this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Right to self defense and reasonable means to do so is a fair enough.
The problem is that currently people think the explodey instant death pointers are somehow a defensive tool instead of just adding more offense to the problem.
Want to feel secure in your home? Invest in something actually useful like durable doors and windows, difficult to pick locks, if law enforcement is outside a safe response time range, a panic room is probably a good idea. All of those are infinitely more helpful against the one in a million shot of a home intruder event happening to you than all but handing said intruder the weapon they will soon kill you with.
And that's not exaggerating, women who purchase arms for defense against stalkers and/or abusers are more likely to be specifically killed with that weapon they bought for their own defense than they are to successfully defend themselves with it.
Also, most of these home intruder fantasizers have all the sense of avoiding escalation in a conflict of a fucking nuclear powered rocket breaking the carmen line speed record.
While I recognize your good faith argument, I don't believe it fits with the reality of how criminals operate, or the practicality of what most people can afford.
You can turn your house into a prison/fortress, which is expensive and only protects you when you're inside with everything locked up. Panic rooms are expensive as fuck, if you weren't aware.
And the odds of self-defense are MUCH better than you think. It's not a 'one in a million' shot that your gun helps you- in 90+% of defensive gun uses, the criminal sees the gun and runs away because he's not there to fight to the death, he's there to steal things he can get somewhere else from someone else without risk to his life. He wants a helpless victim, not a fight.
Click this reddit link- it goes to reddit's /r/ccw (concealed carry weapon) but filtered to show only stories of when /r/CCW members had to use their guns in self-defense.
Please just go read some of those stories and rethink your 'one in a million shot' position.
Nice selection bias, as if the many more people it turns out catastrophically for are able to speak their opinions on the matter in contrast.
Ok you say it's selection bias... Can you show me some news stories of people who's guns were taken from them? Surely if as you say a successful defensive gun use is one in a million there are tens of not hundreds of millions of failed DGU gone wrong stories...
I doubt you will find many. Even anti gun researchers say there are minimum 4x as many DGUs as firearm homicides. I can cite stats on that when back at my desktop if you want them.
There's plenty of valid reasons to be against gun ownership. But the idea that DGU is one in a million is not one of them.