I own a gun!

[Drudgewire]

But I guess some people just prefer to live under the watchful eye of the nanny state, than to face the risks associated with living in a truly free society. These include people abusing those rights. But punishing everyone for the crimes of individuals is never just, regardless of how emotionally worked up and fearful you allow yourself to become.

This sums up how silly it is. Over and over I hear "I would never want to live in a society where so many people have guns."

We're all living in the right countries then, because I couldn't stomach living in a place so mamby-pamby about them.

 

[Phrost]

This sums up how silly it is. Over and over I hear "I would never want to live in a society where so many people have guns."

We're all living in the right countries then, because I couldn't stomach living in a place so mamby-pamby about them.

Jokes aside, that's really sad. It's shameful that any modern, supposedly educated society allows such emotional, irrational nonsense to actually influence policy.

We're not much better over here, but at least it's not as knee-jerk when it comes to firearms.

 

[Euromutt]

I don't think that assumption is valid.

A single adult is often the family breadwinner and leaves the house for work while the children are at school. A stay at home housewife is more likely than a single mom to be at home while the kids are in school. Seem to me that single parents are more likely to be burgled because their houses are more likely to be unoccupied.

The house being unoccupied would also happen with single people and dinkies. So how come it's specifically one-adult families that seem to be affected?

 

[Kestrel]

The house being unoccupied would also happen with single people and dinkies. So how come it's specifically one-adult families that seem to be affected?

Perhaps because the numbers for the dual income no kids people are combined with the retired couples that don't leave the house on a regular basis. On average over the two groups, the house is more likely to be unoccupied. As for single people, who knows. It really isn't on topic for this discussion.

The real point is that there is nothing in this data to support your theory that single mom's houses are being burgled while they are at home.

 

[Piggy]

There just doesn't seem to a value on life anymore. Someone goes into to commit a burglary, encounters someone, and decides "no witnesses" is a better solution than a couple of years in jail. Of course drugs play a role in this.

I don't know if it's either, actually.

I've sniffed around, and -- this is pure opinion -- there seems to be a cultural/fad aspect to it.

Never underestimate the power of social inertia.

It's all anecdotal, but I've read cops from several US cities saying that incidents that 10 years ago would have ended in a stand-off or a fist-fight are now going straight to gunplay or knife-fights.

Somebody disses you, you feel you gotta defend your honor, and you attack them.

I don't know that there's any logic to it.

It's kind of like how you get one spree shooting, you know you're going to get more. And that's not anecdotal, btw.

Even highly publicized suicides are followed by a statistically significant uptick in, not just suicides, but suicide by that particular means.

And that makes it even scarier, the illogic of it all.

 

[RenaissanceBiker]

There just doesn't seem to a value on life anymore.

It's so abundant.

 

[Rolfe]

Aaaagggghhhhh!! Drudgewire's changed his avatar!

I'm desolate!

Rolfe.

 

[MikeMangum]

Maybe not. But these situations are vanshingly rare to find in news reports in Britain. To imply that they're actually very common (and that that is because householders are unlikely to be armed) is simply unsustainable.

If it's not in the Daily Mail, it didn't happen, right?

Maybe criminals breaking down the door while someone is home is common in the USA, but not round here.

You have it backwards. From a 2004 article in the Telegraph about the Monckton killing:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3613417/An-Englishmans-home-is-his-dungeon.html

But the trouble is that this kind of burglary - the kind most likely to go "wrong" - is now the norm in Britain. In America, it's called a "hot" burglary - a burglary that takes place when the homeowners are present - or a "home invasion", which is a much more accurate term. Just over 10 per cent of US burglaries are "hot" burglaries, and in my part of the world it's statistically insignificant: there is virtually zero chance of a New Hampshire home being broken into while the family are present. But in England and Wales it's more than 50 per cent and climbing. Which is hardly surprising given the police's petty, well-publicised pursuit of those citizens who have the impertinence to resist criminals.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=69193

A "hot burglary" occurs when the bad guy enters a home knowing it is occupied. The hot burglary rate in the United States is about 10 percent, while the hot burglary rate in the UK – which banned handguns in 1997 – is around 50 percent.

You want to know where there's essentially a zero rate of home invasions? Rural Texas. When I lived there decades ago, you could legally shoot someone who entered your property. Not your house, your property, assuming it was posted with "No Trespassing" signs on the fence. If it was land that had crops growing on it, you didn't even have to post signs on your fence. Almost every house had at least one firearm, and usually at least one each of shotgun and rifle. Most farmers had rock salt shells for their shotguns to chase off kids.

I was curious, so I looked up the Texas code to see if the laws had changed since I was a kid:

http://www.texaspolicecentral.com/2007_-_2008_Penal_Code.pdf

Sec.9.411 Protection of One's Own Property.

(a) A person in lawful possession of land or tangible, movable property is justified in using force against another when and to the degree the actor reasonably believes the force is immediately necessary to prevent or terminate the other's trespass on the land or unlawful interference with the property.

 

[Euromutt]

The real point is that there is nothing in this data to support your theory that single mom's houses are being burgled while they are at home.

That's fair enough; I brought it up because it was consistent, not because it was decisive evidence.

But even though I do accept that my interpretation is not necessarily right, I don't accept it's necessarily wrong either, especially if the best you can do for a counter-explanation is say "who knows" and quickly change the subject.

 

[Drudgewire]

Aaaagggghhhhh!! Drudgewire's changed his avatar!

I'm desolate!

Rolfe.

It's still a kitty.

 

[Kestrel]

I found a Briefing Note on Burglary from the UK home office that indicates force was used to gain entry in most residential burglaries.

In most burglaries where entry is gained, the offender
uses some form of force.The BCS estimates that:

door locks were forced in a fifth of incidents (20%);
door panels were broken in just over a tenth (12%);
a window lock was forced in 14%;and
a window pane was broken in 10%.

But it seems the force was against doors and windows, not people. I suspect the same is true in the US.

The paper does note that some burglars gain entry by false pretenses and/or pushing past the person opening the door. But this is nowhere near the 40% to 50% numbers that have been claimed. If you dig around on the web, all such claims seem to go back to Gary Kleck. At least those that bother mentioning a source.

Perhaps Gary Kleck mistook "gained entry by force" as indicating that force was used against the occupants rather than the building.

 

[Euromutt]

If you dig around on the web, all such claims seem to go back to Gary Kleck. At least those that bother mentioning a source.

That's probably because Point Blank is from 1991, and the USDoJ and BCS statistics Kleck used were never published online.

Perhaps Gary Kleck mistook "gained entry by force" as indicating that force was used against the occupants rather than the building.

No mistake. Kleck's comparison was of "hot" burglaries, i.e. residential burglaries that took place while the occupants were home. As I said earlier, a "hot" burglary and a "home invasion" are not (correctly used) synonymous, because a "home invasion" implies that the intruder intended, or was highly prepared, to inflict harm upon the occupants, whereas a "hot" burglar may only be after material goods and does not seek contact with the occupants. (I.e. all "home invasions" are "hot" burglaries, but only some "hot" burglaries are "home invasions.")

The point being that American burglars generally seek to avoid confrontation with the occupants to the extent that they won't hit a house when there's someone home. A lot of western European burglars, by contrast, are apparently not deterred by the possibility of the occupants being in the dwelling, even though they don't intend to enter the same room as the occupants. E.g. they're quite happy to clean out the ground floor while the family is upstairs.

 

[TX50]

Is there any training on how to kill an animal humanely and safely with a gun? I do know that with horses the intuitive place to shoot simply breaks the poor beast's jaw and doesn't touch its brain. And even if you aim right, the skull is hard enough that there is a real risk of a fatal ricochet hitting a bystander.

I've never actually held a gun in my life, but they give vets this theoretical training anyway.

Rolfe.

UK police firearms officers get that training too (or at least my old man did
when he was a Scottish police firearms officer). He got called out quite a few
times to kill glaikit stirks. He said that often the farmer had tried to kill the
animal with a shotgun - this being the only firearms generally available to
them - but had succeeded in doing nothing more than enraging it even more
(and making a bloody mess of it). I remember he had diagrams showing the
proper shot placement for all sorts of beasts in a little book in the rifle case.

 

[TX50]

[...] This is why I feel safe leaving my wife home alone.

Practising at the table is also great if they get attacked while at dinner.

 

[ServiceSoon]

Could you provide a reference for that? I find that "over 40%" figure rather implausible on the face of it.

Rolfe.

Here is some information that isn't provided by Gary but rather the US Department of Justice-Deborah Lamm Weisel.

"In the United States, most residential burglaries-about 60% of reported offenses-occur in the daytime, when houses are unoccupied.11 This proportion reflects a marked change in recent decades: in 1961, about 16% of residential burglaries occured in the daytime; by 1995, the proportion of daytime burglaries had risen to 40%.12 This change is attrubuted to the increase in women working outside the home during those decades-leaving houses vacant for much of the day. Thus, burglaries are often disproportionately concentrated on weekdays. The temporal pattern varies in Britian-about 56% of burglaries occur when it is dark. 13


Click for source on page 4.

Endnote 11 says FBI 2000.
Endnote 12 says Rengert and Wasilchick 2000.
Endnote 13 says Budd 1999.

 

[Rolfe]

A possible counter to that is that common occurrences are not newsworthy. England & Wales combined have one of the highest residential burglary rates of countries surveyed in the ICVS, and if the percentage of "hot" (but non-"home invasion") burglaries were that high, they ought to be fairly common. Just like the papers don't report every car crash, they might not bother with "hot" burglaries unless someone was seriously hurt.

Don't be daft. If that sort of thing was common, and I mean so common it isn't in the local papers that are despearate for material to fill their pages and will practically write a leader on a cat stuck up a tree, then we'd know about them.

There's been one major burglary round here this year. Big house in or near Carlops was done over. While everyone was out. The talk in the village hall was of how much spying must have been done to figure out when both the occupants and the neighbours would all be absent. That was enough to get quite a few people including me) resolving to be more careful about locking doors and setting burglar alarms.

And as I said, there's the constant problem with the little old ladies being distracted by bogus callers.

Give me a bit of credit for knowing what's going on outside my own door.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

UK police firearms officers get that training too (or at least my old man did when he was a Scottish police firearms officer). He got called out quite a few times to kill glaikit stirks. He said that often the farmer had tried to kill the animal with a shotgun - this being the only firearms generally available to them - but had succeeded in doing nothing more than enraging it even more (and making a bloody mess of it). I remember he had diagrams showing the proper shot placement for all sorts of beasts in a little book in the rifle case.

Well done those cops. I think SSPCA officers get similar training - or at least some of them.

Rolfe.

 

[Drudgewire]

So you know Rolfe, the new av grew old on me quick. I'm going back to the other one when I get to the computer it's on tomorrow.

 

[Euromutt]

There's been one major burglary round here this year. Big house in or near Carlops was done over. While everyone was out. The talk in the village hall was of how much spying must have been done to figure out when both the occupants and the neighbours would all be absent. That was enough to get quite a few people including me) resolving to be more careful about locking doors and setting burglar alarms.

I had to look up where that was. Peeblesshire, yes? Thing is, the burglary rate in Scotland is way lower than in England & Wales, and they are treated as separate entities in the crime statistics. Of the 30 countries surveyed in the 2004/2005 ICVS, England & Wales ranked highest in residential burglaries with 3.5% of households affected, while Scotland scored 19th with 1.5% of households affected. There are more burglaries per household in Iceland than in Scotland.

In fact, Scotland appears to stand apart from the rest of the British Isles in almost all forms of crime surveyed in the ICVS. If you look at Figure 2 on page 36, you see England & Wales, North Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are all near the top in overall victimization percentages (20-24%), while Scotland is just below the median (13%).

So I apologize if I caused some incorrect impressions by using the term "British" less than correctly; in my defense, I can only say I didn't feel like typing "except Scotland" every time.

Give me a bit of credit for knowing what's going on outside my own door.

I'm not sure I see why I should. It feels like every statement I make on this issue is met by an argument from incredulity from you, up to accusing me of peddling an "urban legend." It gets a little grating after a while.

 

[Rolfe]

Well, I lived in England for 25 years. When I lived in Sussex I left my door unlocked for quite long periods, both occupied and unoccupied (not deliberately, but I didn't feel threatened enough to be obsessive about it). I did hear about some burglaries (most of garages and outhouses, with expensive gardening tools being stolen), but never one of an occupied house. Except for the distraction scam I described, which was distressingly common.

I was even burgled myself once, when I lived in Herfordshire. That was a dodgy enough neighbourhood that I was always very careful to lock up when I left the house. Never heard of anyone being burgled while they were in the house there either though. But while I was in Scotland for a few days, I was hit. I got back to find a window had been forced.

When things are common, people know they are happening. They know people they've happened to, and they read about them in the papers (even if it's only the local weekly rag), and the subject is discussed in conversation, and the police get all worried about the situation and start putting out information about the problem to try to put people on their guard. This is exactly the case as regards the distract-the-old-lady scam.

To suggest that other sorts of occupied-house burglary are so common that even the local newspapers don't bother to pad their meagre column inches with these incidents, but at the same time they aren't a topic of conversation and the police aren't saying a word about the issue, is pretty far-fetched.

And I say this, having spent close to half my life in England.

I'm merely saying to you that the way you are interpreting the statistics does not square with the actualite. And that the type of crime the statistics represent might not be the type of crime you are assuming they mean. (As well as the old-lady scam, I wonder if a garden shed being broken into overnight while the owners were asleep in the house would go in that category? That one's common too.)

Rolfe.