Good.
Make those elitist corporate executives feel uncomfortable. Make those billionaires fear you. Make those MAGA dipshits who don’t believe in your personal choices should be allowed, make them be scared of you.
Make the conservatives who constantly vote against your interests and want to erase you and your culture because it makes their magic sky wizard angry, make them all fear you.
They won’t stop unless you deter them with promises of violence, which is what the fucking point of being armed is supposed to do.
If these fascists dont have fear in the consequences of their decisions or actions, they will continue to erode your rights.
They won’t fucking stop, get it through your scared pacifist head that you need to buy a gun yesterday and carry it proudly at every protest.
You think billionaires are going to care if you have a gun or not?
Spoiler but if they cared you wouldn’t have the right to a gun anymore.
I dunno, dude. After Luigi killed that one healthcare executive, more and more people with money are tugging their own collars from how easy it is to track, pursue, and execute a billionaire in broad daylight. Im assuming you live under a rock and/or sheltered. Love your user name, btw
also the CEO of blackstone was assassinated and they are trying to make it seem like he got the wrong people going after the NFL. The lobby labeled what was on what floors, and which elevators to use. Guy didn’t wander aimlessly, he went straight to blackstone, killed the people that got in his way, killed the ceo, then himself. Sure, looks like he had a problem with the NFL, but this was an assassination targeting the ceo.
His name is Shane Devon Tamura.
Maybe the people who should be afraid of concealed handguns are the criminals who might be shot by them. That’s the whole point. Defensive gun usage statistics are sparse whether due to people being scared to report what may be seen as a crime on their part, or it not being a tracked statistic in their jurisdiction.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulhsieh/2018/04/30/that-time-the-cdc-asked-about-defensive-gun-uses/
Unless you are in a position where you are aware something worth defending yourself with a gun is happening, and you have enough time to access that gun, and ready yourself, you will likely not get to use it to defend yourself. In fact, if someone, willing to do a stick-up, notices something that tips them off to you having a gun, you become a more desirable target, guns are expensive, and easy to fence. They will have their gun drawn before you really notice they are there, then it is very unlikely trying to defend yourself will do anything but get you shot.
You’d think that, and then a guy pulls a knife on you and your GF in a walmart parking lot. You have ample time to get to your belt, in fact you have so much time that when you touch the grip you can give him the “you sure?” look without even pulling it, and he can go “sure not” and turn and walk away to rob someone else. Happened to me, went in and bought my bread instead of whatever that guy had in mind.
Just because sometimes you’re in a Kobayashi Maru and phasers won’t help doesn’t mean you never need phasers or that they never help.
This conversation is not that it NEVER happens, it is addressing why the stats where someone defends themselves with a gun are so low. In practice, defending yourself from armed thieves just gets you killed, or badly injured, the vast majority of the time. If that person had a gun, was standing out initial grabbing distance, and you hadn’t pulled your gun yet, you going to touch that grip would have likely just gotten you shot, and left bleeding in that parking lot, as the person ran off.
Debatable. Define “low” and define what we’re counting as defensive use of a firearm.
The lowest estimate for Defensive Gun Use (hereafter referred to as DGU) we have is 100k/yr, done by Harvard and only using verifiable police reports where the defender killed the attacker. That entirely discounts situations like mine, in which the attacker was scared off by the mere presence of a firearm without a shot being fired. 100k/yr is still more than our gun deaths/yr, so if that’s “low” then our gun deaths incl homicide, accidents, and suicide are too. And even if it is low, I bet the individuals in question are happy to have had it when they did need it and could use it.
The other commonly cited estimate is by Gary Kleck and John Lott, and used to be on the CDC’s website (not sure if still is, but it can be found.) They estimated between 500k and 3mil DGU/yr, and includes situations like mine. Whether or not you want to discount them, the numbers are still higher than I’d call “low.”
Of course drawing from the drop is bad practice, nobody advises it, but you positioning it as a guarantee is clearly not the case at least 100k times/yr. In real reality, defensive gun use happens all the time.
Daniel Webster SC.D.; Jens Ludwig Ph.D. 2000 is a paper just dismantling the methodology, and data, behind the Kleck-Lott study. There are, apparently, a lot of studies picking this one apart, but this is the one I was familiar with before this. Basically they manufactured their results to get the conclusion they wanted. Even the best studies acknowledge from suffering from things like the telescoping effect, significantly. With Kleck and Lott, they often make arguments even their own study refutes, but they are hoping most people never actually read it, especially people who have training on reading academic papers. This article has a pretty good, bullet point style, break down of how they report what their study says vs what it says, and some of the underlying issues of it, and other studies of it’s type. Here is a paper discussing how this data is collected, confirmed, and reported, and why things like the National Crime Victimization Survey, always come up so much lower (recently mid 80k range). Basically a study on methodology in this line of research.
The Harvard number you cite comes from studies that estimate 60-120k DGU’s per year. They also caution that going to the higher end requires some very loose interpretation, and inclusion, of data. Their research leads them to the conclusion that MOST reported DGU’s stem from escalating fights, from arguments, between two people, and not from someone targeted to be a victim, like a robbery, etc., defending themselves. The majority of DGU’s in home held weapons are used to intimidate family, and close friends, rather than third party assailants, and the defenses here are super varied, and often make the person reporting the DGU is the criminal actor. Here is what Harvard has to say about the subject.
Again no matter which you choose to go by, it’s hard for me to call it “low.” I suppose to a point that’s subjective, but even your lowest number, 60k, is on par with our total gun deaths/yr including accidents, homicides, and suicides. So, if it’s low than that’s low too.
You gloss over the context of where most of that number comes from. It doesn’t come defending yourself against some third party who has targeted you for some form of victimization. It comes from people reporting how they used their gun to intimidate someone who they were arguing with, as defending themselves with a gun. Mostly people close to them. Which normal people don’t actually consider a valid reason to say they defended themselves from crime.
That’s why it’s concealed. The robber doesn’t know who has a gun, unless they’re banned, then they’re safe.
You might be surprised how often it is easy to tell someone has a concealed gun, if you know what you are looking for.
Yeah. With lengthy observation that is NOT going to happen with a robbery. This isn’t a heist movie.
This just leads to people bringing weapons with them when they commit crimes as they may also need to defend themselves.
To be fair though if you live in a high crime area there might not be a good answer for how to protect yourself.
And this is the problem. There isn’t a good answer for the victim, at the time. You are unlikely to be in a position to effectively defend yourself, even if you have a gun. The better concealed the gun is, the longer it takes to pull, and the better the response time with the pull, the more likely the thief is to know you have it and act on that knowledge.
This is why anyone not bullshitting you tells you to do the thing that is least likely to get you killed, and that is just peacefully hand over the stuff, and let them go, then call the cops, and let them do nothing. The real way to reduce crime is to fix systemic ills.
It doesn’t even take lengthy observation most of the time. Most people are bad at concealing that they have a gun, especially in a way where moving doesn’t make it obvious. There is also the issue that the better something is concealed the slower it is to pull, and more obvious it is you are trying to access it.
I used the Forbes article specifically because most will be from what you will call biased sources, but it’s an issue where both sides have their own narrative and looking at the data that one side has while discounting the other will get you lies.
I know that you’re more likely to shoot friends or family with a defensive home gun then any home invaders.
Because you’re millions of times more likely to be interacting with family and friends than get broken into. One’s a daily occurrence. Also a lot of studies which claim gun ownership is more dangerous to gun owners are deliberately using suicides as part of their numbers.
I don’t think you can suicide your friends and family.
I was referring to another common talking point in the same vein which shows deception.
You might know your own mental state enough to know you won’t shoot yourself but thats a bold claim to make for family members that live with you as well. I’d rather not take the risk.
This is accurate, and I used to make it a key part of my own decision-making, until I thought about how bad the - statistically - average American is, at almost everything. I hope I don’t need to cite references.
Ultimately it is, and should largely remain, a personal choice, and I’ll note that there are no statistics for the number of (thoughtful) people who believe they should own a gun, and come to realize they were wrong, before disaster. I’ve known several of these, among many gun owners, known no disasters.
Gun ownership isn’t for everyone. The broad truth of this statistic is important for each individual to know, but not a great rule of thumb for each individual to base an important decision on, if that makes sense.
Good. An armed society is a polite society. Guns are the great equaliser. Larger and stronger people aren’t free to assault smaller and weaker people as they wish. There are societies like Singapore and China where crime is punished so severely that people don’t need personal protection. Sadly, today, that’s not how most of the West is run.
There is – as far as I’m aware – no good data to suggest any of this is true. The severity of punishment has no correlative link let alone causative link to crime rate. As for “politeness” I don’t even know how to tackle this, I know Japan and Canada are considered “polite” by public opinion and both have stricter gun regulation than US. And as for the great equalizer claim while I can see that theoretically it could be an equalizer of force that would only be the case if the “weak” were as likely to have a gun as the “strong”. If we simply compare women to men – since women are often physically weaker than men – we see the gun ownership rates skew heavily towards men. So if anything in that context not only is it not equalizing it is further dividing the gap between the weak and the strong in this context.
Polite isn’t the same as fear. Also both your catchphrases are right wing NRA bullshit propaganda which isn’t remotely true.
If the government won’t protect citizens they have the right to protect themselves.
I’m not American and I don’t care how much you like or dislike the NRA. Your comment sounds like authoritarian bootlicking.
When has the government failed to protect your or family members? Dont you think those would be the exception rather than the rule? If you are gearing up for the revolution I can’t blame you but I doubt you need to protect yourself in that way unless its from animals or you are a drug dealer.
Not OP but I was the victim of years of abuse in school. So many time I was viciously attacked and no one cared. They would follow me home and attack me and my family or steal our things. Reported it all, no one cared.
One day while preparing to go home, I was attacked and one of my bullies began choking me. I thought I was going to die and gripped his neck too. He nearly died. Government blamed me for it and I was expelled pending institutional psychiatric examination.
Another time I was told by someone at college “don’t go to graduation”. He hadn’t been all-there for a while by then so I erred on the side of caution. Took it to local and provincial police, to national police, to the school… No one took it seriously. Had to ping an old friend who worked in intelligence to get someone to take me seriously.
When he finally got raided: thousands of rounds of ammo, body armor, explosives, manifesto, etc… Everything he needed but the guns, but he was working on that too.
Two very serious times the government failed to defend me or other people in my life and I had to take it into my own hands.
Why would they treat him so differently than you? Thats extremely unfair. At least you didnt need a gun to fix that problem though.
True, but how long until that happens too? So far I’ve navigated these things with intelligence and the will to live, but I know better than to think that will always be enough. I’m ~40 and I’ve got kids, I’m not a young man with nothing to lose anymore.
When has the government failed to protect your or family members?
Just so I’m clear, you think I’m not allowed to care about others? I’m not even allowed to care about my own safety until my family has been attacked? Wild take. I’m glad society isn’t comprised of people like you. I care about others as well as my family. Most people aren’t murdered and raped and assaulted each year. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about murder and rape and assault.
Private gun ownership is an answer to a systemic failure, so yes I’m asking for concrete examples of when that system failed. Is your argument that guns prevent rape, murder and assault generally?
Guns don’t create a more polite society, they create a more fearful society.
