Is that Mike Hammers wife?

Did you know that police officers have NO responsibility to protect you and your life? You are responsible for your own protection and for your own life.

I carry because I REFUSE to become a statistic!

I also agree with you about guns, sorry I wasn’t clear. And I definitely agree about their “taste” crimes!!! Yicks!

Jill

I’d think that the level of training varies greatly from location to location. Regardless of the effectiveness of particular training programs the reasoning is still sound.

I agree with you on that, but not in this case. As much as I hate to defend Disney (their crimes against music and good taste are countless), I think they’re in the right here.

While I generally agree with your other points, I think the training cops receive in hand-to-hand is so lacking, it really shouldn’t be called “training.”

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Gyges and others made many rational arguments on why not to bring your gun to work except on that once a year special day, “bring your son’s and daughter’s gun to work day”. However I have real sympathy with the statement above. Our govt. was founded on the principle of protecting the individual from the state (many exceptions based on race, class, gender etc.).

I think there’s a reason to be concerned about private entities’ power over individuals. It seems reasonable to tackle this problem as a society.

Nowhere on that page does the 99.99% statistic come up. As a matter of fact nowhere does it mention how many times a gun was actually fired. The closest it comes is to say that in 91.7% of the time the attacker was not “wounded or killed” which would include shots fired and missed as well as shots fired as warning. If you’re going to use statistics to back up your argument, you might want to read them first.

Actually, I did you one better then looking at that web-page and did something that you obviously didn’t I read through the meta-study sited by your website. It turns out your website over simplifies things. A large portion of the report is spent criticizing the methods of the studies it compliles. It also points out that “results pertaining to the details of DGU incidents are based on 213 or fewer sample cases, and readers should treat these results with appropriate caution.” Meaning that your statistics are at very best suspect.

As for your argument about “not pointing” reeks of the old “I’m not touching you,” game that kids everywhere play. Lets not play games with something as important as gun safety. You know and I know that “brandishing” a hand-gun means unholstering it. Where are you going to point the gun then? The ground?

Further more assuming your logic is impeccable, there’s no decrease in violence, just a transferal.

Simply brandishing it is enough to make even the worst of the thugs decide to find an unarmed victim instead of taking on a handgun.

http://www.pulpless.com/gunclock/noframedex.html

Defense stats.

At the risk of posting too much, I have to amend my earlier argument, with one much more basic.

Even if “99.9% of the time that a civilian uses a firearm for personal defense it is not fired,” the first rule of gun safety is: Never point a gun at something that you’re not 100% willing to see destroyed. A Gun is not meant to be a bluff, a gun is meant to send a hunk of metal (or several depending on the gun type) into whatever you point it at. Period.

I’m a skeptic, where’d you get that statistic? If you’re going to use specific numbers, please be able to back them up. Otherwise say “In my experience,” or “It’s widely held that…” If you just make numbers up people might be tempted to think you’re full of it.

You’re also working under the assumption that everyone with a gun would practice gun safety and that nothing goes wrong during the use of the gun. I’m working under the assumption that introducing a very dangerous element to an already bad situation is going to make it worse.

Also, just so you know, I’ve got 2 rifles (which are in a safe, with the ammo somewhere completely different). Which I use on a fairly regular basis (I hunt, and practice shooting so that I can have as clean a kill as possible every time). I’m firmly in support of the right of American’s to own guns. I have since way before I hunted. I’m also aware that people are stupid and guns are dangerous.

Simply seeing the victim is armed is enough for even hard core thugs to decide their life is more important than taking a shot in the abdomen and they move on to the next unarmed victim.

As far as gun free zones; some must unbelievably believe that thugs check their guns at the door when they see such a sign………

So you’re advocating shooting into a group of people containing not only people committing a crime, but the victim and someone trying to stop the crime? Even assuming the security guard is an expert marksman, bullets don’t stop after hitting somebody they keep going. Also at a close range there’s a good chance that the criminal can get to you before you can shoot at them. That’s why police officers are trained in hand to hand combat and don’t just rely on their side arms.

“In Minnesota a gang of six beat up a young father in an amusement park parking lot after he tried to stop them from groping his 12 year old daughter.”
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Who knows how much fun we could have had if everyone in the altercation was armed? We could have gone from battery right on into homicide or maybe murder. (Dodge City was terribly unrated!) Now that would have been real amusement for the onlookers assuming they weren’t shot first. Call the cops; they’re at the scene in minutes and the do come armed.

Needless to say this amusement park is a “gun free zone” so neither the father nor a single bystander were able to stop the carnage by displaying a weapon capable of sending a message of “stop this now” to the gang.

Even the security guards were unarmed.

A firearm is the great equalizer making the weak as strong as those that would prey on them.