Guns saving people
I’ve often heard it asked (and often wondered myself) how often guns prevent the death of innocents rather than cause them.
This article doesn’t answer that question. But it offers nine instances where it happened.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
I often hear Europeans or foreigners talk about US shooting incidents. The only source of their “info” is from the American news channels themselves.
I ask them why they’ve never heard about the mass shootings that were stopped because a citizen had a gun. They had no answer. They say “maybe such things happen and maybe they don’t, but the rampant shootings in the US is too much”. Something like that. They think we need to “do something” about it. Like adopt their own successful anti gun stuff…
[reposted from The Navy Yard Killings
September 17th, 2013 at 9:29 pm]
Neo-neocon,
What absolutely everyone seems to gloss over is a point I’d like to address in the aftermath of the Newton and Navy Yard shootings.
Such “spree” shootings are like the crash of a commercial airliner. They are spectacular (in the literal sense of the word) and so the media rushes to cover them. As result, even though we might see such a shooting once a year (or less), they seem to happen more often than that because of all of the media attention both initially and for days or weeks in the aftermath. Because of this they are not far from anyone’s consciousness.
On the other hand, incidents in which an armed citizen foils a crime, be it armed robbery, rape or even murder, are rarely reported, even though they occur with much greater frequency than shooting sprees. Yes, sometimes these stories make a local news broadcast, but they are almost never picked up by the national media outlets.
So a situation where negative gun stereotypes are hyped by frequency, duration and mass reportage actually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy to gun-control advocates. How could you not want to ban guns, it seems like some school group is getting shot just about every week? It is the “seems like” which is the operative phrase; once again, progressives reveal themselves as being indoctrinated into the narrative of false appearances rather than any objective reality.
One other point:
the other night on Brett Baier’s Special Report He highlighted a study abour gun crimes. It seem that in the past 30 years there were about 530 people killed in such spree-type shootings vs over 500,000 people killed by gun crimes in general (I’m citing from memory here). Which means that such spectacular spree-shooting victims such as Newtown, CT or Aurora, CO comprise .1% (thats point one percent) of the total dead from handgun crimes.
Yes, one can always argue that one single death is too much, yet it’s these rare spectacles, infrequent though they are, are what gives the gun-control squad the twist in their knickers.
Is a victim any more a victim because s/he was killed with a gun than by a drunk driver, or a knife wielding assailant? Do they want to ban cars and knives because one auto casualty or one kinfing victim is still one too many?
It’s clear that those who favor gun control simply have a primal hatred of the gun itself which makes the slippery-slope argument against gun control all the more cogent.
Note that the source of the article is Buzzfeed.
This makes me wonder if they are engaged in click-baiting.
There are many sources for such news:
http://leftcoastconservative.blogspot.com/p/armed-citizen-self-defense.html
http://thegunwire.com/
http://thearmedcitizen.net/
http://www.americanrifleman.org/blog_list.php?cat_id=46
But for actual scholarly research on the subject, start with the work of Gary Kleck:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kleck
Continue with the work of Clayton E. Cramer:
http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/WP-Tough-Targets.pdf
There are studies and data on this, but the anti-rights side desperately denies any social utility of publicly carried firearms. They must, of course. To admit that firearms have social utility is to admit their entire argument for gun control is a farce.
Many of the lemmings at the bottom of the ladder who support gun control in the US are incapable of defending themselves, so they would rather sacrifice our freedom and our ability to protect ourselves, in exchange for their own traitorous hides.
Why the hell should I offer up my life and the life of anyone I care about, for some useless trash that calls themselves anti gun Democrats and shills for criminals? They should go join a concentration camp and be killed if they want the protection of the State that badly. Has nothing to do with me. I have no duty to give up what I have, so that the State can protect their arses.
In fact, these lemmings should be careful about irrevocably breaching the “social trust” between the masses here, since government isn’t going to protect their lazy backs against criminals and they are Definitely Not Going to be able to defend them against half the armed population. Death squads, remember those guys in Iraq and Vietnam? They were weaklings compared to what we can produce in the US. Remember DC snipers? Those are weaklings compared to what US civilians can produce. If the unenlightened masses of Americans “voters” think that if they agree to confiscate our guns, that it’ll make it “safer” for them… well, well.
They want to be “safe” and protected by the Government Daddy, their sugar daddy, and to hell with the rest of us? They won’t know hell until it hits them.
Btw, guns don’t save anyone.
That’s an incorrect philosophical stance, which leads to corrosion of ethics and epistemology.
What’s at work here is courage and human valor, initiative, and freedom of conscience, judgment.
The Left, however, thinks humans should be like pigs, killed for food and corralled to where they belong. Right or wrong doesn’t exist, it’s eat or be eaten, a zero sum world. That is the Left’s Utopia. Animal farm doesn’t begin to describe it. They’re not farming animals. They’re farming your soul.
What a more solid position would be is to defend the natural right of humans to live and not be enslaved, raped, or killed on the whim of criminals, the State, or the People Who Support the State.
Left Coast: Thanks. You beat me to it.
Ymar: As passionate as I’ve ever seen you.
These are the kinds of things I would have said at every post about Obama, the Left, or politics in the US from 2008 to 2012, if I wasn’t going under the radar.
Now a days, no real point. They sorta of know what’s going on and have already gone active.
One of the Australian propaganda msg, which the Left picks up because they are international, is that they school shootings and they were stopped because of the gun ban.
Meanwhile, rape, assaults, knife attacks on the streets and at bars in Sydney shoot up. They are so afraid of getting killed with a gun that they’d rather some fellow Australian get raped, assaulted, stabbed, and have to live in fear and with medical bills. Knife stabbings are less lethal, these Aussie pukes say. They’d rather get stabbed than shot.
Well, well. They’d rather get stabbed than shot dead. Spoken like a True Slave. When the Master brings out his whip, you know what’s coming.
Here in America, I can’t say all but many would prefer to risk their own lives in the pursuit of freedom and happiness, than be satisfied with a life living under the eye of warlords, rapist squads, death banger urban youths like a regular serf.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGaDAThOHhA
Oh no, the gov isn’t going to take your guns. They just want only police and military to have guns. Australia has a good gun system. The Left will tell us to copy Australia, they don’t have school shootings.
They just have assaults, stabbings, rapes, out the scale.
It is impossible to argue with a gun control advocate. They are idealists, like many on the left, who will simply insist that if nobody has access to guns, you don’t need to save yourself with one. The practical implications of preventing criminals from obtaining firearms, who by their nature, don’t obey laws is beyond the grasp of the idealist.
Like good idealists and village idiots, their arguments are constructed from the perfect world that would exist if everyone was as reasonable they are. I don’t waste my time reasoning with idealists – they’re surrounded by a bubble of impenetrable simpleness that deflects any ideas that present the world as it is and always has been.
Instead, I invite them to the shooting range and teach them how to use one. For everyone who has accepted, I’ve got 100% rate of acceptance that gun ownership isn’t the problem. They all come home alive and many find that target shooting is fun.
Next time you’re talking to a gun control freak, take them shooting. You will be surprised how many of them modify their stance and accept it’s possible own firearms and not be compelled to shoot anyone just because you had a bad day.
It is impossible to argue with those who advocate for ever stricter gun control or any of the cognitively dissonant ‘solutions’ of the left, not because they are idealists but because their ‘idealism’ rests upon having rejected aspects of reality itself.
Those on the left view life as a problem to be solved, rather than a reality to be experienced.
Once a month The American Rifleman (NRA magazine) publishes a page of stories of people who were saved from mayhem by the use of a gun.
One additional point:
It is estimated that there are about 350,000,000 privately held guns in the United States with a population of about 330,000,000 people. That’s about one firearm for every man, woman and child. Given that about 19,000 victims die in any given year from gun violence is a remarkable occurrence (that is, .000542% of the population die from gun violence). This thoroughly repudiates the constant leftist claims that the U.S. is a violent culture. In fact, we are a remarkably peaceful culture.
Piers Morgan, stuff that in your pipe and smoke it!
I think those anything control advocates are simply and purely evil. Slave masters and slave master aspirants
DaveindeSwamp,
They are self righteous sanctimonious control freaks.
“We know how to spend your money more wisely than you do. We know more about your health care than you do. We know what you should be eating, what kind of light bulb you should be using and how much water should be in your toilet tank. We are smarter than you because if you are not one of us, you are a knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing unibrow Neanderthal. So sit down, shut up and obey.”
Most of the deaths from guns come from DC, Chicago, and other Democrat fiefdoms. If you remove Democrat controlled areas and cities from the stats, the rates are lower than Europe.
Many of the guns belong in personal arsenals, one guy with a wall of 10 guns for example.
That still leaves a sizable portion of arms for training purposes, generational wise, for the 150 million Americans who would be part of the resistance.
It’s not a bad idea to conjure up the “quagmire” in Iraq and Vietnam, where they told us the US military couldn’t put down an insurgency that didn’t even number 1 million supporters in total, except in the areas they controlled militarily, and compare it to the number of Democrat zombies that say owning guns is useless against the US military.
If it was so freaking useless, why’d it take your Devil Bush so long to put down an insurgency in a country not even half the density of the US demographic?
People expecting the police, any police, to act as their bodyguards are fools.
Take this, for example:
Per the local TV station WUSA, the Capitol Police SWAT team that was thirty seconds from the Navy Yard’s front gate was ORDERED TO STAND DOWN by their watch commander while the massacre was in progress, and the Metro PD were begging for help —
http://www.wusa9.com/news/article/275371/498/EXCLUSIVE-SWAT-Team-left-Navy-Yard
Watch the video: the reporter can hardly believe what he’s saying. And he’s citing several CERT officers as the sources.
Wow.
It all comes down to Rights. I have a RIGHT to defend myself by force against another individual who tries to attack or kill me.
Period.
Even if they pass laws curtailing that action, they can’t remove the Right — that is forever beyond their reach, and not within their gift.
As always, Obama’s orders to Stand Down are repeated and conveyed throughout the mad dog hierarchy.
Let them die. It’s easier on the Left that way.
There’s also this FB page, which is approaching 1000 defined incidents of protection-related gun use.
https://www.facebook.com/GunsSaveLives.net
I’ve no doubt there are many undocumented cases of a stand-down forced by an armed innocent.
These may not get reported because the bad guy ended up fleeing, and good guy fears the ramifications of making a report: Was I legally entitled to display my gun right then? Will I be prosecuted if I was a half-inch outside the law?
Recall that in the early ’80s, a widely cited study claimed that guns in the home were X times more likely to be used against the owner than against a criminal. The flaw in that finding was, the study only counted shootings. Deterrent actions (e.g., threatening an intruder with a gun) didn’t count. Well, that’s how many confrontations end, and they wouldn’t happen without the homeowner’s firearm.
Even surveys may undercount these incidents because citizens don’t want to reveal them.
I know I ain’t talkin’ about mine.
The US government actually agrees that guns save lives. Otherwise they wouldn’t arm their police unions and themselves (Feinstein) with it. Nor would they pay bodyguards or Blackwater for Hollywood or politicians.
It’s just that their definition of salvation is similar to a death cult’s definition, and they are not particularly interested in human lives, per say. That’s not what they are going to save. Pig fat and meat, perhaps, but humans are not on their agenda as anything other than slaves.
The government, right now, has a lot of guns, a lot of ammo. They are going to use it for something. And it’s not going to be for stopping crime. So they agree with guns saving lives, they just can’t say it in the open at the moment tactically. Which is why that propaganda line is a strategic mistake in the long term.
Read John Lott’s articles and books.
Join the NRA and get their magazine Rifleman, it has a regular section (the armed citizen) on citizens defending themselves.
The left’s instinct against self defense is broader then just hoplophobia (gun phobia), remember they were and are fanatically opposed to missile defense. And of course missile defense is entirely in government hands and does not defend the individual.
The left has in addition to a totalitarian impulse a deep seated suicidal impulse.
On Killing by Grossman, finally reading it now. Feel like I’ve got enough necessary background work done that I can understand all or 90% of it.
Or maybe because kindles weren’t around during those days.
Oh well, Grossman’s been surprisingly against media violence. Which, for those in the gaming industry, sounds conservative or too government regulation wise. But he’s not advocating that stance because of political concerns or because he wants to increase government regulation. His concern is primarily that Hollywood violence, is brainwashing and conditioning children so that their social limiter (what some call a safety valve, limit, the switch, or the restraint on killing another human being) is being turned off without the subject’s awareness.
He relates it to various crime statistics. So instead of saying “no guns = more crimes”, he’s more saying societal brainwashing and media violence destroys the limiter =more crimes.
That’s an interesting argument and the book tells it in more detail. I’ve heard his stance before, concerning an interview with my civilian H2H instructors, but this book goes into much more depth and answers a lot of my questions on his stance and positioning. Or rather, it will answer all of them once I finish it.
As for why this matters to the regular American civilian… well, just think of Hollywood and how many real guns they use. And just think of how little “gun control” they have on their studios. They get to have guns, make money off them, just like Leftist abortion clinics, but GUNS ARE NOT FOR YOU SLAVES.
Basically. So that’s why regular Americans should care, even if they have not conditioned themselves to switch off their social inhibition against killing.
Switching off the social inhibition against killing, is what makes humans dangerous. Not weapons externally attached. You can make warriors out of that. Or psychopaths. Or mass murderers. Or protectors. Like any social and human tool, the use can be good or evil depending on various factors.
Also Japan is said to have extremely high media and movie violence, but is counteracted by… well the Japanese aesthetic way of life, I guess. When a Japanese boy spends 20-30 years listening to everyone telling him he has to protect his family, he has to look out for and support his little sister, and he has to protect, to the death ,his girlfriend… social conditioning is not always evil or stupid.
One of the problems with the brainwashing type of propaganda is that the subjects don’t control it. They can’t think about it beyond the limits they were conditioned with.
So switch out “Fighting for women’s choice about her body” to “fighting for a woman’s right to choose how to defend her family and home”.
Use the Left’s propaganda against them. Their zombies will not have been updated with the software to defend against it so fast.
Propaganda should be used offensively. What I see a lot with American patriots is that they like to use it defensively, huddling around in their turtle shell waiting for the murdering rapist to get tired. The Left is not going to get tired. But maybe people already know that. Even then though they still talk about making excuses for their rights, excuses for why they should live, excuses for why the state should let them have guns, their life, their pursuit of happiness.
When will people poke this hot fire rod sticker in the eye of the Left and talk about how the Left are rapists for trying to make more victims/ WHen will people poke them in the eye with a hot coal spear that their attempts to disarm the US population makes them tyrants and enemies of humanity?
Attack them. Don’t just sit around and “defend your rights”. As if that ever won a war.
Ymarsaker,
“When will people poke this hot fire rod sticker in the eye of the Left . . . ?”
It was precisely this attitude that originally attracted me to Gingrich’s presidential campaign. It was an aggressive, unapologetic pre-Duck Dynasty conservatism willing to redefine the political field of battle and make the left play on other terms.
Regardless of whether Gingrich would have been a good president or not, I firmly believe that such an aggressive approach is an essential first step to reclaiming the America of the Founding Fathers.
Mass shootings are the result in part, of melding two distinct and somewhat antithetical ideologies, or social plans: melding the ideology of inclusiveness on the one hand, to an ideology of political self-government (with a capital “S”) resting on a presumed individual moral competency (self-governance with a small “s”) on the other.
The observation of this dynamic is nothing new to anyone here. The regulars have said as much, or much to the same effect, dozens of times.
Call it what you want. Mainstreaming, sensitivity, lifting the stigma, rehabilitative integration, inclusivity, addressing human needs where they are found, celebrating differing abilities … whatever, it is a secularized version of utter depravity and brokenness theology. Now, at the apex sits the secular state as the motherly dispenser of grace and social indulgences, who must at the same time demand shared sacrifices from all of Her children.
External political freedom plus destigmatized internal incompetency. Two incompatible views of human reality and life aspirations operating in the same political space.
The result is completely predictable.
What’s to wonder about?
https://scontent-b-dfw.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/1240501_10151940009997518_1908589468_n.jpg
LOL. Remember this when you hear the assholes screaming again for more gun control.
Sort of off topic, but peripherally related.
http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=5063
Links to the board of trustees.
http://trustees.msu.edu/about/index.html
Write them each a nastygram demanding this professor be terminated for willful discrimination and abusive mistreatment of the student body.
I’ll give up my guns when they pull the lead from your cold dead body after you tried to fatally injury me or any member of my family….maybe
I like the “official” attitude here in Florida. Carry a pistol in your car and or get a concealed carry permit. IF some thug tries to break into your house: SHOOT Him. Baa-Daa-Bing. Like Dat.
Back in the Peoples Republic of California, from which I’m a refugee, NONE of the above was encouraged. I carried a pistol in my car for 15-yrs,
figuring that the misdemeanor was worth it if I needed to use it quickly. (-:
Florida SWAT has actually broken into the wrong house address at times and been shot for it. The inhabitant is now in legal death for murdering a police officer.
For all of Florida’s security protections against prosecution of self defense via firearms, the Left still exists there as a power.
http://raleightelegram.com/201207172200
FLORIDA — According to local media in the area, an innocent man is dead after Sheriff’s deputies in Lake County, Florida got the wrong address in pursuit of a murder suspect, barged into a man’s house at 1:30am, and shot him in his own house even though they did not announce they were the police.
TV station WESH reported today that Andrew Lee Scott, age 26, was killed when sheriff’s deputies mistakenly went to his house late at night, mistakenly thinking that they had the address of a murder suspect instead. The murder suspect had parked his motorcycle in a parking space in a parking lot front of Scott’s apartment building and although deputies did not see him go in that particular unit, they assumed that Scott’s apartment was the suspect’s home.
When deputies entered the home, they said that Scott had a gun held in his hands, possibly for his own defense to ward off an unannounced intruder at such a late hour. Scott did not shoot at the deputies, but they shot and killed him as they entered the home.
There’s a reason the Left supports guns only for police…
So if people bust in your home, always be careful who you point your guns at. Because aristocrats won’t tolerate such in their house.
It ain’t your house any more. To win against the aristos, you have to live. Even if that means submission for a time.
Democrats like to report false charges so that their SWAT death squads barge in, and your Democrat neighbors know you got a gun so…. it’s a convenient way to “get rid of people”.
The Democrat neighbor can say “my hands are clean”. The cops that busted down your can say “my hands are clean, I’m just following orders”.
You… you’re dead or in jail for life. That is their game. That is their joy. That is their desire. Know it well, for that is Your Enemy.
The Left has many operations nobody knows about. And the ones that do know, ain’t talking.
Didn’t see a similar link, so I’ll add this one. Saw your post but… just now ran across something, quite by accident, at The Jawa Report, nine shootings averted/ended by other people with guns
}}} Given that about 19,000 victims die in any given year from gun violence
Where are you getting that stat from, T? It’s WAY off.
Weapons……2007…..2008…..2009……2010……2011
Total………14,916…14,224..13,752…13,164…12,664
Firearms:..10,129…..9,528….9,199…..8,874….8,583
That’s from the FBI:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8
The police are downgrading reports and basically not putting on record crimes which involved minorities.
Makes their city look better.
So assume the stats have already been tinkered with, by somebody.