Not WLS related but what is wrong with this thinking?

NNicholas
on 10/26/09 3:14 pm, edited 10/26/09 3:19 pm - Oxford, MI
     Nowhere in the post did I make any remark calling for the Wild Wild West, which was far more peaceful than our modern big cities, by the way. The image of all those shoot outs was greatly exaggerated by Hollywood. In reality, darn few really happened and only one duel, where two guys faced themselves down in the street was ever documented. It didn't happen because If you pulled a gun, five hundred other guys in town had guns strapped to their side. By the way Dirty Harry was a Cop! A cop with balls.

    Do you know the number one source of those stolen guns in America? The FBI. A statistical fact. Number two is the US Army. The military and the police of this country lose more guns than the rest of the population combined. Most of the guns the ATF is asked to trace by Mexico, it turns out, came from the US Government. Public safety has never been a concern of anti gun groups. Power and control is.

     The reason that most gun murders involve a shooter who knows his/her victim, and they know them better than anyone else I suspect, is that the national gun shooting statistics lump all gun deaths together. The vast majority of the gun deaths are suicides, usually terminal people, who go out an buy a gun and kill themselves to spare their families the cost and pains of watching them die slowly. That is why anti gun people can claim that, "Statically you have a better chance of getting killed by your own gun, with in a week of buying it...." In the countries and cities with the most stringent gun control, the violence is the highest. Think of this fact, no one ever goes postal in a police department and shoots 30 people. It isn't hard to figure out why that won't work. I did read that some guy, last year, was stupid enough to try a armed robbery of a gun shop while it was full of customers. The coroner took him out of the store with dozens of bullets in him, provided by the off duty cops and other customers in the store. No one has since tried that stunt, and I suspect it will be a while before some idiot does.

      Shooting someone is not usually necessary to deter a criminal. Often just the fear of being shot will make a person reconsider a criminal action. Being 100% sure that there is no chance of getting killed offers little deterrent. Someone may not own a gun, but if the criminal does not know that for sure he has to take a personal risk to commit his crime. If he knows that a person has no means of defense, then only the victim is forced to take personal risk.

     Consider this, if your life is threatened who do people call? The man with a gun. (Police) There are over 300 million people in the US. At any given instant, statistics from the US government say that as few as 30,000 police are free to respond to a call nation wide. The skeptic would ask" how do they determine that?" The answer is if you know how many cops there are, which we can get, and then determine how many minutes out of an shift a cops is free to answer calls, with the same fancy math used to get football stats you get this stat.  Now ,that is to say that at this very moment as you are reading this, only as few as 30,000 cops in the whole country are not busy with other calls, not busy doing desk work, not tied up investigating crimes and would be able to respond at this very second. Putting your odds of being rescued, without even factoring in the percentage of those that would or wouldn't actually be local enough to respond in time, at less than 30,000/300,000,000 or less than 0.01% or less than 10,000 to 1 against you . Would you have gone through with WLS if those were the odds? The only thing that works in our favor is that most criminals just are not good enough at math to calculate the odds or we would all have to pack 24/7.   
  
    So given that these incredible odds were beaten, the cops that didn't respond threw a 1 in 10,000 chance that one of these persons might have been saved. Now was my point when I posted this! You just don't throw away a 1 in 10,000 winning lottery ticket that involves human life. 
 "I refuse to measure success in pounds lost, but rather in life gained!"
Nick
Gene S.
on 10/26/09 11:43 pm - Fort Worth, TX
Responding to your various points:

*The "lottery ticket" analogy is flawed, proven by the news story itself.  The deputies witnessed the attack and failed to do their duty to apprehend the perpetrators.  The only way that the victims' theoretical gun ownership would have helped is if (a) they happened to be armed at the time (b) were able to react quickly enough to bring their weapons to bear and (c) the exchange didn't turn into a shootout with collateral damage.  Is it possible they could have defended themselves successfully?  Yes.  But those isolated, violent incidents between strangers are relatively rare and don't justify mass private arms escalation and the side effects that come from that.  And frankly, the 200 million guns (or so) already in circulation are plenty.

*If I call the police, it is not because they have guns.  It is because they are the local, trained, legitimate public safety entity who can deal with the problem better than me.  Yes, they have guns, but what they have that really matters is that they have authority

*I need a reference for the FBI-supplying-the-majority-of-weapons-to-criminals assertion.  I'm having a real hard time accepting that claim at face value.

*Your belief that gun ownership deters crime is overstated, because you assume that violent criminals are rational creatures in the first place.  Whether they are drunk, on drugs, desperate, or just plain nuts, many are just not thinking like you and me when they decide to carjack someone.  If the possibility of a long prison stretch doesn't deter them, I doubt the idea that their victim is armed will make much difference to them.  And for those few dedicated rational violent criminals, I can see an escalation of firepower -- where they feel the need to step up their own weaponry to counter expected resistance. 

*I am not anti-gun and don't belong to any anti-gun groups.  As I said, I enjoy shooting from time to time, have hunted, and support the current gun laws, perhaps with a few tweaks.  I have no problem with someone using a gun to defend their persons and home.  I don't own a gun any more, but have no problem with those who do.  That said, deregulation of firearms would be a gigantic mistake.  I don't want to live in a society where I'm always looking over my shoulder.

*"Power and control" is an issue -- for the NRA.  The NRA's constant fearmongering ("Arm yourselves against the imminent Socialist takeover!") is getting old.  Their answer is always "more guns!"  They have little interest in the root causes of crime -- desperation, mental illness, and addiction -- and even less interest in helping folks with those problems.  Even though I have an interest in hunting and shooting, the political agenda and methods of the NRA will keep me from ever joining their ranks.  Our nation's independent spirit is not held together by weaponry -- it is forged out of common beliefs, values, and principles.  That is the power of America.
The WLS patient formerly known as Slobberinbear.            
NNicholas
on 10/27/09 12:51 am, edited 10/27/09 1:11 am - Oxford, MI
     Now my lottery analogy is right on. The odds were beaten when not one but two cops were there on the scene to witness the crime. I was showing, through rough statistics just how rare this is. Authority is only as good as the ability to enforce it. In a violent armed situation such as this, the authority was useless. This was my point of the post! I was not planning to try to start a gun debate. Nowhere did I state that the people, if armed, would have saved their own lives. They may have, but we will never know now. What we do know is that these cops didn't even try! Want to know the source of the FBI gun loss claim, the ATF! Nothing stops all crimes, but I can assure you, that just the sound of a 12 gauge pump being racked can put terror in the hearts of even a drug crazed junkie.
     By the way, once, my 9mm pointed at a attempted car jacker's head did indeed send him and his homies running!  I could have pulled the trigger, but why? Once he started to run the crime was stopped. At the time car jackings in the city were becomming an every day thing. They dropped of to darn near none right after an eighty-six year old grandmother was slelected as the intended victim of a car jacker. She reacted to the attempted car jacker by pulling a 357 out of her purse and blowing him away. Now I would call that detered, even if he was a crazed druged up addict.
     And, just so you know, I am an NRA firearm instructor who has taught tactical firearms classes to cops. One of the Detroit cops I was talking, with just last week while filling in for a fellow instructors class, expressed to me the hopelessness of trying to be there for every one who needs help. He expressed that in many inner city neighborhoods having a gun is essential, but hel also noted that  gun crime has indeed gone way down since Michigan enacted the "Must issue law" and the "Castle Doctrine". Laws that I originally opposed, out of my concern that the training, required in the laws, seemed to me to be inadequate. 
     Good people, law obeying folk, with guns have never been a problem or anything to fear. Bad people, law breaking criminals, with guns, are another story, and they don't intend to obey a law that says that they should not have a gun. Why would they, they become criminals by breaking laws not obeying them.Far more people are killed by cars each year than guns, by your logic we should look over our shoulders and fear every car on the road. 
      The NRA did not start the claim that tyranny can only be kept in check by an armed society. The founding fathers did. They believed so strongly that our common benefits, values and principles had to be backed up by the possible threat of force that they made it the second article of the bill of rights, right behind the right to Life, Liberty, and Property. The supreme court has already affirmed this.
     The funny thing is that my intro to firearm classes always use to have at least one "reformed anti gun person", as they would discribe themselves, in each class. These are people who changed their mind about gun control once they had the chance to inspect a loaded gun, from the barrel end, up close and personal.
     Now if I had a dollar for every , "I like to shoot", " And I have hunted" from people who have no gun education and have in reality never held a gun in their life I would be retired in the tropics right now. OK, I will bite, what guns do you own, makes and models? Just name one and give me the first 5 digits of the serial number! I can look up whether the series was ever issued in a flash for most firearms.
 "I refuse to measure success in pounds lost, but rather in life gained!"
Nick
Gene S.
on 10/27/09 2:45 am - Fort Worth, TX
Nick, as I said, I don't own a gun any more.  Over the last twenty years I had a Taurus .44 special revolver and a .44 S&W (Python?  Anaconda?  It was a snake of some kind) at two different times.  I've never owned a longarm but have been dove hunting with a 12- and 20-gauge.  I also have shot skeet with a 12-gauge and some target shooting with a .22 rifle.  That's about it.  I don't claim to be a skilled shooter, but I have familiarity with basic small arms and can load, operate, and clean them. 

I agree with you that training is important and admire your dedication to it.  If I owned a gun and shot more regularly I would seek out a qualified instructor.  But I'm not going to let fear dictate my life, and I don't need a gun to feel secure, and I resent the NRA for amping up the fear and paranoia.

I have no issue with the Second Amendment.  But you can't tell me the government doesn't have a legitimate public safety interest in moderating the sale and ownership of firearms.  The Supreme Court has affirmed this, too.

I know that your heart is in the right place, Nick.  I know you feel that you are defending your rights and helping other people protect themselves. I'm sure you sleep well at night and I don't begrudge that.  But you can't tell me that the current gun laws are somehow increasing the victimization of the innocent -- or that increased gun availability wouldn't have a slew of other side effects.

And that's why I responded to your post in the first place.  The article you quoted stands for the proposition that somehow our moderate gun control laws caused the death of the victims; arm yourself, citizens, because the cops won't protect you.  I find that line of reasoning ridiculous.  I know that wasn't YOUR point -- you were pointing out the flaws of the deputies involved, and I completely agree with you on that and hope the deputies (if found in dereliction of their duty) are punished for their cowardice and/or incompetence.
The WLS patient formerly known as Slobberinbear.            
NNicholas
on 10/27/09 4:40 am - Oxford, MI

Gene, 
     I am sorry, after reading my last reply I realize that it was a bit snippy. It is not excuse, bit events on another forum have be a bit edgy today. I will not debate that the author of the article, which brought this story to my attention was a little over the top in his correlation of this to gun regulation. I see this as he missed the big picture and that is of the appearance of a failure of the police to do their job. I did not include his entire article because even in my eyes it has some serious flaws and offers a week argument. That said, some current local and state gun laws do put the general public in danger. The cities and states with the most restrictive gun controls have always had the most gun violence. Cops can't be everywhere and when only the crooks have guns, the crooks have the odds in their favor. Check out that just this week, London England, where all private ownership of guns were banned almost 20 years ago, has just announced that it's Bobbies will now carry Uzis to keep pace with the upwardly spiraling gun violence in London. Today, London has the highest percentage of hot home invasion rates, (where the criminal knowingly breaks into a home when the resident is at home), of any other city in the world because the crooks have no fear of home owner self defense.

 "I refuse to measure success in pounds lost, but rather in life gained!"
Nick
Gene S.
on 10/27/09 4:50 am - Fort Worth, TX
I'm on that other forum too, and I agree. I didn't see the stuff about Mike until after I posted my last reply. 

I've been to London twice and noticed a lack of a police presence.  When I mentioned that to a local man (thinking to myself "Hey, this must be a safe city!"), he informed me that the lack of police was a big issue for Londoners.  So your "lottery ticket" would be even more rare in London, it seems.
The WLS patient formerly known as Slobberinbear.            
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