Guest post: A definite bias against the American gun fetish
Originally a comment by Pliny the in Between on So it was reckful?
I admit I have a definite bias against the American gun fetish. I learned to handle firearms from WWII vets, none of whom carried firearms routinely. To this day if someone were to hand me a weapon I would inspect and clear it the way they learned to do it during inspection in the 1940’s.
I was a trauma surgeon for more than 25 years. In that time, I treated wounds made by 22 cal pistols and rifles, 38s, 9mm, 10mm, 45 cal colts, black powder muzzle loaders, 12 gauge shotguns, 30 cal long guns and the 5.56mm favored by many of the assault rifles in civilian hands. Victims from 80 years of age to 7. Not saying my experience was typical, but I never once treated someone shot by someone defending their home. A fair number of police officers shot in the line, but no home defenders. Three mass casualty ‘events’.
Worried far more than once about getting cut on frangible fragments in our victims from ammo banned by the military but allowed for civilians.
Many suicides or attempts, many domestic assaults, many unintentional injuries. Lots of people cleaning guns or handling weapons that were ‘not loaded’. Only a handful of stranger on stranger crimes. Usually the shooter knew the vic. Lots of gang shootings – sometimes repeaters with a history of a prior GSW.
FYI: if home defense is your goal you can’t beat a 12 gauge shotgun. It imparts tremendous energy to the target at the ranges a home defender would face, is a hell of a lot easier to aim than a handgun and won’t travel 8 blocks through 2 houses and kill your neighbor.
The 5.56mm injuries were the stuff of nightmares. Designed for combat use, the wounds were devastating. At least as bad as a 30 cal rifle. Rifles injuries were a whole different level from the handguns. Handguns fire subsonic rounds. So the tissue injury is directly related to the path of the projectile. Rifles fire supersonic missiles. Very little of the actual energy of the projectile is imparted to the victim – that’s why it passes through usually. But while it’s passing through the tissues, it’s accompanied by a supersonic shock wave several times larger than the size of the slug (several inches in some cases). Everything in the path of that shock wave might be damaged or destroyed.
I can’t say that I came away from the experience with a great appreciation for the Second Amendment.
I agree with almost all of this.
I’ve heard that the home/personal defense picture changes a lot when you consider people who scare off an intruder or mugger by brandishing a gun at them. Most people aren’t killers and they don’t want to shoot anyone. So you’re not going to see, nor would you want to see, a big body count from people defending themselves.
Skeletor — so we’d be better off if the “home defender” crowd had no bullets. I agree it would be an improvement but it wouldn’t solve the problem entirely.
Alabama is one of the places that have felony murder laws, in which a person can be convicted of murder if they commit a crime and someone is killed, even if none of the criminals killed anyone. One example: a couple of unarmed men broke into a house, the homeowner shot and killed one of them, and the other was convicted of murder. (The homeowner so much as told the guy that this was what was going to happen.) I suspect this kind of law emboldens gun-happy home defenders, perhaps increasing the chances that they kill someone.
So has there been much discussion of the 2A issues with the incident? Or has it been mostly just “all racism, all the time”?
If criminals know that they might face an armed homeowner, they may be less likely to choose that criminal activity. If somebody breaks into my home, I want to be able to meet threat with effective force. Shotgun is the best weapon for home defense, for all the reasons listed above.
If somebody breaks in while I am gone and steals property, OK, I am not going to like it but things can be replaced. People who break into places when others might be present are a whole different situation because if these usually male criminals find a woman or kid alone, that break-in can become a rape and/or murder.
If you want to label my desire to defend myself and those I love as a fetish, go ahead. I keep reading stories about how the mostly unarmed women in the UK are still being raped and/or killed by men and how the police often seem to be on the side of some of the most dangerous men you can imagine. And it makes me wonder how Americans would react if police starting showing up on our doorsteps to “check our thinking” because something we tweeted upset a man who claims to be a woman. I doubt the cops here would think that would be a safe practice for them.
Those first two Amendments to the Constitution were put there by men who were not stupid. And I don’t think they were wrong on those two issues.
Yes, we’d be better off if guns for home defense had no bullets, at least until that fact became widely known.
There’s an extensive article about defensive gun use on Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_gun_use
TL;DR: Estimates vary wildly.
Re #4
I have seen some people discussing the ramped-up use of self-defense defense. I don’t see that as a 2A issue per se, except that it involves guns most of the time. Right to Bear Arms is not the same as right to use arms in all cases for all reasons against all possible targets. But some people can and do view any restrictions on the use of guns as the first step toward banning all guns, so they turn it into a 2A issue. But yes, there’s an awful lot of “all racism, all the time”, apt phrase, at least in the conversations I see.
Re #5
I don’t agree with your stance about using deadly force to defend your home, but I can accept it. You make a somewhat reasonable point about protecting people versus property. An awful lot of problems, though, seem to be from people who are very much defending property using deadly force, and from people who like to make a show of deadly force without having any clear interest in protecting anything. I think they can rightly be referred to as having a gun fetish, and I think the society as a whole can be said to have a gun fetish, even it doesn’t apply to you personally, which it may not.
One thing that bothers me about your statement. You talked about protecting yourself via deadly force against nosy police officers. The police are documented as being very scared of deadly encounters over issues small and large. Some of those fears are groundless and based on racist assumptions, but they exist. Scared police seems to me a recipe for a deadly encounter, not necessarily an avoidance of nuisance. Were it me, obviously I’d want the police not to do the Stupid Thing because it’s a Stupid Thing, rather than because they are afraid I’d kill them (and thus come to the door prepared to kill me).
Sackbut #7
If somebody breaks into my home when I am there, am I supposed to trust that they only mean to take property and nothing else? And property is vital to some people – living is done in properties, working (where you get money for food) is done in properties, some poor people are going to be living on the street if they lose their property or jobs. My home is where I take care of my 88 year old mother. It is the place I bought with money saved through decades of work. It is not my life but it sustains two lives (five if you count my Mom’s cats). If somebody breaks into my place, I may just be a tad protective of both life and property. Anybody who does not want to deal with a brute like myself can just, well, not break into homes.
What I wrote on the police question was “And it makes me wonder how Americans would react if police starting showing up on our doorsteps to “check our thinking” because something we tweeted upset a man who claims to be a woman. I doubt the cops here would think that would be a safe practice for them.”
I was not talking at all about my possible personal reaction to this practice. I am wondering if people having guns makes officials less likely to try and do Stupid Things in the first place. The police in places like Portland may just roll their eyes and stand down when politicians in charge tell them to let the city burn. The police here may decide to tell the politicians to take a flying leap if the politicians tell them to become the thought police — when police know that, yes, armed civilians might become very angry about having their thoughts checked. The police may decide that if the politicians want our thoughts checked, the politicians can do that all by themselves.
Southwest, are you suggesting that police conducting duties ought to be afraid for their lives? Yes, those sorts of tweet inspections are stupid, intrusive, and cause a chilling effect to free speech… but does that warrant a fear that they might be shot at any moment? I will remind you that this rationale is precisely why American police lead the developed world* in killing civilians. The idea that their lives are in danger in every encounter is deliberately included in their training, giving them a relative hair trigger compared to police elsewhere.
You point out the fact that women in UK are largely unarmed and get killed and raped, as if to suggest that this would not be the case if they were armed. Are the women of USA not being raped and killed too? Just as with police, USA leads the developed world in the lethality of its crime statistics. If there are reductions of some types of crime in USA relative to other developed nations, it seems to me that this is more than offset by the likelihood of death due to the prevalence of guns.
It is not the desire to defend you and yours that is being called a fetish, it is the general cultural obsession with this idea that firearm prevalence increases safety, in total defiance of the statistics on the matter. I don’t know if that specifically to you or not.
* “Developed world” – a poorly defined term, but bear this article in mind before pointing to the likes of Mexico and Brazil.
Let’s do a wee thought experiment. If criminals knew that when committing crimes they could face heavily armed, trigger happy cops who like nothing better than blowing away unarmed children, they may be less likely to choose that criminal activity.
How’s that working out for you America? Because it doesn’t even work in New Zealand.
OTOH, the knowledge that your house contains guns could be an incentive to burglars, as guns are among the most frequently stolen property. About 380,000 guns are stolen each year in America. Though most of them are stolen from vehicles, advertising your gun possession may increase rather than decrease, the likelihood your house will be burgled.
I assume this is in response to my comment about people using deadly force in defense of property. I was not talking about home invasions. I was talking about things like:
* Walking around someone else’s town with a rifle at the ready while a peaceful protest is going on;
* Brandishing a handgun because someone took a shortcut across one’s driveway;
* Shooting at a dog that had been “borrowing” toys from the yard.
These are made-up examples based on real incidents, but I hope they illustrate the point. If you are a reasonable person and would never engage in such acts, great, but please don’t assume that all of this is about you or that all gun owners are as reasonable as you.
A major problem with all of these thought experiments is the same problem with introductory economics text books; they begin with the assumption that people act in their rational self-interest, which always means the rational self-interest of the thought-experimenter or text book writer. But violent street criminals do not operate in the world of textbook writers or suburban homemakers; what a violent street criminal regards, rightly, as their immediate self-interest would horrify and appall a professor or a homeowner.
In the former case, it is often *failing* to commit a violent felony which puts someone or their family at risk of death or grievous bodily harm, through gang affiliation, social pressure, or the simple economics of needing to secure a living. In the milieu in which violent criminals operate, going to prison or even facing a potentially-armed homeowner or police officer is simply part of the cost of doing business, and the uncertainty of such an encounter is preferable to the certainty of an armed encounter with a rival organisation or violent discipline from one’s superiors.
For many book-writers and thought-experimenters, going to prison for years on account of a violent felony is as alien and terrifying a concept as getting drafted into a war or actually experiencing an alien invasion. For people who grow up in crime-ridden environments, with relatives and mentors who have been to prison for such crimes, such a fate feels like a far more realistic one than, say, going to the Ivy Leagues. Couple this with the short-term benefits that, say, dealing drugs or armed robbery can bring, and a violent young man will have a very different risk-to-reward calculation to a middle-aged homeowner or professor. Couple this with the simple fact that, in a free society, a significant number of crimes are never solved, and a significant proportion of the solved crimes fail to result in a conviction because of the hurdle of evidence, and the calculation tilts even more in the direction of committing a violent felony than in avoiding one, for the kind of person in the kind of milieu where such crime is common and expected.
In reality, guns for home defence are only useful if they are stored in multiple areas across a property where a well-trained resident has ready access to them, either loaded or immediately loadable under a high-stress circumstance where someone is unprepared to spring into action (from a dead sleep, or a midday nap, or when popping inside during a summer barbecue, or returning unexpectedly from an extended vacation, etc). And “well-trained” means exactly that; one should not only be proficient in the loading, maintenance, and operation of the firearm upon a human target in a high-stress situation, one should drill specifically for accessing the nearest weapon under these circumstances as well, for every weapon stored on the property, such that as soon as one can determine that a violent felony is taking place, one can rely upon muscle memory to retrieve, load, and bring the weapon to bear upon the intruder.
If someone is able and willing to devote enough of their time to this training, to the maintenance of said firearms, to the philosophical understanding that they will be using a firearm to end someone’s life, and to ensuring that said firearms are not stolen or misused by the untrained members of the household or their friends, then one stands a decent change (but only a decent chance) of not having one of those weapons used in a tragic mishap from a child or an untrained buffoon or an angry spouse or a suicidal family member. And, in the actual event of a home invasion, there is still a decently-high chance that a gun will be simply taken off of you and used against you by the invader, who (at least in the US) will have a casual familiarity with firearms and a disregard for interpersonal violence that it is difficult for middle-class homeowners and professional book-writers to imagine.
In order to be an effective deterrent in the home, a gun must be loaded and easily available. Which also plays into the hands of a home invader because they have been awake and alert for at least long enough to plan the burglary and enter the home by mischeivous means. Also, since eyes are generally not dillated when coming out of a sleep it takes time to focus, and if the occupant needs corrective lenses is at all the more of a disadvantage. The only effective way to repel an invader wtih a gun is to shoot to kill, and so with all these disadvantages, it is more difficult in the dark when startled and fearful and not yet focused to hit a narrow target such as the heart or head than it is on a gun range with ear muffs and a coach. Keep in mind, too, that to have a gun ready in your home it is also ready and available for a curious child.
We also know that kids coming home unexpectedly and trying to be discreet, may be mistaken for burglars, and there are cases of kids coming home unexpectedly from college being shot by their parents. About 10 years ago, I was traveling to Lincoln, Nebraska, and had written the address of my nephew’s house incorrectly so knocking at the door at 10:30 by the older woman who answered the door may have led to me being shot by a frightened homeowner.
Security experts will tell you that the safest way to defend your home is with a non-lethal disabling mechanism such as pepper spray. Sprays have a wide spread so your accuracy doesn’t need to be as close as it does with a gun and if it is your child there will be anger and death, but not surprise. If you spray someone you can hold them at bay until the police arrive, and not have to live with the fact that you have killed someone.
We know that the 2A was largely in place and sold for the reasons that it would give people some recourse if the government became tyrannical, say for example by claiming the results of an election were fraudulent; others claim is was passed to enable to the militias that rounded up runaway slaves. I don’t recall any argument that it was intended for self-defense nor for hunting.
And an armed society is not a polite society. It is a tense society.
In every self defense class I’ve taken (always at the “request” of my employer – scare quotes indicate the lack of voluntary status of that request), it has been emphasized that if you pull a weapon, you must be prepared to use it. I know I am far from the only woman who has been “requested” to take these courses, nor the only woman who has complied. Also men, though men seem less likely to receive these “requests”, at least in the jobs I have held.
So the idea that someone will pull a gun with no intent to shoot is, at best, a crap shoot (pardon the pun; it was not intended, but was noticed).
“Goddammit, Dad! How typical of you to gun… me… down… like…”
†
(Sorry, couldn’t resist)
#11: “…guns are among the most frequently stolen property.” Can you provide a source for this?
Interesting discussion. Couple of more thoughts. Working with the police over the years (treating them, working on gang abatement and domestic violence programs in concert), they shared a couple more useful facts: 1) more than 20% of trained police officers killed in the line of duty are killed with their own weapon. 2) Police are trained that if you are within 21 ft of a violent perp you are withing their kill radius. Consider what relevance this has to home defense.
Also consider what effect having a firearm has on fear inducing situations. Does having a gun make one more prone fight as opposed to flight?
Finally, if you have not, I encourage you to attend a large gun show at least once in your life. I promise that for most it will be an eye opening experience.
#17,
https://www.statista.com/statistics/252440/property-stolen-and-recovered-in-the-us-by-type-and-value/
In terms of home burglaries, it’s money, jewelry, electronics, cars, and firearms, because they’re easy to resell.
iknklast:
That’s never made any sense to me, having both taken and taught hundreds of self defence and martial arts classes.
*Is bombarded with unlikely hypotheticals involving someone taking a gun off me because I didn’t shoot them, then shooting me with it*
Well, maybe. I don’t know anything about guns apart from having to shoot rabbits to eat when I was a kid (on a farm, not, like, the neighbour’s pets). I’ve taken a few courses on negotiating with people who have guns, but fortunately zero experience. But the aphorism seems like bullshit to me.
Now:
latsot, remember, this is Amurica. And I grew up in (and attended most of these sessions in) Oklahoma. And we were also told to use car keys. Yeah. Good thing I was never attacked by a stranger after dark on a deserted road; following that advice could have made me a dead otter instead of a living one. No, most of the attacks on me tend to be from loved ones, and I had no defense, even though my father had plenty of guns. (He used them for hunting, not home defense, and kept them unloaded and locked when he wasn’t hunting or target shooting.)
Now I carry pepper spray. It’s too bad it took my dog being killed by a pit bull to make that happen.
iknklast, to be clear: car keys can be a moderately effective weapon if you really know how to use them, but you are almost certainly much better off keeping your hands free and your keys and phone somewhere you can easily get at them. Guns aside, if you have to use a weapon to defend yourself in your home, try not to use a knife and definitely not a kitchen knife. Use a stick.
I’d always heard that all guns were loaded and that all force is deadly force. The minute you threaten someone with a firearm you’ve already passed into the realm that they *could* have died so that should be the expected outcome rather than a mere threat.
Blood Knight:
Yeah, that makes sense. If you have a weapon, you should be prepared for the consequences. Not just the consequences of using it, but the consequences of upping the ante. I’d say that’s true just of carrying a weapon (of any kind) not only brandishing one, threatening someone with it or shooting someone.
But “if you pull a weapon, you must be prepared to use it” doesn’t make sense, assuming “use it” means shooting someone. Can’t I pull it to threaten someone if I have no intention of shooting them?
I’m assuming it means something like “if you pull a weapon, you must be prepared to accept the consequences, which might involve upping the ante to the extent that you have to shoot someone”.
But if it does, they should say that. It just seems like something that people say because it sounds kind of cool.
Anyway, off-topic and I’m just rambling because it annoys me. I’ll stop.