As a real life example, when i was a wee one , we had visitor in the middle of the night .
He decides to try to gain access thru a bedroom window .
Lucky for him the windows were locked, as my father was on the other side of the window locked and loaded waiting.
My father was a nice guy and never hurt anyone, but i have no doubt that with 3 sleeping children and a wife in the house, he would have killed that dude dead as hell if got thru the window.
The police were a good 20 minutes if not much more away.
Of course i was a child and dind’t know anything at the time, he only shared that story after i was an adult.
I’ve seen this message from supposed normies on FB. School shootings didn’t happen when we were kids. Something must have changed (can’t ever be easier access to guns). No, it’s because people are angry and messed up in the head, which is somehow Biden’s fault.
Yet another perverse incentive positive feedback loop works like a charm for Republicans:
Make every day life more dangerous for the constituents by flooding the country with guns
The base gets more scared, blames democrats
The base buys more guns, making things more dangerous, making them yet more scared, etc.
Is that story supposed to make me think it’s a good thing your father had a gun? Because it did the exact opposite. If the window hadn’t been locked he would have murdered a petty thief looking to commit a crime of opportunity. Your whole family would have been scarred for life by that event.
There’s also just way more people. There’s 45 to 50 million more people in the US than there was in 2000. Just having way more people would drive up the number of violent crimes per day, and that’s before accounting for all the other factors.
How do you know the intruder wasn’t trying to kidnap one of the kids?
I don’t own a gun. But it’s ludicrous to argue that you’re better off without a gun so that you don’t shoot someone trying to break into a house with small children inside, in the middle of the night, through a bedroom window.
No, they feel it in their bones. Something has changed. People are more angry and deranged now. And they’re pretty sure democrats are responsible, even if they aren’t sure exactly how yet.
I understand. I’m just saying there are many, many factors that are leading people to the incorrect conclusions they feel in their bones. There are really obvious and boring explanations for why it “feels” like more of X is happening. One of the blandest and most overlooked is that there is more of almost everything happening because there are more people. And it’s never been easier to hear about things. If you click on one mass shooting story on the internet, algorithms will start trying to yell you about every mass shooting.
That isn’t the real argument though. The real argument is that the stats are conclusive and if a person is buying a gun to fend off a hypothetical Bad Guy breaking into their house, that person is far more likely to accidentally kill an innocent person.
if this is actually serious, it’s because statistics say that the intruder wasn’t likely to even be armed let alone trying to kidnap someone… something like 65% of burglaries are committed by people the victims personally know. and something like 60+% are unarmed.
it’s like saying how do you know the person you just passed isn’t a serial killer… you dont “know” that, but it’s a fairly safe assumption…
plus like mosdef said, you are more likely to hurt an innocent or be hurt yourself than you are to live out your action movie fanfic
People never think about the practicality of using a gun in home defense.
You hear some noise from downstairs that wakes you out of a dead sleep. You process the situation, groggily open the closet to your gun safe, try to remember the combination, enter it and open the safe. Then you remember that you keep the ammo separate because your wife heard that you’re supposed to do it that way from their gun-crazy neighbor. You grope your way through the darknees and find a clip in the cigar box inside the shoe box in the shoe caddy. You insert the clip but can’t see if the safety is on or not. You push the button next to the trigger but can’t tell that put the safety on or switched it off. The footsteps get louder and you say fuck it, jump out of the closet and run to the living room. A thin silhouette is ten feet in front of you and you pull the trigger.
How confident are you that you just shot the person entering your home? Was there someone entering at all or was it your teenage son? Did the gun fire at all or did you accidentally switch the safety on instead of off? Hell, consider it a miracle that after all your fumbling that the person was still there in the first place.
It’s insane to me that people basically buy guns almost hoping for the day they get to shoot somebody in their home so they can justify the purchase to the people around them and ultimately to themselves after the fact.
Somebody who was a genuine threat probably wasn’t going to be thwarted by a locked window. Could it have been some highly improbable, worst case scenario? Sure. But far more likely it was some teenager looking to snatch a VCR.
Almost all of the gun arguments for personal protection rely on extremely unlikely edge cases where the worst possible thing happens and the gun owner reacts perfectly.
Sure they are. That’s the main takeaway from this story! I love, LOVE, that’s this guy’s Big Family Gun Story, handed down from generation to generation, is a story where the gun was of no value at all!!! Any sensible person would look at this and say, hey, Dad endangered us day after day year after year keeping a loaded gun in the house so that, one Fateful Day, he could count on it to do fuck all when the Bad Guy was easily thwarted by a locked window.