Home Invader Thwarted

Atlanta Journal & Constitution ^ | 9-6-02 | Staff

[ErnBatavia]

Interesting profile, BTW. Welcome to FR. I hope that you'll keep an open mind to the issues debated here.

Yes, I peeked at the profile also - giving you the benefit of the doubt (something the American left will not give you, and you have to know that), you're a welcome Freeper ... assuming you come here to get educated and see all sides. That all said and done, I also have to assume you're in the mood for a "flame-on" this evening; you seem to be getting scorched for your rather ridiculous popoff.

Woops - of course this is to be to UK, not Diddle

[calvin sun]

For the third time: what problems do you have with what the husband did in shooting the intruder? What should he have done differently? I ask because of your flippant "judge jury executioner" comment.

[BlazingArizona]

reasonable level of force is perfectly legal here

"reasonable level of force" may be the letter of the law in Britain, but unfortunately for victims the court interpret this in an exceedingly pro-criminal manner. The Dina Letarte case I mentioned in an earlier thread is a case in point.

[BlazingArizona]

Actually, if you want to see a case that pissed off the small pro-gun faction in the UK, look at the Tony Martin case.

Don'r worry, this case has been discussed in minutest detail on conservative boards in the US. Under the circumstances (Martin lived in a lonely area and had been robbed seven times) I and many other posters here would have acted in the same way.

[AnAmericanMother]

Anybody can say anything on the internet (myself included, but at least I make an effort to be honest). It's nice that you can bench 100, congratulations on beating me by 25 pounds, but that wasn't the point. It's still not enough to overcome the issue of weight and leverage when a large man is intent on doing you harm. Testing stuff out on friends, portly or otherwise, isn't the same as the "real deal". Which is why I want every advantage in my corner. If you choose to give points away to the bad guys, that's your business. But don't expect others to agree with you.

[AnAmericanMother]

(You STILL don't get the point, do you?)

Sigh.

I have on two occasions repelled criminal attacks. In neither case was I forced to shoot (which by the way is the norm for defensive firearm usage). Hand to hand encounters are much more dangerous for all concerned. And I don't glory in hurting people, I used to work death investigations and I've seen too many dead men to want to make any more.

While your privileged upbringing may have insulated you from Texan wisdom, there's a proverb that is apropos here: "There ain't a horse that can't be rode, and there ain't a man that can't be throwed." By relying on hand to hand, you're significantly increasing the chance that you may get "throwed," possibly with fatal results. I hope not.

[AnAmericanMother]

No, I'm not a hypocrite, just a realist. I don't glory in hurting people. But if it is necessary to defend my life or my family, I will, regretfully, take that step, regretfully because I understand the seriousness of the consequences. When you're through making silly jokes, you might consider that thoughtfully.

[Diddle E. Squat]

Ha, I'm getting quite a chuckle watching you hold your own against the flamethrowers. You debate well, and although I disagree with many of your positions, I think you are doing a fine job and am enjoying this thread. Besides, as a native Texan(Houston), I too appreciate and loved the cool temperate weather of Oregon and Pennsylvania. One can always put on layers, but how can one escape the heat? As to the Highland Park shootout, sounds like you must have encountered one of Barry Switzer's Dallas Cowboys!

Well if you are familiar with S. Dallas south of Fair Park(beyond the actual areas next to the Park itself), then you have an idea of S. Atlanta, but on a much larger scale. Liquor stores and a very few homegrown 7-11 type business, neighborhoods of abandoned houses and weedfields with scattered clothing. Though certainly not uniformly so, there are many large pockets of violent poverty. However the spillover rate of crime is much more than you would see from S. Dallas to N. Dallas, due to geographic/demographic differences.

AnAmericanMother raises a really good point about relative risks. Are you familiar with the work of John Lott? He's a researcher who has found(and his work was peer-reviewed) that 98% of the time simply brandishing a weapon was enough to repel an attack, without shots being fired. On average a gun is used in self-defense 7000 times per day in America.

And those stats in the mainstream media that say anywhere from a child a day to 15 per day are shot by guns? All invariably trace back to the research work of an Emory University professor, who has not subjected his findings to peer review, and who refuses to even reveal his methodology. In reality those are urban myths. Lott attempted to reconstruct the figures, and the only way to do so is to include persons up to 25 years of age, and almost all those involve shooting related to gangs and/or commission of a crime. Which is one reason why the reaction to anti-gun statements is often quite caustic here, because we are used to and expect anti-gun advocates to lie, throughout myths, and then call us Nazi's when we point out the holes in those arguments.

Believe it or not, you will find anti-gun proponents sprinkled throughout the spectrum of conservatives, even here on FR. However it does seem to skew female, and also diminish with the level of threats personally encountered. Your story seems to be a bit of an exception, having been attacked yet still anti-gun. Do you think it might be related to anger/upset with your father, and perhaps an increase association of that violence with guns?

I had a girlfriend whose father was physically abusive, and for many years she was very anti-gun(though conservative in most other areas, excepting abortion until a few years ago). However after she had an ex-husband stalk her, she gradually changed her opinions on guns, even after having taken self-defense courses and other forms of protection. FWIW.

Thanks for the answers on the British public. I just wonder, do they fathom that left unchecked, it is only a matter of time before these dictators such as Hussein and Khadafi will have WMD, and plan to use them? It just strikes me as a form of denial, similar to the denial of Hitler's ultimate goals in the late 30's, an attempt to hit the snooze button. The threat comes not from the size of these countries, but the concentration of such destruction in ever smaller and increasing portable weapons. Such weapons are becoming easier to deliver to any city in Europe or the world by mercenaries, which would make tracing and assigning accountability much more difficult. So if one is much less likely to be conclusively fingered as the source, isn't the risk much less? Especially considering that one's enemies(Europeans) would refrain from counteracting without solid proof?

[Mulder]

I would love to hear what you have to say about the Sig P245

This wasn't directed at me, but I've got a Sig P245 and thought I would comment on it. The grip is a little too short and the trigger doesn't seem as nice as the other Sig models.

Unless you are set on a .45 caliber pistol, I would recommend either a Sig 229 or Sig 239 for carry.

Both come in .40 S&W, 9mm, or 357 Sig. The 229 is the larger of the two, but is the same length as the 245. The grip is just a little longer. The 239 is shorter than the 229, and a little easier to conceal since it has a single-stack magazine. The 229 holds 12+1 rounds; the 239 holds 7+1 (8+1 in the 9mm package).

[Citizen of the Savage Nation]

Good questions, but you'll not get a decent answer. This person, on another thread, equated the US contribution in WWII as minimal in comparison to the British, and that the Russians actually won the war (beat those nasty Imperial Japanese into submission, they did), which along with her personal belief against the dealth penalty unless an innocent, unborn child is involved (then its okey-dokey), doesn't give me a warm fuzzy about the answers you probably won't be getting back.