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Wrong door shootings.

Quoting from a necro thread (2013) but Ben m's reasoning seems sound to me.

My highlighting.

ben m said:
Yes.

It's easy to see, in the available numbers, that chasing-off-dangerous-home-invaders is NOT common. Why is that? Because 60% of homes are not armed.

Imagine a world where "defend your home with a gun" is 100% effective. Imagine there are 10,000 attempts to mount deadly armed home invasions. Well, 3,300 of those would get foiled---those would wind up in the NRA's anecdotal-evidence file---but 6,600 would be hitting unarmed homes and result in harm to the occupants. And "harm to the occupants", unlike NRA-newsletter brandishing-incidents, does get recorded and counted reliably.

See? If you look at the number of actual deaths in home-invasion-robbery incidents, the number of murderous-invasion-averted-NRA-anecdotes is *no greater than* 1/2 of this number.

OK, the National Violent Death Reporting System can give us those numbers for 16 states. Let's look at 2009 data:

Population of reporting states 81,587,293 (about 1/4 of the US population)

2,579 total gun homicides.
137 total homicides by strangers (!)
49 of which occurred in homes (not necessarily the victim's!)

Multiply by 4 to get approximately nationwide numbers.

There were only ~200 successful in-a-house murders-by-strangers in 2009. Total. A tiny number. Let's be generous and say those were all home-invasion robbery-murder attempts.

There cannot have been---if gun-self-defense were foolproof, in a country where 2/3rds of homes are unarmed---more than 300 home-invasion-murder attempts in 2009. Therefore, there are fewer than than ~100 true robbery-murder-averted anecdotes in 2009. There's your "guns save lives". Legal-gun-owner-home-defense saved fewer---probably far fewer---than 100 lives in 2009.
Heck, there were ~350 accidental gun deaths in that time. There were ~50 accidental gun deaths of children under 14.

That's why I've said this before and why I will keep saying it. Keeping a gun at home to protect you from home invaders is utterly, horrifyingly wrong. Dangerous home invasions are preposterously rare, as non-gun-owners have proven by not dying in home invasions.
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Architect said:
Just to clarify for our US posters, whilst ordinary Police in the mainland UK are not armed there are specialist Armed Response Vehicles (ARVs) for each force or division who are placed such as to meet response target times. These times are not published, for obvious reasons, but in the large cities will be just a few minutes whilst in rural areas it is a little longer.

In addition each Police Station (sometimes called a Police Office in Scotland) will have secured firearms and additional authorised firearm officers (AFOs), who may have normal duties but are able to assist.


You really don't want to go waving a gun around assuming the Police won't be able to respond in kind - it doesn't end well.
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Or in deed a chair leg.
 
jimbob said:
Quoting from a necro thread (2013) but Ben m's reasoning seems sound to me.

My highlighting.
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Meeeeh....not sure if those numbers are wholly reliable. For instance, intrusion by a stranger. I suppose an estranged spouse or other known sicko wouldn't factor in to that stat? How about a woman in fear of rape?

And of course, if you were one of the victims, those likelihoods are not much comfort. I spent hundreds on smoke detectors in my home, even though the odds are tiny that they will do anything but annoy the bejesus out of me and suck up batteries every year. But on the long shot that they might save lives, I want them around and working.
 
Thermal said:
Meeeeh....not sure if those numbers are wholly reliable. For instance, intrusion by a stranger. I suppose an estranged spouse or other known sicko wouldn't factor in to that stat? How about a woman in fear of rape?

And of course, if you were one of the victims, those likelihoods are not much comfort. I spent hundreds on smoke detectors in my home, even though the odds are tiny that they will do anything but annoy the bejesus out of me and suck up batteries every year. But on the long shot that they might save lives, I want them around and working.
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Yes but the difference is that I am unaware of any way that a smoke detector would increase your risks of coming to any other type of harm, beyond maybe falling off a step ladder/ chair when installing them.
 
jimbob said:
Yes but the difference is that I am unaware of any way that a smoke detector would increase your risks of coming to any other type of harm, beyond maybe falling off a step ladder/ chair when installing them.
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Right, I get that, and on balance I come to the same conclusion: I have no guns at the ready in my home because I am pretty confident that someone would end up with a bullet in them that was not the best outcome.

But I'm not sure that is a fair standard for everyone. Most handgun fatalities are used in suicide. If depression or other emotional instability is not a factor in your household, that's something to temper the statistics. If you are a responsible owner, keeping arms secure, then accidental mishandling goes way down. With a database of responsible and mentally healthy adults, I think the odds of mishap are very different than a dataset including every yahoo nitwit who keeps loaded guns sitting in the breakfast table while they guzzle beer and fight with the wife.

My big hitch is not for the Rambo types who shower with guns handy. It's the single mom who is not otherwise able to fight off a home invader (as unlikely as that may be). It doesn't feel right to say she can't protect her family as a last ditch effort because of the statistically real drunk hillbillies that can't be responsible if you stick a gun to their heads (so to speak).
 
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As I said earlier this would go down easier if the Cops actually had a legal responsibility to help us.

Right now we're at "Either I have a gun that will statistically kill me or a loved one or I call a police force that has literally no actual enforced responsibility to come help me." and while the facts bare out option 2 as being better, it would be nice to have better options.
 
JoeMorgue said:
As I said earlier this would go down easier if the Cops actually had a legal responsibility to help us.

Right now we're at "Either I have a gun that will statistically kill me or a loved one or I call a police force that has literally no actual enforced responsibility to come help me." and while the facts bare out option 2 as being better, it would be nice to have better options.
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Even the best police can't get there in time. First 5 minutes you are alone, even in the best scenarios.
 
Please try to stay closer to the actual topic, and refrain from personalising your posts.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Agatha
 
Hercules56 said:
The girl in the car in NY entered no dwelling, she possessed no weapon. Shot dead.

The black kid who pulled the handle on the screen door had no weapon.

As I said, none of these qualify under Castle Doctrine OR Stand Your Ground. Only an ignorant moron would think otherwise. These two men are going to prison for a long time due to their ignorance of the law.
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And yet the people who shot them thought they were justified. Why do you think that is?
 
arthwollipot said:
I've been saying this for years. And I've received some pretty vitriolic backlash for it. A gun, for an American 2nd Amendment Advocate, is a problem-solving tool. Problems are no longer problems if you've got a gun. And we've seen the kinds of things that people consider problematic. Wrong door barely scratches the surface.
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Having lived in Florida, you can tell who is armed. They'll be white, pudgy and a raging dick. They're a dick because with a gun, you don't need people skills.
 
Hercules56 said:
Cuz they are crazy and stupid.
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It isn't that surprising the thing that makes it a crime isn't the act that are reacting to, but if they hit something or not. Open up on a delivery driver at the wrong address, legal as long as you don't manage to hit what you are aiming at.
 
Do USAians get Amazon home deliveries? What's the attrition rate among Amazon and take-out (etc) delivery people?
 
GlennB said:
Do USAians get Amazon home deliveries? What's the attrition rate among Amazon and take-out (etc) delivery people?
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That's why they never, ever ring the doorbell any more. Everybody delivering packages just puts them down (or hurls them) and leaves.
 
Hercules56 said:
The girl in the car in NY entered no dwelling, she possessed no weapon. Shot dead.

The black kid who pulled the handle on the screen door had no weapon.

As I said, none of these qualify under Castle Doctrine OR Stand Your Ground. Only an ignorant moron would think otherwise. These two men are going to prison for a long time due to their ignorance of the law.
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Many, perhaps most, stand your ground laws don't require an actual threat they just require you to be afraid. In many cases it doesn't even have to be a reasonable fear, or even require one party to be the aggressor. In the Rittenhouse case, for example, it likely would not have mattered who killed who, everyone involved could have claimed they were afraid for their lives and were therefor justified in killing the person they were afraid of.

Whatever you think the point of these laws are is not the way they are being written, and they are written that way far to often for it to be accidental or unintentional.
 
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