I can think of three serial killers in my own city who broke into people’s homes to rape and murder them in my lifetime. Here’s my take: if someone breaks into my house to steal my TV, they value that TV over their own life. I have a perfectly good car to steal from in the driveway if they want a low risk option.
And how much people died because they had firearms at home in your city during your lifetime? Buying a weapon to protect your family is like bathing them in Roundup to protect them from dengue fever. Dengue is a real danger, but less so than a Roundup bath…
It’s not as if the alternative were “a gun or no protection.” If you’re afraid of dengue fever, you buy a mosquito net: it’s just as effective, if not more so, and less dangerous. If you’re afraid of serial killers, you install proper locks and an alarm system. You don’t expose your family to a real danger to protect them from a possible one; that’s absurd.
Never looked into the numbers, but probably a lot. In my ideal world, there would be no guns in anyone’s houses. But there are, and someone breaking into a house in to steal a TV knows that.
You’re right, it’s not a movie, so stop assuming you can see what happened, or that the perp was a logical actor. This is one big reason gun nuts won’t fucking listen to people like you: you assume perfect rationality on behalf of the perpetrator in any refutation you can cook up. You assume that because the guy is there for a TV that that’s all he would do; that he is a rational actor with needs and goals that he will achieve and leave. You do the exact same thing right wingers do: You put your ideals into your assumptions without actually trying to understand the parties involved. It just so happens that right wingers are obsessed with sexual violence for some reason.
99% of the time this is what happens: The perpetrator breaks in to steal something of value. They’re already dealing with panic, anxiety, fear, already rooted in the material conditions that push them to resort to robbery for survival. They realize someone else is in the home. Those same material conditions force a choice on an already compromised actor: fight or flight. There is no “Well, I’m caught, time to apologize and walk away.” There is “I NEED THIS. I’M HERE BECAUSE I NEED THIS. I NEED THIS AND THIS PERSON IS IN THE WAY OF THAT.” This isn’t a value judgement: Anyone who has anxiety and has had a breakdown because of it knows this feeling.
But that feeling on an already compromised person results in 2 outcomes, always: Fight or flight. No robber in the history of humanity has decided anything other than “I need to run away” or “I need to retaliate.” Now, knowing that, switch to the victim. You know the robber is going to either fight or flee. But you, too, are a compromised actor. You, too, have a fight or flight response. And the bitch is, you won’t have the wherewithal to put together the flight response unless you’ve already done drills. Even then, that’s assuming it’s just you; If you decide to flee, are you going to have time to gather other people in the home to make that same choice? Are they going to make that same choice? Are they even going to execute that same choice competently? No. Both parties in this scenario, whether by US culture, poverty, desperation, or panic, are predisposed to choosing fight. How that plays out is down to just the tools available.
I explicitly said “put your life and your loved ones in security”, I never said “discuss ethics with the guy who broke your door”…
If you have the money and the time to buy a firearm and train to learn how to actually use it, you have time and money to prepare yourself and your family without being lethal. American culture is fucked up.
OK, I’ll bite. I am in an apartment. I have a gun. I live on the 4th floor. There is exactly 1 door in and out. My apartment is in thirds: The front door leads directly into a living area that stretches all the way back to the only door to the porch. I am in the master bedroom with a window out to the porch. My kid has their room on the other side of the living space, with a window to just outside. So, big shot, what would you want us to do? My son puts out the trash at night and forgets to lock the door, we go to sleep, and then someone comes in. Do I jump out my window onto the balcony, then jump from the 4th floor? Does my son just jump from the 4th floor? Or let’s wipe the kid from it entirely; let’s say I forget to lock my door. Shit happens. So, again, do I jump from the 4th floor, breaking at least my legs, or can you admit that the money and the time means absolutely nothing? Because the training was accrued since I was a child, and the gun itself was a Christmas present when I moved out here all alone from my paranoid but loving boomer parents. You just don’t like guns, and for as much as you’re willing to bitch about american culture being fucked up, you’d rather blame somebody for the death rather than the very american culture you claim to oppose. It is fucked up out here. That’s not anons fault, nor is the death of the perp.
You go in a closed room, like your bathroom. Or you install locks in all bedrooms. And you call the cops without making noises. And boom, you have no more TV but nobody’s dead.
Or even better: you sell the gun and use the money to buy a lock that prevents entry without the key, plus a system that automatically pushes the door shut. With the money left over, you buy an alarm. Your home is easy to secure. And everybody would be in a far more secure place than a open thing with a gun. Your gun is far more dangerous for your family than the burglars…
Locks on interior doors are for privacy NOT security. As so many Europeans have rightly pointed out US houses are made from cardboard and popsicle sticks. A locked bedroom door will hold for maybe 3 kicks. Which isn’t even enough time to call the police let alone wait for them to arrive.
That’s of the penetrator wants to kill you. If they just want to commit burglary, they won’t shoot until they feel threatened. Someone who locks themselves isn’t a threat. The idea is not to be protected by the door, but not to escalate the situation. That will put your family in security far more than playing a discount John McClane.
False. While it is true that the majority of burglaries occur in the afternoon, one in four takes place between 2 and 4 a.m. It may be a minority, but one-quarter is not insignificant.
(These numbers are for France, but it should be equivalent in the US)
I would question the veracity of that statistic. I would agree that a quarter of recorded robberies might occur at night, but it would seem many or most of those cases are people either:
Going into homes at night that they know to be empty.
Breaking into homes for purposes of rape/murder, but committing robbery while they’re there.
They do think that the homes are empty for a part; others think they’re stealthy.
As for the rest, no. People breaking into homes to kill or rape strangers are far rarer than you seem to think. In France, and again I have no reason to believe the situation is very different in the United States, more than 80% of rape victims knew their attacker. These are not typically people who break into homes at night. Of the remaining 20%, only a fraction involve home invasions.
At worst, that amounts to a few thousand cases per year in the United States, and probably fewer than the number of firearm-related intrafamilial homicides (which also number a few thousand, but are at least slightly more common than rapes committed during home invasions) and vastly fewer than firearm suicides.
Owning a firearm does not statistically make you safer, on the contrary. If you have enough money to buy a weapon, buy a security system and an alarm instead. They will be far more effective and much less risky.
Sorry. But if someone is breaking into my home at night, I have no means to judge their intent. As far as I’m concerned, you forfeit your right to life when you choose to break into someone else’s home. You’re right on the relative riskiness of gun ownership, but that’s irrelevant to this conversation. We’re talking about incidents of shootings of home invaders, not whether it’s a good idea to own a firearm in general.
I’m sorry, but I have no problem with home intruders being shot dead. If you have so little concern for the safety and well-being of others that you would put their lives at risk in such a brazen way, you deserve whatever consequences you receive. It’s instant karma.
He is. We’re not in a movie.
I can think of three serial killers in my own city who broke into people’s homes to rape and murder them in my lifetime. Here’s my take: if someone breaks into my house to steal my TV, they value that TV over their own life. I have a perfectly good car to steal from in the driveway if they want a low risk option.
And how much people died because they had firearms at home in your city during your lifetime? Buying a weapon to protect your family is like bathing them in Roundup to protect them from dengue fever. Dengue is a real danger, but less so than a Roundup bath…
It’s not as if the alternative were “a gun or no protection.” If you’re afraid of dengue fever, you buy a mosquito net: it’s just as effective, if not more so, and less dangerous. If you’re afraid of serial killers, you install proper locks and an alarm system. You don’t expose your family to a real danger to protect them from a possible one; that’s absurd.
Never looked into the numbers, but probably a lot. In my ideal world, there would be no guns in anyone’s houses. But there are, and someone breaking into a house in to steal a TV knows that.
That would be an understandable argument if there wasn’t alternatives. There are.
You’re right, it’s not a movie, so stop assuming you can see what happened, or that the perp was a logical actor. This is one big reason gun nuts won’t fucking listen to people like you: you assume perfect rationality on behalf of the perpetrator in any refutation you can cook up. You assume that because the guy is there for a TV that that’s all he would do; that he is a rational actor with needs and goals that he will achieve and leave. You do the exact same thing right wingers do: You put your ideals into your assumptions without actually trying to understand the parties involved. It just so happens that right wingers are obsessed with sexual violence for some reason.
99% of the time this is what happens: The perpetrator breaks in to steal something of value. They’re already dealing with panic, anxiety, fear, already rooted in the material conditions that push them to resort to robbery for survival. They realize someone else is in the home. Those same material conditions force a choice on an already compromised actor: fight or flight. There is no “Well, I’m caught, time to apologize and walk away.” There is “I NEED THIS. I’M HERE BECAUSE I NEED THIS. I NEED THIS AND THIS PERSON IS IN THE WAY OF THAT.” This isn’t a value judgement: Anyone who has anxiety and has had a breakdown because of it knows this feeling.
But that feeling on an already compromised person results in 2 outcomes, always: Fight or flight. No robber in the history of humanity has decided anything other than “I need to run away” or “I need to retaliate.” Now, knowing that, switch to the victim. You know the robber is going to either fight or flee. But you, too, are a compromised actor. You, too, have a fight or flight response. And the bitch is, you won’t have the wherewithal to put together the flight response unless you’ve already done drills. Even then, that’s assuming it’s just you; If you decide to flee, are you going to have time to gather other people in the home to make that same choice? Are they going to make that same choice? Are they even going to execute that same choice competently? No. Both parties in this scenario, whether by US culture, poverty, desperation, or panic, are predisposed to choosing fight. How that plays out is down to just the tools available.
I explicitly said “put your life and your loved ones in security”, I never said “discuss ethics with the guy who broke your door”…
If you have the money and the time to buy a firearm and train to learn how to actually use it, you have time and money to prepare yourself and your family without being lethal. American culture is fucked up.
OK, I’ll bite. I am in an apartment. I have a gun. I live on the 4th floor. There is exactly 1 door in and out. My apartment is in thirds: The front door leads directly into a living area that stretches all the way back to the only door to the porch. I am in the master bedroom with a window out to the porch. My kid has their room on the other side of the living space, with a window to just outside. So, big shot, what would you want us to do? My son puts out the trash at night and forgets to lock the door, we go to sleep, and then someone comes in. Do I jump out my window onto the balcony, then jump from the 4th floor? Does my son just jump from the 4th floor? Or let’s wipe the kid from it entirely; let’s say I forget to lock my door. Shit happens. So, again, do I jump from the 4th floor, breaking at least my legs, or can you admit that the money and the time means absolutely nothing? Because the training was accrued since I was a child, and the gun itself was a Christmas present when I moved out here all alone from my paranoid but loving boomer parents. You just don’t like guns, and for as much as you’re willing to bitch about american culture being fucked up, you’d rather blame somebody for the death rather than the very american culture you claim to oppose. It is fucked up out here. That’s not anons fault, nor is the death of the perp.
You go in a closed room, like your bathroom. Or you install locks in all bedrooms. And you call the cops without making noises. And boom, you have no more TV but nobody’s dead.
Or even better: you sell the gun and use the money to buy a lock that prevents entry without the key, plus a system that automatically pushes the door shut. With the money left over, you buy an alarm. Your home is easy to secure. And everybody would be in a far more secure place than a open thing with a gun. Your gun is far more dangerous for your family than the burglars…
Locks on interior doors are for privacy NOT security. As so many Europeans have rightly pointed out US houses are made from cardboard and popsicle sticks. A locked bedroom door will hold for maybe 3 kicks. Which isn’t even enough time to call the police let alone wait for them to arrive.
That’s of the penetrator wants to kill you. If they just want to commit burglary, they won’t shoot until they feel threatened. Someone who locks themselves isn’t a threat. The idea is not to be protected by the door, but not to escalate the situation. That will put your family in security far more than playing a discount John McClane.
You don’t break into homes at night to rob them. Robbers break in during the day. Rapists and murderers break in at night.
False. While it is true that the majority of burglaries occur in the afternoon, one in four takes place between 2 and 4 a.m. It may be a minority, but one-quarter is not insignificant.
(These numbers are for France, but it should be equivalent in the US)
I would question the veracity of that statistic. I would agree that a quarter of recorded robberies might occur at night, but it would seem many or most of those cases are people either:
They do think that the homes are empty for a part; others think they’re stealthy.
As for the rest, no. People breaking into homes to kill or rape strangers are far rarer than you seem to think. In France, and again I have no reason to believe the situation is very different in the United States, more than 80% of rape victims knew their attacker. These are not typically people who break into homes at night. Of the remaining 20%, only a fraction involve home invasions.
At worst, that amounts to a few thousand cases per year in the United States, and probably fewer than the number of firearm-related intrafamilial homicides (which also number a few thousand, but are at least slightly more common than rapes committed during home invasions) and vastly fewer than firearm suicides.
Owning a firearm does not statistically make you safer, on the contrary. If you have enough money to buy a weapon, buy a security system and an alarm instead. They will be far more effective and much less risky.
Sorry. But if someone is breaking into my home at night, I have no means to judge their intent. As far as I’m concerned, you forfeit your right to life when you choose to break into someone else’s home. You’re right on the relative riskiness of gun ownership, but that’s irrelevant to this conversation. We’re talking about incidents of shootings of home invaders, not whether it’s a good idea to own a firearm in general.
I’m sorry, but I have no problem with home intruders being shot dead. If you have so little concern for the safety and well-being of others that you would put their lives at risk in such a brazen way, you deserve whatever consequences you receive. It’s instant karma.