5291

Also, everyone should watch John Oliver’s segment on NRATV.

5292

And they’re all packing which is why you always have to have a bigger gun or your not safe. And if you only give 6 or 10 shots you’re clearly going to be 20 or 30 bullets short of being safe too.

5293

In what universe, after you shoot one guy, do the other two keep coming? Did you piss off the Spetznaz (sp)?

5294

And this is how the NRA became the most powerful organization in America, despite being a bunch of crazy people.

Also, we should totally trust the cops to save us cause they’re great people.

5295

A rocket launcher is also an excellent weapon for self-defense, which has absolutely nothing to do with what I said.

A shotgun and a revolver are adequate for any sane definition of home defense in any society that dares to call itself civilized. If we live in a society where they are not adequate, then we have some big problems to solve – and we need to begin by taking away the fucking semiautomatics.

Will that be hard to do? Yup. Will it take decades? Yup. Will it piss off a bunch of gun-loving loonies? Yup. Nonetheless, I refuse to believe that we are unable to achieve what literally every other developed country has managed to do.

5296

So how come every other developed country doesn’t have to shrug at a bloodbath every week? If you say ‘because our culture is special’ I’m gonna fucking scream.

Seriously, folks. The problem is solved. We’re just too dumb to implement the solution.

5297

Look, last time I was in my gated Hawaii community and three or more armed men broke into my house with the intent to rape my wife and sell my children to Venezuelan sex traffickers, you can be damn sure I was glad for my semiautomatic weapon that I kept responsibly in a safe unloaded with its ammo locked up in another room.

Fuckin’ libtards.

5298

Yeah I’m going to talk to the guy who says a rocket launcher is a good for home defense like anything he says can be taken seriously.

I had plenty more to say, but you don’t fucking care you just want to pretend to be superior and better than everyone else, even though you aren’t. Your ignorance is magical and special after all.

5299

Well, I wouldn’t fire it inside the house. Be great for stopping those tactical pickup trucks I hear all the gangs are using for home invasions these days.

5300

Everyone knows the best defense against home invasion is a dog. Clearly we just need to change the NRA to something like Never Regret, Animals, and then the NRA can pay for everyone’s pet deposit or adoption fees, they have plenty of money, and the home invaders will be highly discouraged from every entering a home. Then we set-up alarms on every window and door, new regulation because everyone loves that, and if after that they still come in… it just wasn’t meant to be.

5301

Really in what universe is a grenade or a rocket launcher a great home defense weapon. If you think they are great, then that pretty much disqualifies you from me treating your opinion of adequate seriously.

Hell a Prius, or worse a Nissan Versa is an adequate vehicle for probably 95% of the trips in this country a flip top phone is an adequate communication device.

As for this being a fantasy scenario that a AR 15 is useful for defending. The amnesia on this place is pretty awful. This incident happened just last November. While I have not found a site for statistics on the use of AR-15 style weapons for self-defense, a quick google finds dozens examples. Overall the low estimate for self-defense uses of firearms is over 100,000 per year the high estimate is over two million. "Assault rifles represent at least 5% of the 350 million firearms, but less than 10%. This implies they are used many thousands of times a year for defense, at or 10-100x more often than they are used for mass shootings.

A few minutes after 11 a.m. CST, on November 5, 2017, Devin Patrick Kelley arrived in his pearl white Ford Explorer SUV at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs. He parked close to the door, in a spot vacated by a parishioner with chronic lower back problems who had left the Sunday services early.[citation needed]

About 11:20 a.m., Kelley stepped out of the SUV, wearing black tactical gear, a ballistic vest, and a black face-mask featuring a white skull,[6] and wielding an AR-15 pattern Ruger AR-556 semi-automatic rifle. He approached the church from the right, opening fire on and killing two people outside the church and continuing to fire on the building itself. He then entered through a right side door, where worshipers were attending regular Sunday service.[citation needed]

Inside, he yelled, “Everybody die, motherfuckers,” as he proceeded up and down the aisle and shot at people in the pews.[6][7] Police found 15 empty magazines capable of holding 30 rounds each.[8][9][10] According to investigators, the shooting was captured on a camera set up at the back of the church to record regular services for uploading online. The footage shows Kelley methodically shooting the victims, pausing only to reload his rifle.[11]

As Kelley left the church, he was confronted by and traded fire with Stephen Willeford, a local resident and former NRA firearms instructor[12] who was armed with an AR-15 pattern semi-automatic rifle. Willeford had taken cover behind a truck across the street from the church and shot Kelley twice, once in the leg and in the upper left torso under his tactical gear.[13][14][15] Kelley, who had dropped his rifle upon the initial fire with Willeford, fired back with a handgun before fleeing in his Ford Explorer. Willeford fired one more round as Kelley sped north on FM 539.[16][17] He then noticed a pickup truck parked at the intersection of 4th St. and FM 539, driven by Johnnie Langendorff.

5302

There was an accident when I was a kid in the paper. The guy not wearing a belt experienced less injuries than the person who was because he was thrown from the car before it was hit again. Clearly, since it happened once, no one should ever wear a seat-belt.

5303

How is this relevant to what I said?

5304

Just because it happened once doesn’t negate the facts of the aggregate. We know other systems work better. We have other countries we can look at for that.

I am not especially anti-gun, but this I need an AR-15 for defense of my home it’s… it’s pretty thin if it holds water at all.

5305

It does no such thing. That implication would only follow if we knew that the distribution of weapon models used for self-defense was proportional to the total number in circulation. That proposition is unsupported, and seems facially improbable.

Additionally, if your goal is to support the idea that banning semiautomatics would reduce your level of safety, you’d have to establish not just how often they’re actually used in self-defense situations, but in how many of those scenarios a different type of gun wouldn’t have sufficed to scare off the attacker.

5306

That’s part of the reason, to be sure; but it’s more due to insane rabblerousing by the NRA encouraged by evil politicians. Because in the 20th century no one was seriously ever considering a federal ban on rifles or pistols, so there was no reason to fear that outcome then or now. And yet in many other more civilized countries around the world, that ban is in effect, resulting in vastly diminished murder and gun violence rates.

And as for the police, do you seriously believe the best response to police criminality is to shoot them? That’s insane. If you kill a cop for the best of reasons you’re dead meat. Even conceding that many police and sheriff departments – in St. Louis county, for example – are corrupt and partly criminal, obviously the best approach to fixing the situation is to organize politically to reform them, not to arm yourself against them.

5307

We’ve gone over this ad nauseam in this thread. All of those estimates are from phone surveys and such with people self-reporting self-defense use. That could include everything from brandishing to turning on your porch lights while holding your gun because a cat ran by and you thought it was the Russians. What’s clear is that there’s very little actual data, thanks to our wonderful Congress. Heck, you can’t even get accurate statistics on police shootings, much less private gun owners.

I’d be incredibly shocked if there were anywhere near 100K incidents of gun self-defense per year where the gun was actually needed (e.g., there was actually a true threat that needed deterring and/or would not have been deterred simply by shouting or turning on some lights), much less actually shooting the gun once in self-defense. Forgot firing a high number of rounds.

5308

There is moderate evidence to support conclusions that background checks reduce firearm suicides and firearm homicides, and that laws prohibiting the purchase or possession of guns by individuals with some forms of mental illness reduce violent crime, according to the analysis. There also is moderate evidence that stand-your-ground laws, which allow people to use guns to defend themselves without requiring that they first attempt to retreat, if possible, may increase state homicide rates.

HOWEVER:

Looking forward, the RAND team recommends that the federal government increase funding for gun research to levels comparable to federal research investments in other significant causes of death and injury, such as automobile accidents. In addition, the focus of research should expand to include the effects that policies have on defensive gun use, gun ownership, hunting and recreation activities, jobs in the gun industry and officer-involved shootings.

“Issues beyond gun violence are often central considerations in gun policy debates, but we identified no qualifying research examining most of them. If we had better information on the effects of gun laws on some of these issues, we would be in a better position to develop fair and effective gun laws,” Morral said.

Chances this will happen with Republicans in control at the state and national level?
Effectively zero.

5309

I agree with you. The data is pretty shitty and not worth fighting about again. But brandishing weapon is still useful for self-defense, and thankful the vast majority of use of weapons for home defense don’t involve shooting. Criminals don’t use assault rifles for crimes, because they aren’t easy to conceal and attract a lot of attention.

If you want to deter potential a criminal or just clear out the druggies from getting high on your property an AR-15 sends a pretty clear message that you mean business more than .22 pistol , The intimidation factor shouldn’t be discounted. If I lived in high crime area with poor police response, I definitely get an AR-15 just for that reason.

You may be right that there isn’t 100,000 cases where a gun is actually needed. Not would I disagree that cases of home owner needing to empty a clip is even rarer. But lets keep in mind how raremass shootings most years under 10 and those involve an assault rifle almost always handful at most. So I stand by most assertation that there is an order magnitude more uses of assault rifles to for defensive purposes than for mass murder each year.

5310

I am unconvinced that a AR-15 is more intimidating than a shotgun (especially indoors, at close quarters), but to each his own, I guess.