Armed robbery - Page 7

I don't really live in a gated community for safety reasons -- I live in one for luxury reasons. Here's the community website: http://www.lakeforestdallas.com/ If I lived in Taxachusetts, I likely wouldn't be able to afford to live in a luxury gated community in the first place -- the gubment would take too much away from my earnings, thus reducing my purchasing power in the marketplace, my freedom of choice, and my overall quality of life.

Aren't there states where you can purchase class 3 weapons if you go to the trouble of getting some sort of license that allows you to and buy them from a dealer that's allowed to sell them? This is simply untrue. Accidental deaths account for only 2% of gunshot deaths. That's an  acceptable number in my opinion. Over 50% of all households in the U.S. admit to having firearms (Nelson et al, 1987). 866 deaths isn't all that bad when you think about it.   It didn't give a break-down of how the injuries occured, whether by accident or some other means. Given the number of firearm homicides, i'm sure there's a lot of crime related injuries in that 200k. I'm also pretty sure most of the accidental ones would have been preventable if the owners had been a bit more responsible. Personally, I think people should be required to take a firearms safety course when they purchase a gun. You'd think most of what they teach is common sense, but lots of ppl are dumb. So there really aren't a lot of little kids getting shot cause mommy and daddy leave loaded guns lying around. That leaves intentional shootings, "big kids", and people that should know better. Hey if kids wanna screw around with guns and shoot each other, knowing perfectly well how dangerous they are, call me unsympathetic, but that's natural selection for you. I'm not sure i agree. Canada doesn't have nearly as much violent crime as the US. Most people here don't have guns in their homes (or handguns at least). You can't go to gun shows and buy handguns, and i haven't ever heard of people carrying for protection. However, every criminal i've ever met that's wanted a gun, has one. If i really wanted a handgun I could go buy one tomorrow. Criminals get their hands on guns no matter what laws you pass. Even if there was a total ban on all guns, they'd just import them in the same way they import drugs. Knowing that criminals can get guns with ease and despite the accidental gunshot statistics, i'd still rather have one cause it means I'm in control if the worst happens. Beyond that it's up to me to keep them locked-down and out the reach of kids.

Navy, for what it is worth I think that you did the right thing. anybody faced with a shotgun should do what he is told. that said, I am sure that you feel like a shmuck, and that that feeling won't go away too fast. but nobody was killed or hurt. what would your life look like if you had pulled out a knife and your girlfriend had been shot and you had kept your wallet and lived through it? and frankly, I'm not sure how happy you would really be if you killed the guys, either. my feeling about guns is that they require a large commitment - I spent several years of my life working with guns (long story, but in a life long ago and far away I was a recon soldier) and I don't have one in my house now. I am really not convinced that you are safer with a gun in the house than not. I don't think that anybody I know who has a gun is well enough trained in using them. What I do have is a huge canister of tear gas in the bed room, by the front door and in the car, and I chose to live in a very safe area at the cost of several other factors. I would rather make it a very good idea for everybody to get out of my house than kill some silly assed buglar or take the risk that my son will one day choose to show my gun to his friends and I'll come home to find them dead.

Thanks for the common sense. That is actually a very good idea. GQgeek, I hope that your words about natural selection don't come back to bite you when you have kids of your own.

I live in a pretty safe area as well, but would rather be in a situation to deal with a problem in the remote chance it occurred rather than either a) wait for the police, or b) hope an intruder didn't hurt my family.

[quote=LA Guy,28 Sep. 2004, 4:22] LA Guy, juvenile here is just trying to act a toughie. We were all juvs, remember?

Actually, I'm not trying to act tough. I assume we're talking about my natural selection comment... Frankly, i truely believe what i said. I can agree that it would probably suck for the parents if their kids ended up shooting each other, but really, they shoudl have raised them so be a bit smarter or they should have locked their guns away. Let me ask you, do you think natural seleciton doesn't exist in the modern world? Is my comment really that out of place? The facts are that kids know guns kill people. Why then would any teen point a gun at someone else and pull the trigger? Remember, we're not talking about pre-teens that really don't know any better. There were only TWO such incidents in the whole of the US in 1998. We're talking about teenage kids that know how guns work, what they're used for and how to pull the trigger. Being a kid that spent summers at his gun-happy uncle's house, i can tell you a story. My cousin once dared me to take a pellet gun, stick it to my head and pull the trigger. The gun was unloaded, or so he said, but i still said "fuck that im' not sticking a gun to my head, you idiot." It's this little thing in the back of my head called that's interested in self-preservation that says "what if?" Now we're not talking about pellet guns, we're talking about real guns. Again, why anyone that knows what guns are for would point them at themselves or someone else is beyond me. I'm sure i'll take flak for this, but these kids are too stupid to know better. People go easy on them because they're kids and blame the parents for leaving guns lying around, but the fact of the matter is, they're idiots. Getting back to natural selection. Like it or not, it's still at work within our population, although in more sublte ways than in the classical examples used in biology textbooks. This is obvious because as humans, the likelihood of any one of us successfully reproducing isn't dependant on whether we can blend in with the foliage present in our habitat so as to avoid detection by predators, or the length of our beaks so that we can more easily get to food that others can't. The factors at work are much more complex and extremely difficult to study directly. I think this guns example works pretty well though. This is pure conjecture on my part, but i wouldn't be the least bit surprised if these kids that kill themselves and their friends in these accidents were of below average intelligence. They most definitely lacked that part of your brain that prevents you from doing stupid things like pointing guns at your head and pulling the trigger. You know there's actually a good, pulitzer prize winning book, called "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies." It's not really about guns, but more about tryiing to explain the divergance of human development on different continents. It's a great read, and in one chapter the author goes on to describe what he sees as above average intelligence in a rural tribe in new guinea. He frames his observations within the theory of natural selection, postulating (and i'm simplifying) that because the #1 cause of death for males of a reproducing age was murder, only the smartest and most cunning survived long enough to reproduce and that after hundreds of years of this, the result was as smarter population. This murderous history dated back hundreds of years and so the time period was long enough to actually have a noticeable effect. By contrast, natural selection was less of a factor in London, where population density caused other problems such as the plague, which killed indiscriminantly. It's quite a fascinating read. I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in history. The author is actually an evolutionary biologist and not a historian.

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Or maybe the "biological" characteristic that is being selected against is the parents' inclination to have guns in the house. BTW, why don't you just use the tear gas suggestion? Seems like it would work just as well.

Tear gas doesn't make people cry; people make people cry.

I like that. Vero, I don;t believe that *you* just made up a great new slogan for the anti-gun lobby. That, and coming up with a reasonably coherent form of objectivism all my your lonesome. You must be some type of savant. Or some wierd oracle or something.

...i don't get that sense at all. anyway, re. tear gas, it's a totally different animal from a gun. not that it's better or worse for home security, it just carries a different set of benefits and hazards. and some of the hazards could prove just as fatal as a gun, when used in the wrong hands. /andrew

I would rather not mess around with the potential uncertainity of tear gas or weapons of that type, its not like you have practice runs to see how it spreads, you could end up incapacitating yourself and not the attackers. I would rather take my chances with home defense given my inherent advantages, 1) better knowledge of the surroundings, 2) the element of surprise 3) most likely superior firepower.

not to be an argumentative newbie here, but pretty much unless you lock a person in a room full of teargas, it is almost impossible to kill a healthy person with it. on the other hand, a room full of tear gas will make almost anybody change their plans. a gun is about killing - if you touch a gun, you need to be ready to kill, or be killed. and if you have one around long enough, there is a good chance somebody will be dead. guns make killing very very easy. my basic idea is simple - if I fire tear gas at somebody, both he and I will be in some pain for a period of time, and then we will get better. I need to think if I am willing to take the pain, but I don't have to think for second if I am willing to kill him. on the other hand, I can solve the problem and all of us get to go home to our loved ones, eventually. if I draw a knife, or a gun, then there is a good chance that I will leave somebody dead, and a good chance that I will get killed in the process. that is playing for keeps.

As I mentioned before, there are too many uncertanities for me in that equation. What if he isn't affected by the tear gas as much as I am, and can fire a weapon? What if he got slightly affected, gets pissed, and decides to set fire to my house? What if my kids have an allergic reaction to it? What if he didn't even have a gun, but a knife or a metal bar, or whatever, and it was an situation I could easily remedy at gunpoint?