 2 decades, never knew a molester. That doesn’t mean that they were not there.
Also congratulations! I had two murders within a one-block radius in a three year span! I’ve had friends in my neighborhood come home to discover that they were robbed. And I have certainly seen people in my assorted neighborhoods taken away in handcuffs with someone else’s blood on their fists.
I posted a link that had a general description of the incident. Did not take any special google skills nor any dedication. But yes, am admittedly very sick of the condescending lectures we get on this topic (not referring to you).
This is a fundamental difference of opinion, that I believe when 2 people get into a disagreement, they do not need to pull a gun. Period. Especially if they have been drinking. Bad outcome is likely. Good thing we seem to agree in healthcare issues, as we clearly do not agree on this one, which is fine. Will agree to disagree.
Guess we run in different circles. Don’t know anyone who has ever been close to or involved in a shooting. And hopefully it will remain that way.
@HarvestMoon1, thank you for the suggestion. Thought provoking for sure.
D2 lives in a very “safe” part of town, surrounded by professors and families. Hers is the only house on her block with a security system. Several neighbors even expressed surprise that she would put one in. But due to the the fact that she is a young woman living alone and we (her parents) live in a large city with a lot of violent crime (so think defensively), we installed that system nevertheless. And I’m glad we did.
What about getting both the mace AND the taser? And some night vision goggles, too, lol?
D2 was traumatized her freshman year when a drunk guy dressed like a zombie (Halloween weekend) mistook her dorm room for his own. He was jiggling his key in her lock, and she opened the door, thinking it was her roommate. When she saw the zombie, she tried to close the door, and HE thought a stranger was in his room and tried to push it open. She was hysterical and her neighbor ran out and maced him. Long story short, she is now having some PTSD with this latest event and is struggling. But I don’t feel giving her a gun is the right decision for reasons already stated. When I brought up the taser option, her boyfriend voiced the same misgivings about the need for proximity.
Yes, but it also doesn’t address any of the questions about which I asked a few posts ago nor does it directly contradict any of that poster’s conjectures. It really is a “general description” that gives no detail about what really happened.
I think that depends on what constitutes a “disagreement” here. If there is no imminent violence, weapons of any kind have no legal or moral use. But if you are being attacked and fear for your life, I see no reason not to defend yourself at the risk of ending someone else’s life.
I shoot with cops and we have had this discussion over and over, because they want us to know what is legal and what they consider to be morally acceptable, and I have yet to hear one of them say anything approaching your opinion.
I never approve of any person or activity that combines firearms and alcohol.
I do too. But if we are going to “agree to disagree”, please don’t go away assuming that the rules that have served you well in your circles would serve me well in mine.
I can appreciate your caution in not rushing to get your daughter a gun…how traumatized would she be if the person she shoots turns out to be some unarmed drunk kid trying to get into the wrong apartment.
@Nrdsb4, there is no one answer to your question. Simply put, there is no such thing as a perfect defense, every defense has weaknesses. The best you can do is find the point where you can reasonably say that you both feel safe and actually think you are - that those might be imperfect statements is irrelevant from a practical sense.
I would not recommend a gun to anyone not willing and able to take the time and money to learn how to use it effectively, and that does not sound like your daughter. I am not a big fan of contact tasers, they take a lot of training to use effectively and are not great defensively even then. Mace or pepper spray (whichever is legal where she is) works reasonably well if you are in a position to run after using it (I am particularly fond of the ones that incorporate dye) but are not great if your attacker is still in between you and your only exit. I have not seen jazzymom’s barking dog device in anything but movies, and I would be concerned that it would alienate neighbors without necessarily driving anyone away.
I would find out (or estimate) the police response time in your daughter’s neighborhood and then ask yourself what would give her that time. If you spray a guy with pepper spray he might not effectively come after you for 15 minutes - will police arrive in that time? If not, what about a heavier bolt on the door to buy you a few more minutes?
And remind her that police would rather show up to a false alarm than respond too late to a real attack - if she is afraid, she should call the police. Anything she does on top of that is just to give them the time to arrive.
I shoot with cops as well, and also never heard anything approaching the poster’s opinion either.
But, let’s cut to the chase - my life is equally as important as any cop’s life, no less in any regard, as we are both free American citizens. I have a CCP and I carry, and the police I shoot with tell all of us CCP carriers the same thing - do not let any person who steps toward you aggressively close the distance between you and the ability to pull your weapon. Oops, that means the black belt hand-to-hand stuff is pretty much by the wayside.
Cops are told to literally pull their weapon as soon as a person advances toward them and does not stop when told to stop. In case of an argument, the CCP carrier (at least in my classes) are trained to start stepping away and creating distance between you are the aggressor - actually, you really do not need to be trained for that because it is actually a natural thing to do when you know you have a gun.
If the person continues coming toward you in an aggressive manner, then all cops say best to pull the weapon as the person is not longer respecting your space or your intent to get out of the situation. And do not turn your back to run because you are then exposed and defenseless.
And guess what, this is exactly what cops do AND if it is good enough for them to save their lives, then it is good for me.
Damn, truth is stranger than fiction strikes again. Does not even have to be break-in; it can easily happen when you let them in. Been there…luckily for her, did not have to shoot her.
The person actually had come to my door; I knew her, let her in, then realized that something was totally wrong. I instinctively grabbed my gun from its secret storage place. The person starting coming toward me and I said stop and the person realized I had a gun (already flipped the safety off in one move upon picking up). She bolted out the door and it took some 20 hours to find her in the wilderness. Three fire trucks with search lights, cops searching on foot, the whole nine yards.
Turns out her new medication for something mixed terribly with her wine and literally she became crazy and breaking things in her house, and beat her husband up with a crystal vase or something. I did not know all that at the time, but the long walk to our house barefoot in winter time…yep, did not take much to realize the barefoot, no winter coat etc. was totally off and that look in her eyes was foreign as heck - she looked like a killer.
When the police came about 20 minutes later (we called them, not the husband who was out cold), they both agreed that she was a danger and they said she was lucky. The cops were great, i was standing there with my gun in my hand still talking to them and they were cool as heck understanding that if it were not for my gun, it could have been a bad situation for my kids, wife, and me. I did feel kind of lucky that I was the one that opened the door and not one of the kids. For if she tried to harm them like her husband, I would have had to shoot her.
Oh, and you know that one of the people has not picked up stick or a rock and is about to bash the other person’s head in.
Yep, you know every detail and action of every argument between two people it seems, so no one ever needs to pull a gun in an argument. This is the kind of thinking that gets people killed by just standing there hoping for the best, and then they get their heads bashed in.
I’m surprised at your reaction to this poor woman, who unfortunately had a terrible drug reaction that turned her crazy, awcntdb. You couldn’t subdue an unarmed woman with your bare hands? You pulled a gun and forced this woman out in the snow in bare feet? If she showed up at your house in the middle of winter in bare feet, something was obviously way off, but I’m surprised that you thought the right reaction to a neighbor who had flipped her lid was to pull out a gun, instead of helping her.
I’ll take your word for it that she looked like a killer, but still, your response seems over the top to me. What did you think she was going to do that you’d have been unable to stop? Sure, she could have pulled out a gun and shot you, but… she was crazy, she could have pulled out a gun and shot you even when you had your gun on her.
Great, that would be make the world a better place - except for one one problem - there are people who are not listening to you and who do not care what you say. Pretty much the same as the criminal who wants a gun does not care what gun laws are passed, he will get a gun. Therefore, there needs to be an effective Plan B aggression stopping mechanism.
Cops tell that to us at the range all the time. Do not hesitate to call at the first inkling that something is wrong around your house. Especially where we live - 15 minutes easy for them to get here; longer in the winter time.
Normal people use words, not sticks or rocks. You people scare me. I dont know anyone, ever, who has ever gotten their head bashed in or got into it with sticks and rocks. Guess we live in different worlds.
Are you not paying attention? The premise is the other person is the one taking the aggressive action, not the people writing the posts. Who are you scared of here, as no one here is the aggressor? A self-defense stance is not an aggressive stance; it is, by definition, defensive.
And in the example I gave above, there were no words to assuage that woman who flipped out and beat her husband. He probably tried to talk to her and got some brain damage because of it. I will go with the cops who thanked me for doing the right thing and being ready to stop in her tracks, as she had already hurt someone by the time she got to my door.
However, do you not understand what we are talking about here is normal people running into “not normal” people?
And there are times when words do not work in stopping the bad actions of “not normal” people, so might be smart to have a Plan B rather than standing there and getting your butt kicked, especially if the person is stronger or gets hold of an implement or both.
Sometimes reality is a whole lot more messier than the nice tidy scenarios we like to dream up. Unfortunately, most aggressors do not play along with the tidy scenarios.
Sometimes people get into self fullfilling prophecies. I dont know anyone who has ever “gotten their butt kicked” or even gotten into fight. But if you look for one you’ll find it. If a neighbor came to my door seemingly possibly confused and didn’t look right i’d call an ambulance before letting her run barefoot into the cold night. That is just terribly cruel. You have decided she was going to hurt you (maybe yes, maybe no, but i am guessing she wasnt a 300 lb bruiser with a club and you could have possibly subdued her if you had to, not pulled a gun and sent a woman who clearly needed help into the dark of night. The “the world is going to hurt me so i need to be prepared with a gun at all costs” is to me a scary, disturbing way to think and live. But if it floats your boat, go for it. Now I have had more than enough of this. Now if the baseball game would ever end I could go to sleep.
Good for you. I know several. One “looked for it” by telling some guys in a bar to leave a friend of his alone, you know, “using his words”, and later as he was walking home he “looked for it some more” by letting them find him on the street, pull him into an alley, and put him in a hospital bed for a week. Good guy, last I heard he runs a fishing boat. You can still see the scars on his face.
In 2014, the FBI estimates that there were 1,165,383 violent crimes in the United States - only an estimate because, of course, many are unreported. This number only counts the most severe crime per incident, so someone who commits robbery AND aggravated assault on the same person only appears once.
Of those, 63.6% were aggravated assaults, 28% were robberies, 7.2% were forcible rapes*, and 1.2% were murders. If we estimate that those crimes were spread across half a million individuals, and that those individuals had perhaps 3 close friends and family members each who knew about the crime, then this year alone 2 million Americans had an experience that no one you know ever has, and now have a much different idea than you on whether or not the world is going to hurt them and on the value of preparation. And that two million is not counting, of course, the perpetrators.
Of those crimes, firearms were used in the commission of 67.9% of murders, 40.3% of robberies, and 22.5% of aggravated assaults (they don’t track for rape). Meaning that if you take the pessimistic view that 100% of rapes, er forcible rapes that is, were done at gunpoint then 33.6% of the victims faced a gun… while 66.4% did not. To put it another way, you are twice as likely to face a “300lb bruiser with a club”, or something enough like that to “kick your butt”, than you are to face some 20’s gangster with a Ronson.
Now if we assume that in your years of existence, these numbers have never crept into your life, that is not surprising - after all, in any given year maybe 1 in 150 Americans will experience violent crime on this level, and indeed most or at least many will not in their lifetimes. But just as there are idyllic places almost** free of such crime, so too are there many places where it is much more common that the numbers above would suggest, places where helicopters nightly mark the police’s pursuit of a dangerous criminal. Some of these places have half a million dollar homes and neatly manicured laws and homeowner’s associations that have to specify that your household security needs to be discrete, to maintain the illusion that an upper-middle class income is proof not only against crime but even the fear of it.
I do not mean to belittle or ridicule your view of the world and the violence that takes place in it. But if you are going to discuss crime and guns and how the two are related to each other, you need to be aware that just because you do not personally see the crime it does not mean that it isn’t happening - it just means that there are people elsewhere who are experiencing more violent lives to make up for your peacefulness. Enjoy that.
**: Because the FBI, to be consistent with their old data, does not consider “non-forcible” rapes to be crimes of violence. I don’t care who you are, that’s funny!
I am confused by this post to the fullest extent possible, as you seem not to read the news or any prose relating to any society,
Hmm… let’s start with the topic of this thread. Did these students go looking for a fight? No, someone brought a fight to them in their classroom. Are you saying that they went looking for trouble by going to class and mere words could have saved them?
Did the young lady Kate who was shot while walking in San Francisco get her butt kicked while looking for a fight? No, an illegal alien brought a fight to her for no rime or reason. Are you saying she went going to look for a fight because she decided to take a walk and mere words could have saved her?
And what about my acquaintance at the gym who effectively stopped a man who approached her aggressively in dark as she got out her car and who refused to stop when she said stop. She could have gotten her butt kicked if not for the gun her Dad insisted she take with her that night. Are you saying that she was looking for a fight and mere words could have saved her?
It is these kind of comments, which are so devoid of reality, that it makes it easy for the pro-gun advocates to prevail. It is nonsensical to project that if you do not know anyone who ever got their butts kicked or into a fight, then no one get their butts kicked or into a fight unless they are asking for it.
In general, I do wonder what rape victims think about that logic. Were they looking for trouble as well because it darn sure came to them. And I could also safely assume that mere words did not help them out of that situation.
You may want to rethink the logic of your post because there are millions of innocent victims of violent crime, some who are no longer here to discuss their ordeal, who darn sure wish they had a gun to save them the life-long pain (physical and psychological) they living with now. And all that they were doing was going about their normal lives and, unfortunately, they ran into someone “not normal” and I guarantee you none of them was looking for that person or that terrible situation.