Neo-Nazis charged with attempted murder after shooting following Richard Spencer speech: Today in Tweets

@Alan

It does get hypnotic – the cat’s “WTF just happened? Oh, you’re laughing? I meant to do that.” look keeps cracking me up.

@Shadowplay

In your home and someone trying to break in? Useful.

The downside there is that you need to have quick access to a useable gun, and that sort of thing is correlated with higher levels of suicide and accidental killings (especially by and of children).

It is irritatingly hard to find figures about “home invasion”-type events, and harder still to find out what proportion of those involved effective armed defense (other than “not many”) but I wonder whether for many people the risk posed to them by their own guns is more serious than that posed by theoretical home-invading criminals.

There are strong geographic and demographic factors on this sort of thing too, which obviously translates as “if you’re poor, you probably can’t afford to live anywhere better and we can’t or won’t police your neighborhood in an effective way”.

Out and about and an animal attacks you? (Don’t forget – this is a non trivial problem in some areas) Mixed.

This is a bit specialist; most people in north america don’t live in places where wild animals are a substantial risk.

The only real advantage to having a gun is it’s a hell of a sight quicker to learn than self defence, and needs less maintenance.

I see this as a problem, though. It gives the feeling of protection but in reality even the police, whose day job might require them to use their guns to kill people don’t necessarily get enough training and practice to use their weapons effectively, especially under conditions of stress.

I’m not going to say that self-defense with guns is impossible or that it is pointless for everyone, but for many (possibly most) people I bet there many more effective ways to stay safe.

And in other news: Apparently the Catholic School Superintendents (in Alberta) believe that rape is okay.

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley says an alternative sex education curriculum being crafted by Catholic school officials will never be taught if it arrives as previously advertised.

They say the government’s teaching plan clashes with faith-based instruction by including, among other topics, homosexual relationships and gender identity different from one’s biological sex.

In documents filed with the province, the superintendents also take issue with sexual consent by a partner in marriage.

(Bolding is mine)

Full article: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/catholic-school-sex-ed-notley-1.4370304

@Pie, @Jesalin – sort of combining your two replies.

People would be better off learning self-defense. Knowing how to kill paper targets won’t make it any easier to stay calm during an exceptionally stressful event.

Yes. Without question it is a preferable alternative. I personally suggest to everyone who asks that a form of martial art is the best general purpose defense you can have – your body can’t be taken from you and used against you. 😛

HOWEVER …

Some people can’t. It costs in both time and money, both of which are in short supply for especially the people more at risk because they live in a shitty area.
Some people physically can’t manage it. Physical disabilities or aging isn’t gentle!
Some people mentally can’t manage it – actually hitting someone deliberately with intent to cause damage is surprisingly difficult for a lot of people. I call those sort of people civilized. 😛 Most can get trained out of that, some never can.

I did separate out the two at homes deliberately to include suicide/accidental deaths in the bad idea category. Like you, Pie, I’ve not been able to get any real feel for the actual figures regarding home invasion defense. I know it does happen – crops up in the news once in a while – but how often it’s successful rather than fatal isn’t really recorded.

This is a bit specialist; most people in north america don’t live in places where wild animals are a substantial risk.

About 20% of the US population are rural, so while not most people, it’s a substantial fraction.

It gives the feeling of protection but in reality even the police, whose day job might require them to use their guns to kill people don’t necessarily get enough training and practice to use their weapons effectively, especially under conditions of stress.

That’s the biggie. Training is vital, practice is vital, and understanding in your soul that a bit of iron and lead in your waistband (or in your gun safe in the bedroom) doesn’t make you Superman is almost impossible to hammer into heads.
Personally speaking, I’d not let anyone take a weapon home until they’d done 20 hours training, both range and environmental. Sure, there’s a “right to bear arms” in the USA, but every single right has a matching duty. The duty of bearing arms is to know how to use the damned thing safely and, most importantly, when not to.

Not that anyone will listen 😛

A simple comparison of crime rates/murders/number of mass shootings between Canada* and the US would show her statement to be a lie.

*Or pretty much any other developed nation.

Canada’s would be even lower were it not for the pipeline of American guns being brought into Canada’s criminal markets: https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/guns.html

This is why I feel that I’ve got a stake in this issue despite not being American. A big city like Toronto–being rife with poverty and ill-maintained public housing–has its fair share of gangs (of all ethnic persuasions) and if they’re killing people with American guns, that makes it our problem too.

Fortunately, Bojack Horseman has a solution:

And it’s starting already:

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/10/23/meet-the-trigger-warning-queer-trans-gun-club-an-armed-response-to-the-us-far-right.html

As much as I’m not in favour of guns for self-defence on a personal level, I approve of these clubs. I can’t in good conscience tell trans people what they need to stay safe and anything that reminds these alt-right clowns that firearm ownership isn’t just a right-wing tough-guy thing.

Hoo-boy, just found this on Ghazi regarding that charming Lane Davis fellow: https://www.thedailybeast.com/youtube-trumpkin-and-former-milo-intern-kills-his-own-dad-for-calling-him-a-nazi

This guy was deep into the alt-right echo chamber, pretty much picking up every conspiracy theory he could get his hands on. If this ain’t radicalization, I don’t know what is.

@ Sniper Kitty

Is it bad your name makes me smile? 🙂

This is why I studied aikido – it’s a martial form mostly centered around disarming and taking down an opponent.

Yep. Put them down then run like hell. 😀

Aikido is a great one for most people, the size imbalance factor is built in to the art from the start rather than an afterthought (judo variants, I’m lookin at you … ).

That’s class privilege talking. Lots of people can’t afford a large financial loss, from burglary, mugging, or any other cause. A fair number would be indirectly killed by a big enough such loss — and in a slower and more painful manner than getting shot, I might add. Consider someone working paycheck to paycheck, who has something work-essential stolen, who can’t afford to pay to replace it. The resulting downward spiral isn’t hard to envision: out of a job, having to search for a new job in this crappy economy. Doesn’t find it in time and gets evicted. Now homeless, and without anywhere to keep a wardrope dry or to get showered, is soon filthy and in rags, which means unemployable. Now can’t get a job or a home ever again. If that isn’t bad enough, if this person’s in the northeast, the next winter will kill them outright, otherwise they face starvation.

Even in countries with an actual safety net this sort of downward spiral is likely to end up in a very low place. Most of those safety nets have gotten tattered and threadbare. Housing is unaffordable just about everywhere in the west now, for anyone who doesn’t have one of the dwindling number of stable, salaried 9 to 5 middle-class jobs. Losing a rent-controlled apartment because of a “temporary” financial setback might mean permanent homelessness pretty much anywhere, now. Certainly losing one of those middle-class jobs will mean permanent burger-flippingdom, since these days when jobs like that become vacant (and sometimes before), companies independent-contractorize, offshore, automate, or downsize them out of existence rather than rehiring the position as an actual full-time job with full benefits.

That’s leaving aside how much of people’s important stuff these days is in their phones and computers, including (again) work-essential stuff. Cloud backups? Not everyone can afford to spend an extra gajillion bucks a month for several terabytes of space on OneDrive, or trusts their personal information on some stranger’s server farm where anyone might go browsing through it. It’s not like online businesses take cybersecurity seriously, after all. Barely a week goes by these days without another big leak of credit card numbers, passwords, or other sensitive information from some big-name company like Yahoo. Oh, and let’s not forget the way telcos are phasing out unlimited usage plans, so you’ll have to pay through the nose to back up all that data to the cloud, and again every week, and again if ever the time comes to restore it all, which would be rendered moot anyway if your computer had been stolen and you couldn’t afford to buy a replacement.

The long and the short of it is, for people who aren’t at the stable-middle-class level, with a reliable full-time-with-benefits job, a solid credit rating, manageable debts, and an actual house with equity, homeowner’s insurance, and everything — and people without those things are a rapidly growing proportion of the population — any sizable (four-figure-or-more) loss is likely to spiral out of control into a severe crash of their living standards, from which they might never recover, if not actual death. Even losing a wallet full of cash could be a serious problem for someone living from paycheck to paycheck barely making ends meet.

So, “it’s not worth your life” vis-a-vis (at the very least) the more expensive things in your home is class privilege. For the swelling ranks of the precariat, losing what little they have means their life might as well be over. I myself would probably jump off a bridge rather than try to make a go of it without any home, any electronics, or reliable access to food and shelter. Especially given the statistics regarding violence (including rape) directed at the homeless.

@shadowplay

Is it bad your name makes me smile?

Not at all! It comes from an online roleplaying game I play – it’s a long story but the short of it is my character is trained as a sniper, but is really bad at being a villain. In fact, currently he’s defected from the bad guys, yay character arcs!

The other name I debated using here was Jinxed Pixie, which came from a D&D campaign wherein I played a pixie pirate. Yup.

@Sniper Kitty

This is why I studied aikido – it’s a martial form mostly centered around disarming and taking down an opponent. And it’s one of the few forms that favor a smaller person to a degree (it’s kinda hard to take someone out with a punch when they have a longer reach).

I saw a video not so long ago about an aikido practitioner (possibly an instructor, I don’t recall) who was sufficiently self assured to do a little bit of sparring with someone who did MMA for comparison purposes, get beaten and still post his video on youtube. I thought it was interesting, anyway.

@weirwoodtreehugger

I’d also be curious about how many times someone shot a home invader were defense of life and how many were defense of property.

This was one of the things I was looking at, if you’ve not already come across it. It does have a few figures on page 6 that might be relevant to your question.

http://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable15.pdf

We obviously don’t have guns so much here, but dealing with intruders in a dwelling is one exception to the requirement to only use reasonable force. The law here is that you’ll only be prosecuted if the force used is grossly unreasonable. The courts have pretty much interpreted that as punishment beatings after an intruder is completely incapacitated.

I completely understand the property thing, but in court you have to listen to victim impact statements from burglary victims. They can get pretty harrowing. Some people take it in their stride and just claim on insurance; but others end up with PTSD from the feeling that they’ll never be safe again. Moving home is a common experience after a burglary if that’s feasible, and some local authorities will rehouse council tenants if housing stocks permit. A lot of people, especially with kids, end up crashing with friends or relatives for at least a while. (That’s pretty practical if the intruder wasn’t caught as repeat burglaries are quite common)

Alan,

I’m not trying to be dismissive of anyone’s experience with being burglarized. I’m just saying that shooting burglars is not necessarily the optimal answer.

I used to live in a ground level apartment with the windows facing a parking lot. One time some men in a pickup truck pulled up while in the living room. They pried open the bedroom window and threw a foul smelling liquid on my bed and drove off. Since I didn’t get the license plate number, there was nothing the cops could do. In talking to some neighbors, I found out that the woman in the apartment next to mine was a witness to a crime committed by some gang members and was set to testify. We figured they were trying to intimidate her and got the wrong apartment.

Even though I wasn’t hurt, I was still shaken up. I slept on the pull out couch instead of the bed for several days because the bed was right up against the window and I didn’t want that. I eventually moved back to the bedroom but still never slept well or felt totally safe after that and as soon as my lease was up, I moved to an apartment that was not on the ground floor.

I don’t see how having gun would have helped though. Even if I did have one and managed to shoot them as they were prying the window open, the trauma would have been just as bad. Probably worse. I wouldn’t have felt safer because I’d have the additional fear of retaliation.

I’m sharing this mostly because Surplus already basically called me classist for not thinking more guns are the best solution to crime or the best way to keep people safe. A stretch that mrex would surely be proud of. I can sense the conversation headed towards the insinuation that I only hold the position that I do because I’m super privileged don’t know what it’s like to feel violated and frightened in my own home. Kind of like those people who tell me I’d switch to being pro death penalty if one of my loved ones were murdered. Well, I do know. And my position on guns didn’t change. So if anyone reading this was going to try that line on me, don’t.