QFT.

Therein lies the problem. Gun-free zones (or criminal protection zones / victim creation zones as I like to call them) only serve to disarm the law-abiding. Those who follow the laws aren't the problem. It's the ones who DON'T follow the laws that need to be reigned in, not the guy who is minding his own business being a legal, lawful citizen exercising his rights in every day life.

GFZs only serve to enable and protect the criminal(s) from the law-abiding citizen. Sadly, too many of our political leaders believe this to be a good thing!

So, instead of spending billions of dollars on a gun control system that doesn't keep people from shooting others, or spending billions to arm everybody, which will have us all shooting each other, how about we spend those billions on removing the root causes of crime and social disaffection, so that nobody wants to shoot anybody?

The first two don't work, so give the pipe dream a try.

You don't win elections with that, elections are won with "lock them up and forget about them" polemics. Even more so with privatized prisons, nobody sponsors the guy who wants to reduce their "customer base".


PS: And I don't even want to know how a school shooting would end if 50 armed people are roaming the buildings when the police make their entry...

I don't know, why not take a look at the church and mall shootings where armed resistance has gotten there well before the uniformed police arrived, and see what happened there? Or at the much less publicized (because the body count was so much lower) Virginia school shooting at the Appalachia School of Law, a few years before V-Tech?

Armed resistance stops shootings, either through physically stopping a shooter (at best), their arrival encouraging the shooter to commit suicide (it works), or -- at worst -- by engaging the shooter and drawing fire. Sometimes the armed resistance is the cops, sometimes it's not. Given average 911 response times, why not hedge your bets?

No one's suggesting arming everyone on a campus as they show up for class...but -- just as a for instance -- why shouldn't folks with CCW permits be allowed to carry on a college campus? If they're mature, responsible, and law-abiding enough to get the training and to carry that gun everywhere else they go, why are they -- as a student or as a faculty member -- suddenly no longer capable and safe once they set foot on a campus?

Heated arguments, tenure denials, thesis rejections....All of these things, and guns?

Have a sad history of not mixing well.

Yeah, you mean like the tenure denial shooting that just happened at UA Huntsville? Good thing there were snazzy "no gun" signs posted all over to keep her from doing that, huh? Nice of 'em to make sure the six people she shot were completely incapable of even attempting to defend themselves.

But what's to stop the same thing from happening at an office meeting? A heated debate at a Bible study class? A shoving match in the grocery store? Someone cutting in line at a movie theater? And yet day in and day out, all those things (and more) happen to people who lawfully carry a concealed weapon, and all these shall-issue states have yet to deteriorate into the "Wild West" with "gutters full of blood," especially when compared to the strictly gun-controlled inner city areas that consistently top the country's murder charts.

So, again, what is it about a college campus that should make it -- innately -- a "gun free zone" (except for the criminals)?

Schools are not open halls...completely different story


The one where the shooter seemed to be already finished and left the building, was tackled by an ex-marine while and two police officers off duty happened to be near by and helped arrest him? Damn lucky.



So you are a mature, responsible, and law-abiding student with a CCW permit and now disaster has struck and a school shooting happened at your place. You are roaming the building with your gun drawn and suddenly a fellow student comes around the corner with his gun drawn and at the ready - what do you do? Assense his aura to tell his intentions?
Also consider the same situation from the perspective of the police officers making the entry. The average school shooter has no intention of surving and will gladly take another person with him, so how would you instruct them? To risk their lives and those of their comrades by assuming that the guy with the gun is firendly, or to shoot any armed person they encounter, thereby potentially killing dozens of innocents?


It's the same reason which makes partisan warfare so bloody, and why the laws of warfare devote so much text to the classification of combatants and noncombatants: If the distinction between combatants and civilians goes to hell, both will have a far higher death toll.

Uh, SWAT actually has procedures about that kind of thing. Remember, "SWAT is a lifesaving organization". Basically they are supposed to give you a chance to surrender (even if only one brief chance) before they blow you away. So theoretically you could drop your gun and put your hands up.

Think about it another way. SWAT doesn't know that any given person doesn't have a gun. They operate as if everyone present is potentially a suspect. So even if you're an unarmed civilian they'll still ziptie you and detain you. That way a shooter can't pretend to be a hostage and shoot one of them in the back of the head when they're paying attention to something else.

Basically, according to theory, SWAT treats everyone as if they had a hidden handgun, even the hostages.

What the Hell makes you think anyone will be "roaming" anywhere? I'm not Bruce Willis, and my campus ain't the set of Die Hard. I'm not a cop. I don't go looking for trouble (just the opposite, in fact, as with most CCW holders). If I see someone wildly killing the shoppers at my mall, the worshippers at my church, or the students/faculty of my university, and if I've got a clear shot, I'll fire at them and stop the threat. If I don't? I'm sure not going to stalk the halls and act like I'm the hero of an action flick.

You're working off the assumption that CCW holders plan to stalk a building like a SWAT team or a bunch of kids playing a Team Deatchmatch on their X Box, which tells me you're yet another person with no real idea of how guns work (or rather, how people trained with guns work), but who doesn't let that stop them from trying to take mine away from me.

Believe me, if there's one thing a wise, law-abiding, gun owner knows its how much the media already hates us, and the whims of a district attorney can be the only thing between us and a jail cell. We don't go flying off the handle at the drop of a hat, eagerly looking for an excuse to start gunning people down. We do carry to protect ourselves and others if and when we feel we can do so safely.


You think they don't train for this shit? They've got rules to follow, and they're supposed to follow them. Their job isn't to "shoot any armed person they encounter." They point a gun, identify themselves, and shout for your to drop yours, and guess what? You drop yours. That's how they know you're not the piece of crap killing innocents. It happens all the time -- law enforcement approaches someone for a "man with a gun" call, or follow-up to a self defense shooting -- and 99% of the time everything goes smoothly. The good guys do what the cops tell them, the cops sort out the details after folks are in cuffs, and it never makes the evening news.

You only hear about it when it doesn't go smoothly, which is probably what's left you with the impression that that's the norm, not the exception.

Not going to read this entire thing, so apologies if someone else already said this.

How about a special glove that you put on and that has to be in contact with the gun for the gun to fire? You won't have a glove fall off, close proximity isn't as important since you'd have to be holding the gun, it's relatively easy to block a wireless signal, etc.

Sengir, if you're not equipped to do recon in force then you don't do recon in force and if you're not equipped to clear rooms then you don't clear rooms. Roaming the building looking for the bad guys is recon in force, and it is an activity that requires you to clear rooms.

A concealed pistol does not turn you into a one-person SWAT team and it isn't meant to. What it is meant to do is provide you and those immediately around you with a defense. While it is true that the correct procedure is the one that saves lives, and thus it is impossible to make a hard and fast rule that will always apply, the most sound procedure in such situations is to get as many people as is reasonable into a defensible room and defend it.


And as WR stated, patrolmen will not go into that building. A SWAT team will. That SWAT team will be equipped for both recon in force and room clearing. They will have Class IIIa armor with Class III or Class IV inserts. They will have submachine guns or assault rifles. They will have flashbangs and tear gas. And they'll have a whole host of other equipment and weapons intended to give them the best possible picture of what is going on and the best possible protection from attacks.

It'd be a lot better than a watch, but I think it'd still require some miniaturization to work and to be turned into something comfortable enough to wear that any police force would consider it. I can't imagine many cops wanting to spend their whole day wearing a Nintendo Power Glove -- and I can't imagine how hard it would be to make a glove that bulky contain electronics sturdy enough to survive a fistfight (and still be able to link up to your gun).


To be fair, with the new-ish Active Shooter protocols in place in many departments (spurred on by Columbine, America's most publicized gun-free zone), patrolmen may be the ones that enter the building. It all comes down to what size a campus/church/mall/whatever we're talking about, who's on scene first, and the individual training, protocols, and adherence to both practiced by whatever department's involved.

In lots of places, first on scene means first indoors, depending on building size, how far away SWAT is, and stuff like that. So it could be a standard patrol officer...but, well, that would still mean SWAT-esque training specifically to handle an active shooter, so it's most a semantics thing. I'm putting off homework by posting, instead, so I'm allowed to nit pick.

What if you're shot in the right hand and the glove is damaged? It would suck if you weren't able to shoot using your left hand in an emergency.

Mostly previous discussions with proponents of armed campuses, I apologize if I wrongly accused you of dreaming about playing Rambo.


That's the standard routine. But a person who is intent on killing as many people as possible and actually wants to die in the process is hardly a standard case...

And yes, ordinary beat cops are the ones who enter the buildings, that's the procedure devised from the experiences at Columbine and other places. Go in, disturb the shooter and drive him away from the scene if possible.


Speaking of norms and exceptions, school shootings are about as rare as getting struck by lightning. Stupid, irresposible or agitated handling of a gun on the other hand is rare, especially when talking about trained permit holders, but still far more likely than a school shooting...simple cost-benefit analysis.

Can you give an example of where this happened? Because at VA Tech, for instance, the cops stood outside for half an hour until the SWAT teams could arrive.


The glove problem doesn't require you get shot in the hand. Just stand with a wall on your right side as cover. Ideally, you shoot with your left hand, to take the most advantage of cover. A glove made for your right won't fit on your left (and changing gloves in the middle of a firefight is a bad idea anyway).

It's been proven that shooters like those at Columbine, VT, and other places will continue killing so long as they can do so without armed resistance. The interesting thing is based on historical data, it was determined that ANY armed resistance was enough to make them give up / commit suicide.

As such, a law-abiding armed citizen would be just as useful as a trained SWAT... in *those* sorts of situations.

But seriously, for those who are avid proponents of gun control... Answer me this:

Your wife / daughter / son / loved one is but moments away from being killed by a bad guy.

You can wish for them to have one thing and they'll have it.

Do you want them to have...
1. A cellphone so they can call you to say goodbye
--or--
2. A firearm they can use to defend themselves.

It may mark me as a radical but I've gone so far as to teach three of my four daughters how to use a firearm. In the event I'm not home, they are, and someone is breaking in, they know how to use my handguns. The youngest will be taught once she's old enough to hold a gun. She's already learned they aren't toys to play with.

Funnily enough, gun grabbers don't like answering that question. I wonder why?

So you're saying...what? In an active shooter scenario (school shooting, church shooting, etc), you think the cops don't announce their presence and demand a surrender? Because that's what I'm getting from your sentence. Are you implying, instead, that they turn into Shadowrun-themed kill teams, whose sole purpose is to murder any armed civilians they come across?

Because (a) you're obviously not familiar with their training, (b) you're thinking pretty low of our trained officers, and © you're just flat out wrong. There are plenty of instances where I wish the cops had acted like Dirty Harry, but the simple fact is they don't. What's more, there are some who are overtrained NOT to, so much so that officers don't fire their weapons even when they really, really, should. There's a video that curdles my blood to this day, where a decent, hard-working, cop is casually gunned down, all while brandishing his weapon and just shouting for the man to drop his gun -- as he's shot over, and over, and over again, a limb at a time.

Cops aren't any more trigger happy than law-abiding, gun-toting, CCW holders.


If school shootings are so rare as to be statistically improbable enough we won't allow law-abiding citizens to prepare for them...why are they held up, time and again, as examples of the monstrous violence firearms are capable of, and used as reasons to further disarm my country's citizenry? They're either negligible statistical blips that aren't worth considering, or they're not. You can't really have it both ways.

Well, you can play to peoples' emotions, or you can take a sober look at reality. The fact is, this kind of situation almost never happens. The fact is, guns shoot friends and family more often than they shoot bad guys. You can design the perfect imaginary situation where you really want a gun, but it requires you to ignore the risks inherent in being an untrained person who owns a gun. Now, if we were like Israel, where 100% of the population gets military training by age 20, then maybe everyone having a gun wouldn't be so bad. They'd all know how to use one, and how to differentiate friendly from enemy. But divorcing gun ownership from the skills required to successfully operate a gun, that's not such a good idea, is it? It's like letting people drive cars or speedboats or airplanes without a license. I'm not saying that guns are bad in and of themselves. But just like cars, they're very problematic when you give them to people who don't know how to use them.

The question of gun control or not isn't answered by just looking at the situation of "your daughter is about to be attacked, do you want her to be trained and armed or not?"

There are a lot of downsides to lax gun control:

1) a large proportion of gun owners will not have the training to handle their weapons safely
2) a large proportion of gun owners will not secure their weapons properly and kids will get access to them
3) a large proportion of gun owners will not be able to use their guns responsibly or with competence the day they might have to use them
4) some persons are unstable, have bad tempers, go through rough patches, etc. If they don't have access to guns, they can't do much harm. If they have access to guns, they can easily hurt a lot of people, and that capability makes it more likely they will lash out.
5) a person with a gun will be more tempted to commit a crime for the first time if he has a gun, because it is much easier. Being criminal isn't black and white for lots of people, it is a matter of convenience - the difficulty of committing robbery without a gun will deter many. If he didn't have a gun, he wouldn't commit the crime
6) with civilians armed, criminals are more likely to armed too, and they're more likely to shoot first at the first sign of trouble.

I'm sure that in any situation I'm safer with a gun, but that certainly doesn't apply to everyone, and that's the view we have to take.

Will you overall be safer without gun control, where joe average has a gun and goes on a shooting rampage because he got picked at in school, or where your kid gets hold of his friend's dad's unsecured gun and shoots himself with it, but where you're also able to protect yourself? And are you morally ok with all the people who don't acquire guns or don't have proper training, who are certainly at greater risk (which translates into many deaths) without gun control?

Those are the real questions to answer. Just pulling out the one situation that you'll be better of with a gun (trained and being attacked) and using that as an argument is very one eyed.

Double post

I'm sorry, people facing thugs who have a preponderance of force 'almost never happens'? Where are you living?? That happens like ten times a month over where I am.



There was a study that proved this, until its sample methods were examined and were found to be completely made-up in order to create a political point. If, however, you go visit the NIH web site, you can find your own information, which shows that gun deaths among children are basically negligible in the US (hence why it's a news item, while drowning in a 5 gallon bucket is not). It is strictly impossible to see how many crimes are stopped by gun ownership (because studies seem to suggest that the majority of those crimes never happen at all, due to the deterrence effect, ergo can't be counted), but the numbers I've seen are pretty high - and even looking at major news outlets, you can find twice as many 'little old lady scares off mugger with desert eagle' articles as 'kid finds loaded rifle and accidentally shoots self in head twice'.

So just out of curiosity, how do you guys rationalize to yourself the high violent crime rates in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia...which are also bastions of strict gun control? Or the fact that Great Britain and Australia top the US for overall violent crime rates? Or the fact that even Australia's Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research acknowledges that the gun ban had no significant impact on the amount of gun-involved crime?

That's the thing that really gets me about all this. It's not just that good people -- law abiding citizens, who pay the fees, leave the paper trail, and jump through the hoops required to get a CCW -- are disarmed, it's that the disarming doesn't do any good. The assholes still get ahold of guns when they really want them, and when they don't they still find ways to victimize, abuse, assault, rape, and steal from the decent people around them.

Is it really worth throwing the rest of your violent crime victims under the proverbial bus, just to get a "murder by firearm" stat down a little bit?

Just an aside: Those folks who use 'studies suggest' as a support for their argument, whether pro or con, could you please give us a pointer to at least one actual study that supports your position? Maybe even a news article that itself might redirect to a study? It makes the reader feel more confident in your argument and allows us to see for ourselves what the study actually says.

No, I'm saying that the officers will adapt their tactics depending on the situation at hand. If the situation at hand is somebody who wants to kill as many people as possible and is perfectly fine with dying in the process, they will take a far more aggressive stance and when in doubt subdue the suspect before reading him his rights.


For the same reason the other side uses incidents where a bunch of thugs on parole invade a house, kill the owners, rape their daughter and kill their dog as a reason to further arm your country's citizenry.
Personally, I think that somebody who wants to kill people will always find a way no matter what is banned and how many people are armed.


That's one half of the statistic. The other half would be that gun bans don't cause a rise in the overall level of violent crime because the poor, defenseless people a preyed upon, the usual result is nothing statistically significant at all.


@nezumi: So? During the same month several times as many people will be killed by traffic accidents or sudden heart failure - yet nobody runs around with an airbag to his chest and few have an AED implant. Oh, and statistically more than half of those tehn murder victims were actually killed by their friends or loved ones.

Umm... yes they do. I have an air bag a foot from my chest every time I drive. I'm not at risk for a heart attack, so there's no benefit from an AED implant (and quite a cost), but I know CPR and there's an AED on every level of the building where I work (plus do note that I'm pretty sure an AED costs more than a handgun and training).



Source?

(Here's the studies I was talking about earlier:
http://www.guncite.com/gun-control-kellermann-3times.html

Yes, the URL clearly says where their bias lies, but they link to the studies in question, showing where the study about '3 times as likely to get killed if you own a gun' contradicts US gov't data, with links for all.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/.../full/111/4/741 says the reported accidental firearms pediatric death rate for Miami Dade (which has pretty liberal firearm laws) is 123 over 4 years.

http://www.momlogic.com/2008/08/protect_yo...s_from_guns.php - gun accidents kill 500 children and teens a year (which, while tragic, is tiny compared to say swimming pools, and most of them could be prevented through better education. This number INCLUDES the 'I thought someone was breaking in, so I shot, and it turned out to be the babysitter'.

When I said NIH previously, I meant CDC. You can look these up yourself. I'm sure there's a digest somewhere, but when I looked, I just went to the website and spent twenty minutes wading through. If you include 'up to age 22', the number gets high, but that's including a lot of bad dudes who are using guns intentionally on each other in the commission of a crime, not just innocent little tykes. The Brady Group and VPC rarely mention this, but you can see it for yourself if you read the studies (which, like I said, are dry.)
)

Thanks, nezumi, I'll check those links out when I have time.

Wow, you're actually goign to read my links?

I may as well put some more up...

The CDC study is at:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/datawh/statab/unpubd/mortabs.htm
(Do make sure you check how they define ages. Some political groups include up to ~23 as being 'children'.)

ABC news did an article on active shooters, which echoes comments above:
http://www.wcpo.com/news/local/story/When-...QJR1NKbePA.cspx



Number of people saved by using a firearm in self defense:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ascii/hvfsdaft.txt

In each year, from 1987-1992, an estimated 82,000 people responded to crime by using a firearm in self defense (out of which 62,000 were in response to specifically violent crime, as opposed to defense of property), a total of 1% of all victims. Out of these, 20% suffered an injury, compared to 50% who suffered an injury when they didn't respond with violent force (this 50% includes people who tried to run away, talk their way out of trouble, or simply comply).

So at absolute minimum, during the time of this study, 30% of 62,000 people were saved from injury or death by having a firearm. That's approximately 20,000 people, per year. In addition to this, there are the (of course uncountabled) number of people who were never attacked at all because the would-be aggressor realized the victim might possibly be armed, and therefore never initiated the crime to begin with. We can only guess at this number, but studies have shown criminals are more likely to be dissuaded by the threat of defensive violence than by the possibility of arrest and jail time. A simple comparison of US home invasion rates to that of the UK gives a clear example of this.



CDC comments about gun control not reducing crime can be seen here:
Correct. The press release is here: http://www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media/pressrel/r031002.htm

The study is here:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5214a2.htm


Finally, this article I found to be one of the most powerful:
http://www.davekopel.com/2a/Foreign/gun-ba...nd-genocide.htm


For the record, about six years ago I started studying firearms due to my interest in Shadowrun. I come from a pretty socially progressive family. My mom wouldn't even permit me to have toy guns in the house. I was generally pro-gun-control, but more out of ignorance. I spent about a month studying the subject, and now I am fervently anti-gun control. I don't have a CCW, I don't think it's appropriate for me or my place in life, but I would feel more comfortable if I knew there were people around me who did.)

I know several solid folks from Glocktalk who live in and around DC. In all seriousness, if you ever want to set up a range trip or something, I can pass over some contact info. I'm sure they'd love to take ya, some time.

Now thats a powerful influence for a game! It has inspired me to have more situational awareness and general preparations for catastrophies.

That's funny. There are a lot of similarities in my background to yours. It's not exactly the same of course but there are similarities.

Well, I think this is a bit of an abstract way of putting it, but the reality is more nuanced. Many people in the military don't necessarily recieve extensive firearms training. I recently spoke with a young man who'd been in the US navy and he told me that his only training with firearms was firing a pistol and a shotgun during basic with someone screaming in his ear. (Didn't even fire a rifle.) His knowledge about firearms is far less than mine and more than likely his skill level too. I'm a civilian who participates in shooting sports once a month so I've shot a whole lot more than he has.

So you can't really say that military training necessarily means someone is going to be safe with a gun, and you can't really assume that a civilian has less skill or safety with a gun than a military person. In fact, you can't assume that if someone is a civilian that he or she doesn't in fact have great skill with firearms.

Which, of course, ruins the fallacy of "only police and law enforcement should have guns!" but don't go wrecking folks' fantasies, WR. Just let 'em be happy thinking uniforms and badges are the only folks professional enough to carry guns.

hehe cant help but share this but doesnt that really just show that maybe there is something to the army claiming the navy wears pink underware?

According to the United States Department of Justice, 38 percent of the assaults, and 60 percent of the rapes, in America happen during a home invasion. There are more than 8,000 home invasions a day in America. Fully one half of home invasions involve the intruder being armed. In 48 percent of home invasions, homeowners are hurt or killed. In 68 percent of home invasions, the invaders are complete strangers. 17 percent of home invasion victims are over age 60, whereas they only represent about 6 percent of overall crime victims.

Yeah. Numbers like these are way more rare than a school shooting, and definitely something to laugh about with smileys, huh? How silly to want to be armed against such a crime -- especially if one is a woman (60% of rapes) or elderly (who make up nearly 1/5 of home invasion targets), who are also coincidentally the ones most likely to need a firearm as an equalizer against the 50% of armed home invaders.

Tack on an eight to ten minute 911 response time, and you've got one hilarious scenario playing through your head, don't you?

8,000 home invasions a day would equal 2,920,000 home invasions a year. Sounds like a lot? It certainly would be, because for the last ten years the overall number of of violent crimes in the US was around two million and decreasing. And if fully half of those invaders would be armed, that would mean ~1.5 million crimes with firearms from home invasions alone, compared to 385,178 gun crimes IN TOTAL in 2007.

Sorry to tell you, but that statistic is obviously completely made up.




@Nezumi: To be protected from traffic accidents, every pedestrian would need an airbag. And why do you think it's called sudden cardiac death?
I'll also try to find a statistic on the relation between murderers and their victims...one of those things which you know to be true and have heard dozens of times but can't find it spelled out somewhere.

Thanks for the offer to shoot with the glock club, but I don't even own a handgun! Maybe I'll join up just to watch the fun, though.




I wasn't aware such a device existed, especially at a reasonable price and a realistic effectivity rating. If there is, please, send me a link, I'd be interested in it.



Irrelevant. I'm more likely to die from infection following the installation of the device than I am to die from a heart attack. I'm safety conscious, not stupid. I'm also a skazillion times more likely to see my house invaded or be the victim of a violent crime than I am to suffer from a heart attack in the next five years*.


*I remember reading this in a study somewhere. I'll have to get back to you on it, though.




I have never heard that before. I had heard that RAPE victims generally know their attacker, but, IMO, in that case, having the victim armed would sort of be a good thing (if only because when he or she says 'no, I don't want this', he or she has the artillery to back up that request. And while threatening an acquiantance with a firearm is a NOT good thing, getting raped is, in my estimation, worse.)

Try this:

LINK

It would be a gazillion times more likely to be reported, but that as little to do with the incidence: Deaths from sudden cardiac arrest: >300,000. By comparison, there are like 16,000 people murdered each year. And home invasions seem to be quite rare compared to other intrusions (although there few are statistics on the topic), which makes sense if you think about...if I needed money for my next shot, why would I assault an occupied house instead of breaking into the deserted one next door?

I cannot find the link to the study but there was one done that interviewed career criminals in jail & prison. The overwhelming response from criminals was that if they believed their target to be armed, over 70% of the time they chose another target EVEN WHEN THEY WERE ARMED THEMSELVES.

The most cited reason criminals gave was people that willingly carry are far more likely to know how to use it. It makes it too dangerous for the crook.

I've had two instances myself where someone who gave the appearance of intending mischief (mugging) upon seeing I was armed (was OC of my firearm), immediately decided to find somewhere to be.

Thing is, as we've slowly eliminated firearms from popular American culture, we've also eliminated the firearms safety training that always went with it. This training used to come from your own families. Moms & Dads teaching their sons & daughters how to use firearms. I learned from my grandfather. I've taught my children and any friends that asked.

That said, I'm against mandatory safety training. That makes no sense you say? Sure it does. Mandatory safety training would end up having to be an 'approved safety course'. Which means the government would regulate it. If regulated, then it can be made scarce by a ggun grabber government. And as we know, any right that requires you to beg your government for access to a resource to use that right means it's not a right. It's a privilege.

I believe that every firearm owner needs to have safety training. I've yet to hear of a method that can be implemented to achieve that WITHOUT infringing on the 2nd Amendment.

=====

BTW, for anyone in DC, you may want to swing by the OpenCarry.org forums and check the Virginia Forum. The folks in Northern VA hold 1-2 OCDO (Open Carry Dining Out) dinners each month. It's a great place to meet fellow gun owners in a public venue. You will also get to talk with them and find out some honest-to-goodness facts about firearm ownership and lawful use. You'll also find out that gun owners come from all walks of life, rich & poor, high-tech and low-tech.

If you do attend, ask to see if Phillip VanCleave is there. He's the President of VCDL (Virginia Citizen's Defense League). He's a great guy and spending 10+ minutes with him explaining rights and firearms will be a most enlightening experience.

One thing I'm seeing as a firearms owner is that many people are afraid of firearms out of ignorance, not out of malice. They only know the lopsided, biased view that the media gives them. I even converted an anti-firearms friend to one that likes me carrying even when visiting her house. When I explained the why behind me carrying along with the laws and legal aspects, she relaxed about it. It really blew her mind that the entire time she's known my wife & me, we've carried. She never knew or suspected. She changed her view of 'firearms are bad' to 'bad people with firearms are bad'... which is how it is.

A good person with a tool is okay. A bad person with a tool is not good.

The laws and legal code should be written to support that, not punish the good people with restrictions the bad people will ignore anyways.

(a) Not every home invasion is violent. (b) Not every armed criminal is armed with a firearm.

Nice straw men, though. Acting like I was saying something, when I was saying something else, to make it easier for you to shoot down? That's textbook.

The serious violent crimes included are rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and homicide.

Nice try, but unless your defintion of "home invasion" includes Jehova's Witnesses and the neighbour's cat stealing fish from a pond, the numbers will not become any more real (and complex number's won't save you, either).


Also thanks @pbangarth

No, my definition of "home invasion" means breaking into a home or dwelling with the intent to commit a crime, often while using, or threatening, violence upon the dwellers therein.

There's not automatically rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and homicide going on. That's why I said "not every home invasion is violent" in reply to your statistics. I'm not sure what your italicized sentence has to do with that, really. The fact that some home invasions are violent doesn't mean they all are, nor does it mean that none of them are.

Likewise, I'm not sure -- other than a media spin, maybe? -- you assume every armed criminal is armed with a gun...but the simple fact is I said "armed" and you said "gun!" in order to then argue against that many people having guns. That's not me sharing complex numbers, that's you making something up, putting words in my mouth, and then shooting it down. A textbook strawman, like I said.

I can't help but wonder why it is you're so inclined towards all these assumptions about firearms. First you assumed that law-abiding CCW holders are going to stalk a building like an action movie star and get into firefights with each other. Then you assumed that highly trained law enforcement officers are going to go all Red Samurai kill team and storm a building blasting everything that moves, instead of trying to disarm and arrest anyone. Now you're assuming that every armed criminal is armed with a gun... If nothing else, I find your obviously fear of firearms pretty fascinating. It's a shame that you're so scared of, and so willing to make such negative assumptions about, lifeless, inert, chunks of plastic and metal.

And -- hey! -- funny enough, but I still haven't had any takers on why areas with high levels of gun control (from major urban American cesspools like Detroit to strictly enforced gun-law countries like Great Britain and Australia) have such high violent crime statistics, anyways. They should all be outright utopias, without all those nasty law-abiding citizens having guns, right?

i'll take a crack at it, Critias: Because violent crime includes way more than gun crime.

It also includes crimes with a knife, with a pipe, with a tire iron. Or even with no weapons at all.

In the UK, there's still a fair number of crimes with guns, yes.

But more crimes involve knives and other implements.

I doubt anybody is really claiming gun control is a panacea. (Certainly, I won't.)

But it keeps assault or grievous bodily harm from becoming homicide.

(As a bonus, guns don't require much strength to use, and most guns in crimes are stolen guns. Choke off the supply, you reduce the number of people who can really commit a violent crime.)

Finally, allow me to laugh at both sides. Looking to crime statistics is a really bad idea, IMHO. In the US, the Uniform Crime Reports are easy to fake.)

You'd save more face if you simply admitted that this statistic, which has been floating through the net for ages, originated at /dev/random. Instead you are now trying to change defintions in the hope that the numbers might somehow fit when "home invasion" includes every petty burglary and trespassing salesman, plus a few strawman smokescreens. How stupid do you think the rest of the world is?


Following your logic, I could just say that my defintion of "areas with high levels of gun control" means only areas with low crime rates...but that would be really stupid, wouldn't it?


And who claimed gun control you create an Utopia, again?

Choke off the supply, and you even more dramatically reduce the number of people who have any chance whatsoever to defend themselves against a violent crime. If such people are just acceptable losses to you, we've got such a dramatically different view of the world, and of a human being's innate right to self defense, that I really don't see the point in continuing a conversation.

For instance? If you ask me, Australia's got the third worst rape statistics on the planet, and it's not because I think Australian men are innately brutal compared to those in other countries. It's because Australian women are fundamentally disarmed. The number of people being assaulted is pretty disgusting to me, too. Oh, and here's rape, again, comparing all us crazy gun-toting Americans to the peaceful, enlightened, gun-free countries.

I don't bring these up because I think they're funny, or amusing, or anything else. I bring it up to point out that lower gun crime after gun control is not the same thing as lower violent crime after gun control...and it just makes no sense to me, as an individual, to say "well, violent crime rates can be as high as they want, as long as we can brag about a low firearm death rate," or something similar.

Gun control obviously isn't working to reduce any crimes but the very, very, specific "death by firearm" category -- look at, again the murder rates right here in American cities with the strictest gun control, just to make it clear I'm not picking on people from other countries (it's just that that's how that web site was organized) -- but people keep insisting it makes sense. That just absolutely, fundamentally, doesn't make for a logic chain I can comprehend.


What definition am I changing, exactly? I'm seriously asking, because your last few posts have been -- while admirably confrontation -- just plain not making any sense at all to me. And I don't mean "not making any sense" in the "I don't understand how hoplophobic Europeans think," I mean it in the "I really don't understand what the fuck this guy is accusing me of, exactly, but wow he seems cranky" sort of way.

Point of example: I said half of home invaders are armed. You said "LOLOL there aren't that many gun crimes!" You're equating "armed" with "armed with a gun," which is quite simply not what I said. You're making assumptions, putting words in my mouth, and then shooting them down.

Point of example: I said lots of assaults and rapes happen during home invasions. You said "LOLOL there aren't that many assaults and rapes!" That a rape or assault can happen during a home invasion does not mean that a rape or assault must happen for something to count as a home invasion. You're making assumptions, putting words in my mouth, and then shooting them down.

Point of example: You asked me to define a home invasion, and I did so. Then, with no posts in between, you accused me of changing the definition. How can I change a definition that I only just now supplied? You're making assumptions, putting words in my mouth, and then shooting them down.

If all this making assumptions, putting words in my mouth, and then shooting them down doesn't count as a strawman, what the fuck does?


If you've got a different definition of home invasion, I'd love to hear it. Seriously. You seem to be really hung up on this "zomg he changed the definition of home invasion!" thing, so I'm genuinely curious as to how YOU'D define it, that's so very different from how I defined it. If you've got a better definition than the one I gave, I'm all ears. If you don't define it as breaking into an occupied home to steal stuff, and probably to hurt people or threaten to hurt people, please share it. Sincerely.

There's a possibility -- albeit a slim one -- we're just plain talking about two different things, here. If that's the case, I'd like to know before I just keep thinking you're crazy and spiteful.


That's not even a sentence, but I'll assume you meant something like "And who claimed gun control created a Utopia, again?" or something like that (hopefully I'm getting the sarcasm and hostility right)...and I'll respond with "Uhh, the folks that are for gun control, maybe? Because if they acknowledge it DOESN'T work, and reduce violent crime, what the fuck's the point supposed to be?"


Yeah, that one ain't a loaded question in the slightest. Next up, my wife will ask me if these jeans make her butt look big, and a cop will ask me how long I've been beating her. Sorry, buddy, but there's just no safe way to answer that question. The best I could come up with might be "Not any stupider than Americans, except on a few issues that are near and dear to me," and even that isn't gonna fly, I think.

Well, I quoted your definition of "home invasion"...so I obviously did not mean your pathetic attempt to redefine home invasion from "hot burglary" to "any illegal B&E"


Because this is what we have been doing in this thread all along, only when it doesn't fit your argumentation any longer you suddenly get into the technicalities and says "but I didn't talk about firearms explicitly!!". Sure...


I'll highlight it for you, so maybe you will get the point then:
The serious violent crimes included are rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and homicide.
Since every common definition of "home invasion" at as opposed to "burglary" means it is at least a robbery, home invasions will be a subset of this statistic.


I didn't ask you, I told you that your argument "but not all home invasions fit into the 'violent crime' category" was a fallacy unless you redefined "home invasion" in a way nobody uses that word. Obviously that gave you an idea and you thought you might just get away with it...let's just say it didn't work out.


Of course if a gun control proponent used such statistics to "prove" a that firearms cause crime (say, by pointing out that America has far more rapes per capita than all European countries and ignoring all potential causes except gun ownership) you would scream bloody murder because the approach would be too single-minded, the person prejudiced, the statistics uneraliable yadda yadda...

But when it fits your agenda, such methods are completely OK and gun ownership becomes the single determining factor in crime rates.


I will just stop this here, arguing about statistics with someone who switches standards and definitons at will is simply pointless.

I know I'm biased, but reading through, I can understand critias's statistics, but I haven't really seen very many supporting your posts.

Also:




I went ahead and looked it up. Dictionary.com specifically says: "burglary of a dwelling while the residents are at home " which would justify your response.

Dictionary.law.com has no definition.

Wikipedia says "Home invasion is the crime of entering a private and occupied dwelling, with the intent of committing a crime, often while threatening the resident of the dwelling. ... It can also apply if someone is invited into a home and remains on the premises after being asked to leave by the resident. ... Home invasion differs from burglary, which is usually defined as unlawful entry into any occupied or unoccupied building, with intent to commit one of a list of specified offenses. Home invasion covers an intent to commit any crime."

http://definitions.uslegal.com/h/home-invasion/ (US Legal Definitions) lists it as:
"Home invasion is generally an unauthorized and forceful entry into a dwelling. " i.e. - forceful trespassing into a home. It is home invasion whether the purpose is to steal, kill, rape, or just pee in your couch.

I would consider the last one the most definitive (it goes on to quote Michigan state law as an example even). In which case, home invasion does not necessarily include robbery or burglary. Looking solely for statistics on robbery may account for most cases (I really don't know), but it won't account for all.

Critias, I think we need to be careful about using these particular statistics. The rate by country can be greatly affected by the rate of reporting crimes. Many of the countries at the top of the list in the first link, for example, are ones in which there is effort put into encouraging victims to report. The last country in the list, Saudia Arabia, has laws that tend to criminalize the victim, punishing her with lashes because getting raped is her fault. I suspect rates of reporting are pretty low there. Without accounting for extraneous factors such as this, it is difficult to find a believable correlation for either viewpoint being expressed here.

Impotant part highlited for you: The commonly accepted definiton of a home invasion always includes the confrontation with the houseowner (that's why it's used to promote self-defense, the gun under your pillow does not excactly help against cat burglars).
A quick google search also turns out two PDFs dealing with the matter:
http://www.ocsar.sa.gov.au/docs/informatio...letins/IB11.pdf
http://dsp-psd.communication.gc.ca/Collect...7XIE2002002.pdf
Both follow this definition.


But hey, if you still insist that Critias' numbers are correct, we can extrapolate a bit from those:
- 2,920,000 home invasions a year
- "Fully one half of home invasions involve the intruder being armed"
- so there were 1,5 million home invasions with an armed intruder
- In 2008 there were 905,100 violent crimes (Rape/sexual assault, Robbery, Aggravated assault, Simple assault) where the offender was armed in any way.
- The DOJ statistics do not include armed perpetrators of nonviolent crime, and that statistic was supposed to be a DOJ one (although it is of course nowhere to be found...)

Conclusion: Home invasions make up more than 150% of all violent crime in the United States. Yep, sounds like a serious problem.