(Emphasis mine)
The answer is a definite yes, especially when the emergency is saving one’s own life or family member’s life, as nothing is more important than that at that instant.
awc, I get that you think your right to save your family member’s life overrides my right not to have one of my family members shot by some untrained yahoo with a gun that you think he should be able to have. I get that.
What I don’t get is how you could possibly think I would agree with you. How can you have the temerity to think I love my family less than you love yours?
You are free to actually give a reason why the statement is false rather than a empty, unsupported statement.
I cannot think of one illegal drug, which cannot be bought on the black market rather easily. They are all available; all very easy to get; and, all outlawed. And somehow, guns and ammo would be different? Again, you are free to explain, as your logic seems lost on about 180M people.
It doesn’t need further comment, aw, because I don’t recall anyone making that statement that “outlawing is the same as being unavailable or difficult to get”. It’s pretty apparent that it isn’t. It needs no further explanation.
And, fwiw, it’s perfectly permissible here to simply make an observation or statement. No requirement to say anything more. So how about stopping with the insults and put downs already…
I understand the importance of the situation. That doesn’t necessarily translate into skill.
When you’re driving a car in icy conditions and the car goes into a skid, nothing is more important to you than the safety of yourself and your passengers. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be able to deal with the skid successfully and avoid crashing into another car. Maybe you’ll be able to do it; maybe you won’t. But your likelihood of success has a lot more to do with your experience in winter driving and your ability to remember what to do despite the adrenaline-inducing situation than with how much you care about the safety of the occupants of your car.
If intense motivation doesn’t translate into skill when it comes to cars, why would guns be any different?
Please note your last sentence. It answers what I was saying.
You are conflating mathematical risk with a person’s personal threshold of risk. Personal risk is a choice, not a mathematical fact / number.
Philosophically, one cannot choose to focus on the wrong risk - that is why one can buy insurance to cover anything. One only chooses to focus on the risk you deem important to you. Now, someone else may see this focus as not worthwhile or inconsequential, but it is not a right or wrong position; it is a decision that someone takes because he is weighing different factors than you.
Thus, any risk assessment is totally independent of the act of being prepared. One can have / see little risk, and still be prepared, just in case. As well as, one can see lots of risk, and choose to be unprepared for whatever reasons. They are different constructs. Personal risk is a philosophical position and preparedness is an act, and they do not have to be in concert because there are other things that go into decisions other than math - such as, a 15-minute wait time for police or one was threatened by someone etc.
And people do this all the time in real life and no one even gives pause, so when it comes to guns, it strikes people as a bit backhanded way to try and get at people’s guns.
I can think of many examples, but an obvious one is flying. There are millions of people who just refuse to fly and get on an airplane, not because of the fear of actually flying, but because they view it as risky. However, they will drive their family members to the airport and would drive to meet them. And it does not matter at all if you present them the math showing that their driving presents a 60X higher mathematical risk of death via a car accident (and even higher risk for just a serious injury), as compared to if they got on a plane weekly and took a 2 hour trip. They could fly like that for their lifetimes and nothing will happen - and the math shows that well. But drive on they do.
People take different personal risks, but that does not mean that risk is the wrong one to take; it is just different than the personal risk decision someone else would take. The level of risk one tolerates is a personal choice.
Got any links to support that definite yes? As my experience shows, several people perfectly trained to extinguish a lab fire in a controlled training run failed miserably when real lab fires erupted - simply forgot to pull the safety pin. It was not fun to be in the middle of one of those fires and to see the help struggling with the extinguisher! I also know of a person who was good at shooting deer… Shot his own foot when he grabbed his rifle out of the closet in the middle of the night… These anecdotes do not leave much room for optimism for me that a partially trained gun owner’s adrenaline will turn him into a sharpshooter.
Genuine curiosity here… Why are you so afraid of home invasions?
I repeat:
*The ban on machine gun sales has worked since the federal government prohibited the sale of fully automated guns to civilians in 1986. These guns are almost never used in criminal activity, and none of the recent mass shootings in the U.S. involved a machine gun, (although, the San Bernardino terrorists tried to modify one of their guns to make it fully automatic.)
So a ban on sales to civilians = no use of fully automated guns in mass killings.
No ban on sales of assault rifles since 2004 = three notable cases of assault rifles used to slaughter people in as many years. 50 dead, many more wounded. *
It’s a false argument to say that outlawing something doesn’t make it harder to get…or darn near unavailable as with fully automatic guns.
I am very glad that EMT’s and emergency room doctors who are trained for emergencies are able to utilize their training well, and react to those in need, instead of panicking. There is definitely something to the concept of managed risk, and the more training you get for a situation, the better able you should be to react to it.
I am thankful for the training I get, and the training that others get to do their jobs. Could you imagine if you lost an engine, had a cabin fire, or some other serious emergency, and you just started screaming, “We’re gonna die, we’re gonna die!” Doesn’t happen. People fall back on their training, push the fear out of their minds, and concentrate on solving the problem. I can’t imagine just thinking that people cannot act rationally in an emergency. Some people step up, some people don’t, but with adequate preparation, one’s chances of success go up exponentially.
A person significantly overestimating the likelihood of a risk = paranoid.
Hey, you’re not paranoid if everyone actually is trying to kill you! 
Unabomber… (Bright, but paranoid)
Yes! He shipped those bombs on passenger and cargo carriers, right? Out to get me! What a jerk!
And we are saying that conceal carry permit holders do not have adequate preparation.
“And we are saying that conceal carry permit holders do not have adequate preparation”
And I would say that is too much of a generalization. You can’t possibly put everyone in the same category. Some people do, some people don’t, how can you possibly speak for all?
Let me rephrase that. The requirements for a concealed carry permit are far too lax. In many places, almost everyone who applies for a permit gets one, without adequate training. We are allowing people to carry guns who should not be allowed to carry guns.
Okay, I won’t argue with that analysis. If that is correct, I disagree with those lack of requirements entirely. Everyone who gets a concealed carry permit should have an extensive background check, and extensive training.
Again, this is the account of someone who just got a concealed carry permit in Texas. He had never shot a gun, never even held a gun. He didn’t know how to load and unload the gun, let alone shoot it. He rented a gun, took a six hour class, underwent whatever background check is required, and that was it. He has the permit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/opinion/is-this-really-how-you-get-your-gun.html?_r=0
And many states have weaker requirements than Texas. In Montana, you have to be an adult resident of the state, pass a background check and that’s it. There is no training requirement at all. None.
Need for all those shotgun weddings?