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| Re: "Tonight, it's been a year; he killed the others here..." by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 01/09/2012, 9:20am PST | ||||
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Horrible Gelatinous Blob wrote: No, but having an accessible weapon can provide serious, potentially permanent deterral to those who are. Sometimes just brandishing a gun is enough to scare off a thief, as the title character does in the first Dirty Harry movie, where the punks try to rob Harry of the ransom he's transporting, and pointing his .357 at them is enough to make the punks run. For the most part, they're not interested in publicity or even survival. Their only concern is hurting as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Once they're out of people to kill in the immediate area, they almost always kill themselves. Arming the populace isn't going to do anything against a mindset like that. Oh, it isn't? You see some crazy pull out a gun and start shooting. He gets one, maybe two people before you and several others put a bullet in him and take him out. End result: he kills two people instead of seven. Tragic, but a reduced tragedy. Mass murderers have no escape plan. They don't negotiate or bargain. It's nearly impossible to predict anything about them, except that their only goal is to kill as many people as they can. Once that goal is achieved, nothing else matters. And with normal, armed people trained to shoot properly, that number can be substantially reduced. I mentioned the incident in Israel where a crazed man tried to shoot up a neighborhood and got nowhere because several armed citizens shot him and prevented substantial injury to others. If one really, really wants a certain individual dead badly enough, given enough time one can make it happen WITHOUT EXCEPTION. As John Malkovich pointed out in In the Line of Fire if someone is willing to give their life to do so and they're patient they can take out the President of the United States. Against anyone else it's trivially easy. Don't confuse the ability to take the life of another with the ability to protect one's own life against potential threats, real or imagined. There are a number of excellent arguments for gun ownership -- the intent of the Second Amendment paramount among them -- but "protection against criminals" is not one of them. Wrong. While you can't stop a crazed killer who gives no advance warning - the incident in Tucson and President Reagan's attempted assasination are obvious examples - you can stop most minor crimes; we probably never hear of tens or hundreds of thousands of times someone brandishing a weapon scared off a potential criminal, either because it didn't make the news - a news outlet with an anti-gun agenda is going to spike (deliberately not report) stories of reports how a homeowner simply pointing a gun at an intruder scared them off - or because it was never reported to the police. In all of these cases, it is the mere presence of the weapon and someone willing to use it, that stops a crime without a single shot being fired. Someone once said, how long do you think you'd resist being robbed if you had a sign on your lawn that said, "This house is a gun-free zone" or otherwise publicly indicated you don't have any weapons? If anything, it might encourage someone to rob you. I saw a news report how a man tried to rob a barber shop in Detroit, and one of the patrons, a concealed-carry permit holder, who was packing, raised his gun from under the sheet and shot the robber dead. In Florida a few years back, there was a rash of robberies of tourists. This happened because Florida instituted a "shall issue" concealed carry permit scheme, where if you were a resident and had no convictions for felonies you could get a permit to legally carry a gun concealed in public and the police are required to issue it. (That's where the phrase "shall issue" comes from; in places where the police have discretion it's "may issue" and where they almost always wouldn't, it was "shall not issue" as it used to be in Chicago and Washington, D.C.) Anyway, since now virtually any resident of Florida who wasn't a felon could be carrying concealed, criminals switched to tourists, which they recognized by the license plates on their cars either being out of state or being rental car plates (most states have an issuing system for vehicles for rental because the registration taxes are lower in exchange for paying the sales tax on the rental; Virgina uses "RA" plus one letter and 3 digits, Washington DC used "R" and a 5-digit number, Maryland used a stacked "DR" with a 5-digit number; other states had other codes). Once this series of incidents occurred, most states put rental cars back in the same sequence as ordinary vehicle plates to prevent criminals from targeting tourists. During the Rodney King Riots in Los Angeles, some stores were completely untouched while others - even ones known to be owned by negroes - were busted into and looted. What kept the special ones safe? Well, I suppose the store owner, standing on the roof of his store with a rifle or shotgun pointed toward anyone who approached it, might have had something to do with it. Looters went after softer targets; these stores were left alone. The U.S. Embassy in some African country which had collapsed - I think it was Somalia - had a problem with passers-by who shot at them. So they instituted a system to curb these anti-social acts. Anyone who so much as pointed a gun at the embassy was shot and killed. After a few of these, the shootings stopped. In fact, people who were fighting in the area and had to pass by the embassy would unsling their weapon, then carry it with both hands above their heads to show they were not attempting to use them on the Embassy, then would re-sling their weapon once they had left the area in order to resume shooting at each other. As long as the person did not make an attempt to aim it at the embassy or fire it, they were allowed to pass unmolested. The mere fear of being shot at made these people behave. Don't try to claim that having guns - or sometimes just the possibility that the victim might be armed - does not provide protection against criminals. Real evidence proves beyond a shadow of a doubt and to an absolute certainty that it does. |
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"Tonight, it's been a year; he killed the others here..." by 01/08/2012, 5:49pm PST  You're comparing apples to olives. Israel is an openly religious society, of by 01/08/2012, 6:26pm PST Re: You're comparing apples to olives. Israel is an openly religious society, of by 01/09/2012, 8:39am PST New York has a higher crime rate than Vermont?!??!?!!?!?!?!?!?!? NT by 01/08/2012, 7:19pm PST Re: "Tonight, it's been a year; he killed the others here..." by 01/08/2012, 11:22pm PST Re: "Tonight, it's been a year; he killed the others here..." by 01/09/2012, 9:20am PST Re: "Tonight, it's been a year; he killed the others here..." by 01/09/2012, 9:58am PST |
