What I don't understand about the want to have freedom to bare arms (aside from moral arguments about what high levels of gun ownership does to society, but let's not go there) is that the only time I can imagine needing a gun in life is during a time of civil war or some similar sort of uprising. It would not make any difference to me what the law was in this regard if lawlessness had already broken out and I feared for my life.
Or when someone breaks into your apartment and the police have an average response time of, what, 10 minutes or so? How about when you pull over to assist a crashed motorcyclist and it turns out he's a DUI-case and attempts to car-jack you? How about when you see someone waltz into your neighbors backyard and kick in the door? All things that have happened to either myself, or a coworker in the past year. Is it unreasonable to have a firearm for those needs? I'm not Dirty Harry over here, and I'd rather not have to draw, let alone use a firearm, but I'm not also naive enough to think that the police can save me from all of the bad things that might happen. In a nation with as many firearms as people, the cat's out of the bag.
My personal experiences in some of the cases you have mentioned. 2 times house break, both times I confronted the burglars with a kitchen knife and gave them an avenue to escape which they took. I would never want to kill someone because they tried take my property. It's just stuff and quite frankly I value human life much higher, even if it is the life of a criminal who is taking my things.
The fact that there are so many of these situations points towards a different and bigger problem in society and I would much rather energy was spent on fixing them than treating symptoms with firearms.
I do agree that the cat is out of the bag but I still don't want anything to do with guns. They are bad news and only good for killing which is an experience I would rather avoid in life.
> The fact that there are so many of these situations points towards a different and bigger problem in society and I would much rather energy was spent on fixing them than treating symptoms with firearms.
Of course there's a bigger problem. But I would much rather own a gun and actually be able to protect myself and my family, than refuse to have a gun on principle and just pray that one day I get to effect all of society. The latter is like refusing to wear a seat belt, because people should really be driving safely.
The chances of being in a car crash are substantially higher than being shot. Also car crashes are rarely intended.
It's not that I don't understand the perspective you put forward, especially in the US where there is already a high prevalence of gun ownership. I do however think the importance of the right to bear arms is way overstated. It's really easy (and dare I day, liberating) to live without a gun.
More people are killed by family members with their own guns than by 'home invasion' murders in the US. Despite what the NRA propagandises, 'home invasion' murders are actually pretty rare.
Not that I agree with the person you're replying to, but it makes some sense. (caveat: i'd never confront an intruder without my life or my families life in danger.)
Guns have hosts of failure modes, and require specialized knowledge on their operation to ensure safety. Guns can even fire accidentally, with an accidental discharge on dropping the firearm being a possibility on any gun without a firing pin block (which is practically any long gun, the kind you can buy at Walmart in some states, with no waiting period in some states). A poorly handled gun may shoot in a totally unpredictable trajectory, and a first time user would be unlikely to consider collateral damage. (Nursery behind the attacker?)
A knife mishandled usually leads to non-life-threatening self-injury. A knife can be dropped, but will only damage those around it that are wearing inappropriate footwear. A knife has very few mechanisms, and only has as many mechanical failure modes as there are gimmicks on the knife; with some having zero mechanical failure modes possible besides faults that are metallurgical in nature. A knife can be wielded poorly with zero training; a first time gun user may never find the safety without assistance, let alone loading and reloading. A knife results in very low collateral damage.
Basically : I'd rather put a limiter on a novice in combat than give him or her weapons in which they put themselves and their family in even greater danger by their own naivety. With proper training, a gun will be the best choice; my personal problem with that decision is that I've met very few properly trained gun enthusiasts that treat firearms with the respect they need to be handled with, and that's not to say I know very few of them.
This comment made me get off my ass and remember my YC login. Your post parses correctly, but what you're saying doesn't really correspond with reality.
> Guns can even fire accidentally, with an accidental discharge on dropping the firearm being a possibility on any gun without a firing pin block (which is practically any long gun, the kind you can buy at Walmart in some states, with no waiting period in some states).
Poppy cock. Modern firearms don't just go off [0]. It is true that many long rifles and shotguns don't have a firing pin block. They have hammer blocks instead (the difference being a firing pin block is activated when the shooter grasps the grip, while a hammer block prevents the hammer of pin from making contact with the cartridge until the trigger is actually pulled). Most firearms incorporate multiple safety systems.
Furthermore, every firearm made in America in the last century has been certified as drop safe. The test is that the gun is dropped from a certain height (I think it's 39 inches) onto a concrete floor, with the hammer back and a round in the chamber - ie the worst case 'I was about to shoot something but butterfingered and now my live firearm is falling to the ground." That was instituted by firearms manufacturers after a spate of bad press when a factory defect meant a batch of Colt 1911's could fire if dropped with a round in the chamber (for those interested, the problem was with the strength of the firing pin spring; after several thousand rounds were fired through the weapon, the tension on the spring would be low enough that it could be over come by inertia). The 1968 Gun Control Act made drop testing mandatory.
> A poorly handled gun may shoot in a totally unpredictable trajectory, and a first time user would be unlikely to consider collateral damage. (Nursery behind the attacker?)
Yes, and an orphanage across the street in case you miss popping your own kid.
Here's the thing - everything you're saying is based on some pretty big assumptions that just aren't true. A study conducted back in 2007 by the Force Science Center where people who had never fired a hand gun before were put through simulated gun fights found that "naive shooters ... are amazingly accurate in making head shots at close range." [1] Point and shoot is something we humans tend to do really really well.
The biggest issue you aren't considering is that the biggest advantage of a gun is that you just have to have it. Power isn't shooting someone accurately - it's bringing a gun to a knife fight. Having a knife means you have to close to the target to engage - having a gun means I can stand back and project power.
[0]There are cases where guns will fire accidentally. These are extraordinarily rare, and are generally due to trying to use an unmaintained firearm in a way it isn't supposed to be.
>You think you need a gun in order to kill a would-be assailant.
No. A gun also scares them off - and much better than a knife. A gun is an equalizer. Is an 85 year old lady with a knife going to be threatening to some young thug? Not likely. Will an 85 year old lady holding him at gunpoint be scary? Very.
I think the GP's point is - if the assailant expects the homeowner to have a gun, he'll bring his own with him. Now you have two guns on the scene (the escalation GP mentioned), which seems to me to be strictly worse than having no guns on the scene, only if because it's easier to kill someone in a panic with a firearm than with a meelee weapon.
Did you read the story? The woman held a 17 year old kid (who was already "cowering in a corner") at gunpoint.
"Smith made the burglar call 911 as she kept her firearm pointed at him."
We're always hearing stories about "responsible gun owners". Well, how responsible is that? It's basically guns 101 that you don't point unless you intend to shoot. Luckily she didn't end up killing the kid, but it could quite easily have happened.
tl;dr - the point of a weapon in this situation is to project and multiply force, not to kill. Firearms are the best means of doing so.
> You think you need a gun in order to kill a would-be assailant. The OP says he used a knife to scare them off. I know which I prefer.
I guess the point I'm trying to make and I should have phrased this more clearly, is that the primary purpose of having a weapon in this situation (either as a criminal or in the case of home defence) isn't to kill someone - it's to project force. Guns and knives are both force multipliers, it's just that a gun is much more efficient and therefore a much better force multiplier. The point isn't to kill someone, it's to coerce them with the threat of force to do what you want them to.
OP was making that threat when he scared off his home intruder(s) by holding out a knife and 'leaving them an exit' - in essence he was saying "leave my home or I will use potentially lethal force on you." The situation doesn't fundamentally change if OP is armed with a knife or a firearm; it's just the strength of that threat is greatly increased.
Another way to look at this - if OP and his assailant are rough equals in terms of ability to do harm to each other, it doesn't matter if OP has a knife or a gun, as long as he has one or the other. Anything that amplifies his ability to enforce his threat of force should be enough to tip the balance of power is his favour (assuming a rational adversary). Guns only become necessary or useful when there's a disparity between the assailant and the now hypothetical OP. There's a moderately well known case in America where a Texas woman's home was being attacked by two men (it turned out they wanted to steal her husband's prescription painkillers). Her ability to coerce these men without a weapon was extremely limited. However, she had a firearm, and was able to stop the attack through the threat, and use, of force.
> I think the American style of "bringing a gun to a knife fight" just escalates everything.
I mean, you're right. The problem is that a) things have escalated, and b) de-escalating it would mean deep systemic changes to the American Constitution and the perceived balance of power between the State and the Citizen. The reasoning behind the 2nd Amendment is two fold - first it's to provide for common defense in the form of a State militia, which is largely a moot point in this country. The second, and this is a bit controversial, is to provide citizens with a means of resisting the Federal government in the event of tyranny. One would think this would be a moot point as well, in a country that spends an obscene amount of money on its armed forces, but it has moral significance - saying that at the last, the citizen is responsible for the protection of their own liberty, and preserving the means of that protection. </rant>
In my case standing back with a knife seemed to project enough power to convince the intruders to leave (3 people the first time and 2 the second time).
> The biggest issue you aren't considering is that the biggest advantage of a gun is that you just have to have it. Power isn't shooting someone accurately - it's bringing a gun to a knife fight. Having a knife means you have to close to the target to engage - having a gun means I can stand back and project power.
Brandishing isn't something a gun is for, i'm sorry. It's an extraordinarily bad idea to use a gun as a tool for threatening a would-be attacker for both your health, and your legal well-being.[0][1]
> Furthermore, every firearm made in America in the last century has been certified as drop safe.
Single action revolvers have absolutely no safety other than the geometry of their design to prevent accidental discharge and (sometimes) an external safety. Here is the first list of them I found for sale readily on google.[2]
Here's a list of de-certified firearms [3], I'd like you to notice the amount of modern guns de-certified just last year for sale for being deemed unsafe (for these varied reasons[4]). I apologize for the CA-centric data, it was just easiest to find.
Competition shooting pistols often have absolutely no safety devices at all, and plenty are manufactured within the United States.
Many pistols are heirloomed or sold privately, those pistols are not required by law to conform to any safety standards, and can be sold indefinitely. Their high value nature aids the used gun economy, another incentive to have a gun sans modern safeties.[4 :relics and curios/heirloom footnote]
> Poppy cock. Modern firearms don't just go off [0].
Well, here's a blog post with enthusiasts arguing over that.[5] I have a few guns that were left to me by the deceased, but I am by no means an enthusiast.
Here's a blog-post that used wording similar to yours regarding the last century, but he describes drop-safe guns as 'a vast majority' rather than 'every', further explaining about which (modern) guns are never drop-safe.[6]
Now, let me say that I sincerely hope that someone who is going to take the effort to arm their house with a gun will do the homework to figure out a safe firearm to do so with, and with the proper training; but we don't live in that world. People will grab something convenient, just like anything else in life. That means cheap, old, or a knock-off.
I didn't plan it. I just grabbed the first thing in front of me. It could have been a bat or chain or anything else but it just happened to be a knife. Also both times I exited the building and approached from the outside, I kept my distance (30 feet) and gave myself an escape route if the situation escalated. I know that 99.99% of the time a person will run away from someone surprising them with a knife so I took a chance. It was a calculated risk and it worked. The risk calculation changes drastically if you have a gun and it is much more likely to lead to bad decisions being made.
If circumstances had been that I was cornered and I would have had to use the knife if they didn't leave I don't think I would have taken it (or a gun for that matter). To be quite honest I don't know what I would have done in that situation (probably rushed them unarmed and tried to run away). Thankfully in both properties there were multiple escape routes.
Is that the advice you'd give to a 5'5" woman who lives alone? "When the attacker gets in your house, grab a kitchen knife"?
'Cause I'd say, grab a shotgun and shoot in their general direction.
Good for you that as a brave man called Rory it's easy to get rid of invaders with a kitchen knife. You'll probably have the same results with a fake knife.
A good percentage of the time a weapon used by a homeowner during a home invasion is used against them.
Get out of the house and let the authorities deal with it. Your stuff isn't worth your life or your family's continued safety.
Remember that most burglars aren't as shocked or scared as you are during a burglary. It's a routine for them. Their attention is focused on what to do if someone in the house notices.
If you brandish a weapon you're dealing with someone who is more alert and aware of the situation than you are and has no intention of dying.
A good percentage of the time a weapon used by a homeowner during a home invasion is used against them.
This quasi-statistic (which I will take at face value), while interesting from a sociological perspective, does not actually inform individual decisionmaking. It's a thinly veiled way of saying to someone "you can't be trusted to handle a gun/knife/whatever properly" - which, even if true for the majority of humans, is an incredibly offensive and patronizing thing to say to someone. And may just get you punched in the face, which (if it so happens) suggests that you were probably wrong about the individual in question.
That's quite an interesting comment on the tone of the argument you're responding to(http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html), but doesn't actually refute it.
People make mistakes, people are fallible, the /r/talesfromtechsupport subreddit goes to show that quite well. Despite this, you obviously don't want these people to die, and if not having a gun reduces the chance of a gun being turned on them, they may well be better without it.
Having a gun in the scenario inherently raises the stakes to lethal, after all.
Are you a 5' 5" woman who was handed a gun to protect herself against someone likely to over power them?
Or are you someone who was personally offended by the generalization that they might be in the group of people, considered Normal Humans, who don't handle life-threatening situations like a person in the special forces?
Or maybe you just need to climb off down your high horse. You don't know better than any other person throwing their opinion out in this thread. I'm almost sad that I commented given how this has gone to shit and the pretense of an intelligent conversation is gone...
Fact is, as an American, particularly one who lives in a southern state where a gun can (legally) be purchased for cash in a grocery store parking lot with no record, if someone were to break into my house, there is a non-trivial chance that were someone to break into my home they would be armed. Given that I'm single and live by myself, were someone to break in all I would have to do is take a defensive position in some room, phone the police, and announce to the intruder that police are on their way and that I am armed. Now what if I had a wife and kids? That changes the dynamic. What do you plan on doing in that case? Running through a house with a potentially armed intruder while you are not armed? Truth be told, there aren't a lot of wide open spaces in a house and as a 6'3", 230lb male could probably overpower a single intruder. What if you have more than one? I'm a boy scout at heart. Be Prepared.
How likely is all of this? Dunno, my brother has suffered an armed home invasion. My neighbor was luckily not home when his was broken into. A coworker almost got carjacked last month, and him being armed saved his ass. Hell, I once narrowly missed getting into a car accident and when I pulled over to make sure the other car that ran off the road was fine, I nearly got jumped by a couple guys that had a couple inches and quite a few pounds of muscle on me. I'd rather not get the shit beat out of me because someone got some mud on their Mercedes. Draw a line in the sand, if they cross it they fucked up. Hell, just last week my buddy got robbed by 3 punk teenagers when he got out of his car at his girlfriend's apartment complex.
I don't think owning a firearm makes me "deal with things like I'm in the special forces", but maybe I'm just an outlier. Truth be told, I know folks that are wholesome, responsible individuals who want protection, and I know folks who illegally own firearms and don't know the first thing about how to properly handle a firearm. It's a mixed bag of nuts and only reinforces the notion that damn near anyone who wants a gun will have one. I certainly wish I lived in a Western European country (for more reasons than a little more sanity about firearms... if only my mother had attained US-German dual citizenship as she very well could have, oh well) and this wasn't as much of a thing, but I don't and I doubt I'll have much luck getting over there in the near future, so I've got to play the hand I've been dealt. Now as for assuming us firearms owners are a bunch of knuckle dragging, Dirty Harry wannabes, please reconsider your stereotype. The large majority of folks I know down here are responsible folk.
> 'Cause I'd say, grab a shotgun and shoot in their general direction.
This is terrible advice.
The chance that you are the victim of a serial killer is so vanishingly small as to be not worth considering. Therefore if you have an intruder in your home, they are almost certainly after your property.
I would hope that any moral human being would not value property over a human being's life.
Therefore the best outcome which preserves human life is to simply let the intruder take your property and leave. They're almost certainly in a hurry to do so.
Involving a firearm escalates the situation unnecessarily and raises your own chances of death from very very unlikely to probably 50/50 (stat pulled from my butt).
If, on the other hand, you do believe that lethal force is justified to protect property then you have a miss aligned moral compass.
When a stranger is in my home at 3am while my spouse and two kids are upstairs sleeping, I won't risk judging what he/she will or will not do. Even if I were alone, I wouldn't take that chance. My intention is not to preserve "human life" but the lives of my family and myself.
> My intention is not to preserve "human life" but the lives of my family and myself.
The irony of course is that (statistically speaking) you would be vastly lowering you and your family's chances of surviving the event.
The chance that the intruder is there to murder you is ridiculously minuscule. It's so small that the people that do indiscriminately enter homes to murder get special nicknames like "Zodiac Killer" and Hollywood makes films about them.
Worrying about this type of intruder is irrational. Pulling a gun turns what is almost certainly a routine burglary into a life and death situation.
Of course. I just find the idea of guns making you safe so laughably absurd (and provably false). I'm sure they make you feel safer though. Maybe that's worth something.
Here's a good comedy skit about gun ownership (NSFW)
Guns don't make me feel safe. Being properly trained on how to use defensive force makes me feel safe.
The error in your logic is that you're imagining yourself with a weapon, which indeed, is laughable and provably unsafe.
Edit: not going to bother replying and further make this thread a gun debate. Just want to state that YouTube videos of comedic skits and accidents doesn't nullify any argument. Humans will make mistakes; that's a fact of life.
> Humans will make mistakes; that's a fact of life.
I agree. This is a fact of life. This combined with the utterly vanishingly tiny chance that you will be the victim of a serial killer make gun ownership for the purpose of safety absurd.
Own a gun all you want. But at least realize that you and your family are actually less safe because of it!
You're making incredible judgements about an individual who clearly spends the time to learn how to be a responsible gun owner. What you're equating is someone who says they know karate because they watch a lot of kung fu movies. This is a guy who regularly trains at a dojo.
Not everyone who owns a gun has the proper discipline to learn how to use their weapon. I call those people statistics, and they set a bad example for the rest of us who respect our tools.
I'm not passing judgement at all. I'm saying that having a device that is designed to suddenly and explosively discharge a projectile is inherently unsafe. To back up my claim I posted numerous videos, many of highly trained people, who have experienced accidental/negligent discharge.
Accidents happen. Even to the most highly trained and careful. The issue with gun accidents is that they have an incredibly high risk of being fatal. Enjoy guns all you like. Just stop pretending that you are safer around them or that you are immune to mistakes. No human is.
If I was a 5'5" woman I would get out of the house and call the cops. Still preferable to killing someone.
This comes to mind (particularly the part about "If he is in superior strength"):
"If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected." - Sun Tzu
What if he wants to rape the woman? What if he takes a cut from the knife, then knocks out the woman, rapes her, and murders her?
"Preferable"? Is the invader killing the woman preferable to the woman killing the invader?
It's amazing how shortsighted you are! "Just do this" or "just do that."
Talk to any kind of instructor in self defense or martial arts, and they will tell you to not get into a knife fight, or you will get cut. All of your ideas rely on the invader being rational and more interested in his own well-being than anything else. Yet the fact that he's a home invader shows that is not the case.
Firearms are equalizers. They make the 5'2" woman just as dangerous as the 6'+ 200+ lb. man. They allow her to defend herself from beyond the invader's reach. They make noise to draw attention to the fact that something bad is happening.
Rational people realize that they have nothing to fear from law-abiding gun owners who only want to be prepared to protect their loved ones from evil people. And rational people realize that evil people are not going away anytime soon. Rational people realize that there are plenty of irrational people who may do them harm, and that the only effective method of self-defense is to have a firearm and know how to use it.
Saying that the cat is out of the bag so you need a gun is cold war logic were you need to be able to kill the other more times. So you rather want to escalate the situation further instead of trying e.g., what Australia did by implementing gun control?
So Charles Branas's team at the University of Pennsylvania analysed 677 shootings over two-and-a-half years to discover whether victims were carrying at the time, and compared them to other Philly residents of similar age, sex and ethnicity.
This study only looked at one side of the equation of people who carry guns, the ones who got shot. What about all the people who carry guns and never use them? Wouldn't they be excluded from this study?
No, it did not just look at one side of the equation.
"We enrolled 677 case participants that had been shot in an assault and 684 population-based control participants within Philadelphia, PA, from 2003 to 2006. We adjusted odds ratios for confounding variables."
"Their study assessed risk for being assaulted and then shot, a compound outcome event whose second element (being shot) is not inevitable given the first (being assaulted). Persons who were assaulted but not shot are not studied. We do not know whether any association between firearm possession and their outcome measure applies to assault, to being shot given an assault, or both."[1]
Aside from starting a gun race with the burglar and fearing losing your life altogether with your possessions, I never follow this reasoning. How is it worse facing without guns a unarmed intruder than facing with a gun a well armed one?
If you're physically weaker than the other person, it's pretty clear how it's worse. Two people with guns is a much more even match than two different-sized people without guns. And that's ignoring the criminals-will-still-have-guns argument.
It improves your odds, but raises the stakes. You should only raise the stakes if you care more about successfully stopping the intruder from taking your stuff, than you do about increasing the risk of death.
At the end of the day we still need to look at the stats (how often do intruders hurt/kill homeowners when unprovoked?), but it still doesn't make too much sense to raise stakes for the sake of survival.
Contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, the vast, vast majority of home intruders don't want to murder you (it's so rare that these people get special nicknames like "Son of Sam" or "Zodiac Killer"). Most intruders just want your shit so they can sell it off.
Adding a gun into the mix runs counter to simple common sense. The rational response is to have property insurance and stay out of a burglar's way.
This approach is a double win. 1. Nobody dies (yay!) 2. You get brand new stuff paid for by the insurance company!
For better or for worse that argument is facile in countries where guns are already plentiful. No one gets to choose whether their intruder will be armed.
Nothing like that has ever happened to me. In fact, I have never been in a situation where I would have been better off with a gun on me. Funny how people who own guns seem to end up in dangerous situations so often.
I'd be careful implying causation here. Another way to look at it is that people who often find themselves in dangerous situations feel the need to have guns to protect themselves. When you think about it that way, it doesn't sound so 'funny'.
Well, in this case it might be. In a society where no one owns guns, the chance that some intruder has a gun is near to null, so you don’t need a gun either.
The article you cite discusses intimate partner violence and seems to suggest that abusive households which have a gun present may result in the gun being used against the woman. If you read my comment, I was discussing attacks by strangers.
Of course it is possible to imagine situations in which a gun makes you safer. The point is that in the real world, you are more likely to end up in a situation where it makes you less safe. More specifically, women are far more likely to be killed by their abusive partners than they are to face a life-threatening home invasion.
So don't buy a gun if you have an abusive intimate partner, and do buy one if you are single or have a non-abusive partner. Pretty simple.
Also, upon rereading, your article doesn't even really support your claim that a gun makes women less safe. Note the comparisons made: "More than twice as many women are killed with a gun used by their husbands or intimate acquaintances than are murdered by strangers..." "A very small percentage of these women (7%) had used a gun successfully in self-defense..."
Note the comparisons NOT made: the percentage of women in households without a gun who successfully defended themselves, or P(murder|abusive husband && gun) vs P(murder|abusive husband && !gun).
> the percentage of women in households without a gun who successfully defended themselves
Irrelevant, since the whole point is that lethal home invasions are very rare. In other words, even if having a gun provided 100% protection against a murderous home invader, and even if lacking a gun made it 100% certain that he would kill you, owning the gun would still have a negligible effect on you overall safety.
> P(murder|abusive husband && gun) vs P(murder|abusive husband && !gun)
You can't have it both ways. Either guns make it easier to kill people or they don't. If they don't, then they're no good for self defense. If they do, then you're more likely to be killed by your partner if he has access to a gun than if he doesn't.
Irrelevant, since the whole point is that lethal home invasions are very rare.
If women defend themselves successfully 7% of the time when a gun is in the home but 3% when it's not (the relevant comparison), then guns are effective in preventing domestic violence. The article doesn't even discuss this statistic, which is the only important one.
Either guns make it easier to kill people or they don't.
They do - no one disputes this. No one disputes that an armed man vs an unarmed woman has a better shot than an unarmed man vs an unarmed woman. So what?
Having a gun in the home makes it easier for each partner to kill the other. Thus, I don't see how it could possibly make one partner safer than they would otherwise be. It would appear to make both of them less safe. (And the real solution to this problem is to GTFO of an abusive relationship, not to buy a gun because then maybe there's a tiny chance that you can kill the guy before he kills you. That's just nuts.)
I'm not sure why you keep harping on statistics, since neither of us has any direct statistical information regarding whether a woman owning a gun makes her less likely to be killed by her partner. There are no statistics supporting your position either.
That's a really ignorant statement. The problem with the gun debate is that nobody wants to walk in another's shoes.
There are many people who live in areas where police response is nonexistent for many types of crime or response times are awful. Guns are a great equalizer for the weak.
The overblown prohibition push over the years has empowered the more extreme gun advocates and created the potential for more problems.
I had a man break into my home when I was there. He got in through the roof, going up scaffolding on a derelict building next door.
I offered him a cup of tea, and told him it would probably be safer for him to leave via my front door and down the stairs rather than back down the scaffolding. He declined the tea, but I went and made one for myself and called the police. He went back out the way he'd come in. The police caught him in the garden, where he brandished a bottle at them. They did not shoot and kill him[1], they de-escalated then caught and cuffed him. He served a short sentence, got some drug and alcohol rehab, and is now only engaged in minor crime.
At no point did I think "this would be better if any of us (me, him, the police) could have a gun".
That's nice, especially since he didn't have one of the very many knives which are, I gather from the news, such a perennial problem in your neck of the woods. Here's hoping you stay lucky!
Knife crime was popular in the news for a while because they reported on disproportionally many cases, presumably because of the lack of something more exciting - like gun crime.
Funny part was, I didn't even own a gun for the break in or when I found the dude breaking into my neighbors house. In fact, I was lucky enough that there happened to be a cop driving by right as I ran out the door to try to grab his plate number. In the case of the carjacking, that happened to my boss when he pulled over to render assistance to a man who crashed his motorcycle. Him just trying to be a good Samaritan at 3 in the afternoon on a Sunday. After the break in I bought a rifle, and after my boss nearly got carjacked I bought a pistol and am pursuing a concealed permit. I'm not going into with a John Wayne mentality, rather I have something of a Scout's Motto mentality. Be Prepared.
Given that your HN posting history mostly consists of you saying how you really want to join the army and kill people, can you honestly say that self defense was your primary motivation for buying a gun? It sounds to me like you want to use it.
Your stories don't really support your position because everyone involved is still alive. If you'd had a gun, then at least one person could very well be dead as a result of committing a not particularly serious crime.
So now you're gonna go pick through months of comment history for a comment or two and take it out context? Why not evaluate how my love of Java and type-safety informs my desire for the segregation of society</sarcasm>. You're probably one of those Twitter mob types that tries to get folks fired for their opinions, aren't you?
I bought a firearm because I like shooting little paper targets. I can legally carry a loaded firearm in my car, but I don't, so what does that tell you? I have a single handgun, so I must be a homicidal maniac, right?
>I lust for the thought of besting other young men, I want to win, I want to be the one standing when the dust settles. Maybe it will sate that appetite, maybe it will give me some appreciation for the world that I lack. Who is to say? I don't feel the desire to go out and slay my fellow man, except in that one specific context.
You'll forgive me if I don't find the last sentence very reassuring!
Look, I know I'm not going to persuade you to stop loving guns. But do you realize how you come across? You come across as quite a literally a gun nut: a crazy, angry dude with a gun who can't wait for an opportunity to point it at someone. You are making the case for more gun regulation better than I ever could.
My two takeaways are to have a strong door and to let the proper authorities handle accidents that don't require immediate aid. Those two behaviors seem safer for all involved.
I don't understand how a gun would make things better in any of these scenarios. Without a gun the worst case scenario is that some property is stolen. Big deal. With a gun the worst case scenario is that a human being's life has been snuffed out.
here's an idea. Get property insurance instead of a gun. That way if your shit gets stolen you'll get a shiny, brand new replacement from the insurance company!
Or other criminals, or a straw purchase, or buying them on the street, or buying via the "gun show" loophole. Truth be told, I have friends who went down "the wrong path" in life. I've got family that aren't exactly on the straight and narrow either, and a pistol can be had for a few hundred dollars on the street, no questions asked. To think that my owning a firearm is going to get me robbed is a flat out idiotic statement. I'm never seeking a confrontation, but my having a firearm is going to put me at a marked advantage over someone who doesn't.
> but my having a firearm is going to put me at a marked advantage over someone who doesn't
No, statistically speaking (and via simple logical deduction) it will dramatically increase the chance that a life (yours and/or your attackers) will end.
If you informed on the mob then, yes, you should be worried about getting murdered on the street, and you should probably carry.
Otherwise, that punk that pulls a knife on you just wants your wallet. Just hand it over and nobody dies that day (I'm assuming you don't value the contents of your wallet over a human beings life).
The statistics unequivocally point to guns reducing safety. I'm not usually a big fan of Jim Jeffries' comedy, but he does a great bit about gun control (NSFW link)
I'm in total agreement with Jeffries here. It's ok to like guns. Just drop the "it makes me safer to carry one, one day I'll stop a robbery, etc" nonsense. Be honest and say "fuck the statistics. I like guns. You can't stop me from owning one. Now piss off". It's much more intellectually honest.
What I don't understand about it is that the right to bear arms was rooted in the desire to allow citizens to arm themselves against an oppressive government so they could organize an effective overthrow if the need ever arose again (after the revolutionary war). Today, the government's military is so advanced that they'd quickly squash any kind of uprising even if you somehow managed to obtain every legally purchased firearm in the country. The right to privacy and encrypted communication would go a lot farther in that respect than the right to bear arms, putting aside self defense arguments, yet you don't hear much about that from the right wing groups touting this argument in favor of gun rights.
Tell that to the Mujahideen, the Viet Cong, and the 2003- Iraqi Insurgency. You could make the case that in the latter two conflicts, the more mighty power was unwilling to commit total war [1], but I would like to believe that the US military would not commit total war against its own people. At some point there is nothing left to rule.
There's a difference between "total war" and "nothing left to rule"; indeed, there's a difference between total war and merely executing civilian hostages in reprisal for acts of insurrection, although the taking of civilian hostages is often a feature of total warfare -- as, indeed, it was when Sherman employed the strategy against Confederate civilians, who had so recently been his fellow citizens and yet remained his fellow Americans, during his famous "March to the Sea".
In fact, Sherman not only engaged in total war, but originated the idea that it should be used in that conflict; he had to sell it to Lincoln before he could get permission to employ it. I really don't think it's that much of a stretch to imagine such a thing happening again in the United States; all it'd need would be, on the one hand, another sufficiently bloodthirsty general, and on the other, another sufficiently widespread perception that those on the dirty end of the total-war stick had it coming.
That argument always presumes it is the entire military against civilians. One would think if things got that bad, there would be some manner of defections from the military into the rebelling side.
>Today, the government's military is so advanced that they'd quickly squash any kind of uprising even if you somehow managed to obtain every legally purchased firearm in the country.
You'd be surprised at how effective guerrilla warfare is.
Only against an occupier unwilling to meet it with measures harsh enough to be effective. Historically speaking, I'd say it is more likely for US military forces to employ such measures against Americans, than against occupied foreign polities; as far as I can think of, we've actually never done the latter, while US history exhibits at least two instances of the former -- the Indian relocation, on the one hand, demonstrating the effectiveness of mass resettlement, and Sherman's March to the Sea, on the other, doing likewise for "scorched earth" techniques and reprisal killings of civilian hostages in response to guerrilla attacks.
1. They can't, at least not as plainly as stated here. The wars being fought today are asymmetrical and, in many cases, ideological. You can take out a pocket of resistance here or there, but there are no huge battles like in a war between two nations. Victories are small, cost more, are not decisive, but are guaranteed due to the overwhelming strength of the weapons.
2. More importantly: they don't want to. long drawn out wars are profitable, numbing, and demoralizing. Most people don't care about them anymore. They just happen in the background. No thumbs up, no thumbs down. Go on about your business. That's the best type of reaction a government could ask for when pushing the agenda of lobbyists and the corporations they represent.
People will beg the government to come in and save them from themselves.
So the question, I suppose, is what could trigger the actual occupation? My guess is that it will be austerity measures that will come through widespread municipal bankruptcies. Pensions and disability checks will stop coming. Services will stop being provided.
There is a whole section of the population that subsists on government provided benefits. Multiple generations, below the poverty line, directed acyclical graphs of income where the last person to have worked is a generation or two ago. When that lifeline goes away, then we will see unrest. Then the government will come in and occupy, providing basics. Give us your guns and we will protect you. Take this rice and this water and go home and watch TV.
> there are no huge battles like in a war between two nations
Nor need there be! That's not how guerrilla or "asymmetrical" warfare works; the chief advantage for the guerrillas is that they disappear into the populace between attacks, so there's no one for the more ordinary sort of army to have a battle with.
The way you win a war like this, as the occupier, is to counter this advantage in a way that makes guerrilla warfare proportionately costly for the guerrillas, which ordinarily it is not. For example, you might respond to guerrilla attacks by taking hostages from among the populace, and if the attackers fail to surrender, proceeding to execute the hostages taken. While hardly nice, this method is very effective, and can eventually produce the total and complete pacification of the territory under occupation. (Of course, so can mass relocation or genocide, but those are absurdly expensive and time-consuming by comparison, not to mention far more costly in terms of political will, and are thus best reserved for cases where hostage-taking doesn't work, such as the North American aborigines in the early 19th century, or the Armenians in the early 20th.)
You can achieve victory in an ordinary war by blowing things up, more or less. In a guerrilla war, more subtle means are required. And nastier means, no doubt! -- I don't think anyone has ever tried to claim that military occupation and the forcible curtailment of guerrilla warfare were nice, and I'm certainly not making any such claim right now. I'm just pointing out that, on the one hand, this is what you have to do to win, and on the other hand, it is possible to win a military occupation, if the political will exists for it to be competently carried out.
In recent American history, of course, such will never does exist, because for all the generic American ignorance of history, foreign affairs, and military matters, we do at least have the basic good sense to recognize that engaging in military occupation, of a country which never did us harm and isn't about to start, is both wrong and expensively pointless. That's why it takes stupid, venal, dishonest leaders to fool us into supporting such adventures.
(Of course, it helped a lot that after Vietnam such leaders stopped conscripting the children of the mostly progressive elite, which did a great deal to mute progressive opposition when the Bush II claque came along; instead of finding some way to suppress people whose political opinions actually mattered, the Iraq adventurists could count on a volunteer military in which the elite had no significant personal stake, thus no significant reason to try to prevent being squandered. But that's a different discussion altogether.)
That was a big issue for the North in the early years of the Civil War. Southerners were disproportionately represented in the small pre-war standing army and West Point alumnae. So the war starts, and they mostly go home and switch sides; at the same time the northern armies are massively expanding, with a gutted officer pool.
Linguistic quibble: "Alumnae" is the nominative feminine plural of the noun "alumnus", and thus refers specifically to a female graduate of some institution of higher learning, &c. In 1860, there was no such thing as an alumna of West Point, a school which at that time had only alumni (which is the nominative masculine plural, and the correct usage in this case).
The original right to bear arms is about being able to stand up to an oppressive government. It's not something you are supposed to need in daily life, it's something you are supposed to need when your government decides that tax rates are 85%, curfew is 8pm, all electronic communication is banned, and any soldier is allowed to live in your home and rape any civilian.
The right to bear arms is ideally one you never need, but it's essential as a contingency plan. We've yet to see a government that didn't exercise horrible abuses of power and the right to bear arms hopefully keeps some of that in check.
That sounds a bit odd. If you're standing up to the government, why would the laws matter to you. Or is it a bit like "Here's a gun, if we ever go too bad, shoot us". Which in turn raises the question why has no-one massacred Wall Street yet.
The framer's intent, as far as I know, was to make it such that the populace would be well-armed before it gets to that point. You are correct that laws would mean little to someone standing up to the government, but availability of firearms would mean a great deal at that point.
Wall Street are, ostensibly, private citizens doing their private jobs, not elected officials who are supposed to be acting in the public's best interest.
Well... Not everyone thinks like you. Some people feel safer being able to defend themselves if need be. The possession, even if it's never used is tranquilizing. It's clear enough that the police and security systems are not perfect and won't always have your back.
Maybe in that future you'll be able to 3D everything but if we lose the right to bare arms don't you think that would limit the supply of arms when that time came?
What about living in a society where guns are readily available, but with low gun violence? Presumably it's the gun violence that bothers you, not the availability of guns.
> Or I don't care about freedom to bear arms because I don't have a gun
You're doing it wrong. If you want to paraphrase one of the two affirmations in that quote, you need to write something like: "Or I don't care about freedom to bear arms because I don't have anything to shoot at".
The second part of that structure is showing a use case for that freedom (speaking, publishing, shooting). Simple possession is not enough.
So concentrate more the next time you feel like entertaining this fantasy that civilians need to be able to freely shoot at stuff, just like they need to freely speak and publish.
"I don't care about the freedom to bear arms because I have nothing to protect"
I agree that fending off a modern army with rifles is a pipe dream which causes political blindness (although this disparity just illustrates how thoroughly the second amendment has already been trampled). But there are plenty of smaller scale immediate situations where one might really wish they had a gun - eg bears while camping.
Also the whole premise around these sayings is ultimately flawed. When we are forced into coming up with justifications for natural rights (thought, communication, using tools, being left alone, etc), we're fighting a losing war.
My version of "fending off" includes an end goal where you're no longer under attack and don't have to hide out in caves.
Guerrilla campaigns work because they're driving less-committed foreign invaders out through attrition. Our domestic military has nowhere else to withdraw to, and would necessarily have broken free of public opinion (otherwise democracy would put a stop to anything long before sustained conflict).
Don't get me wrong, if any such thing occurs I would much rather have distributed gun ownership than not. Furthermore, the right to bear arms quite obviously covers conventional explosives, armored vehicles, and missiles. To the extent that this might not be good policy, then the second amendment should have been rewritten rather than simply trampled.
On the political front, it frustrates me to see the amount of energy shoehorned into "they're gonna take our guns", which imho causes people to be myopic to the other rights that are being oppressed. I'm not talking about commenters in this thread (who obviously have more than one issue in their head at once), but your less-connected punter who turns on talk radio and has their specific desire for freedom transmuted into support for a different flavor of tyranny.
This has been perhaps the most interesting thing, from a military tactics view, of the latest wars. That a moderately armed insurgency can hold against a very sophisticated military. The limits of smart weapons. In many ways it bolsters the argument that the 2nd amendment, as a bulwark against the emergence of a federal police state, is not actually outdated.
From a capabilities standpoint, the latest wars have the very sophisticated armies showing an awful lot of self restraint.
Another way of putting it is that the longevity of the insurgents probably says more about the mission that was handed to the military than it does about the ability of the military to deal with the tactics.
> In the border region with Pakistan, the mujahideen would often launch 800 rockets per day. Between April 1985 and January 1987, they carried out over 23,500 shelling attacks on government targets.
I would say that compared to the Soviets the Mujahideen were only moderately armed. Even more so the Taliban vs the US in the border regions of Pakistan.
