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I'm someone you would describe as "anti 2A". I still think the "defense against home invasion" style argument is mostly nonsense. It's super rare, and I don't t

I'm someone you would describe as "anti 2A". I still think the "defense against home invasion" style argument is mostly nonsense. It's super rare, and I don't think the benefits of guns outweigh the downsides for that kind of self defense. (Having been a victim of exactly such a crime, I'm glad neither I nor the burglar had a gun.) However, seeing Ukrainians take up arms to fight an invasion has caused me to re-evaluate my position in general, and I actually think an armed population is likely better than the alternative. I'm sure Finland isn't unhappy that they're heavily armed right now.

throwaway_4ever 5y ago
> It's super rare Is it? How do you define super rare? I live in a low crime US suburb and still personally know 3 homes that have been invaded: friend's next door neighbor, a house 200ft away, and the literal across the street neighbor.
- _hypx 5y ago
  Home invasion means forcefully breaking into someone's house where there are people in it. It's very different than a burglary. Burglaries are common, but the former is rare.
  - zthrowaway 5y ago
    And having a firearm to protect your life in that rare situation is still important… The police are the cleanup crew, those first 5-10 minutes you’re on your own.
    - _hypx 5y ago
      The danger of owning a firearm, especially if it is always armed for such an occurrence, is more dangerous to the household than the risk of home invasion (which again, is rare). It is an idea that people defend using the concept of "safety", but in reality is motivated by fear or hypermasculinity as the main cause.
      - daenz 5y ago
        You don't seem very open to changing your perspective, but if you care to peruse a subreddit dedicated to reporting defensive gun use in the news, it contains a ton of stories that you've likely never encountered[0]. You may disagree with many of them, but some are absolutely defensible, like an ex-boyfriend breaking into woman's apartment and beating her until she is able to shoot him[1][2] (from the front page of that subreddit). My point is, become familiar with the frequency that these reports happen before you make the claim that it's rare. 0. https://www.reddit.com/r/dgu 1. https://kfor.com/news/local/oklahoma-woman-shoots-and-kills-ex-boyfriend-during-break-in/ 2. https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/wickliffe-woman-shoots-boyfriend-after-being-struck-multiple-times-boyfriend-later-arrested
        _hypx 5y ago
        I get the feeling you have that problem in reverse. All defensive gun use is very rare. Certainly, rarer than the opposite (offensive gun use). Combined with suicide risk and accidental deaths or injuries, it is rarely justifiable. Study on this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2848468/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2848468/
        daenz 5y ago
        The CDC reports 60,000 to 2.5M instances of defensive gun use per year[0] 0. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.html#:~:text=Estimates%20of%20defensive%20gun%20use,defensive%20gun%20uses%20each%20year https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.htm....
        _hypx 5y ago
        The numbers regarding defensive gun use is very likely to end up being a classic example of commercial interests affect scientific research. Nearly all of the high numbers come from a handful of sources that have connections with the firearm industry. There are many methodology problems with their numbers too. In the relatively small amount of research on this subject that is not influenced by commercial interests, the numbers suggest that defensive gun use is very rare: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0091743515001188 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00917...
    - throw0101a 5y ago
      > And having a firearm to protect your life in that rare situation is still important… Firearms in the home actually increase your odds of death: > Access to firearms is associated with risk for completed suicide and being the victim of homicide. * https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M13-1301?articleid=1814426 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M13-1301?articleid=1... Specific examples of domestic violence against women: * https://www.vox.com/2015/10/1/18000522/guns-domestic-violence https://www.vox.com/2015/10/1/18000522/guns-domestic-violenc... There's one study that showed that even carrying a gun on your person increases your likely hoot of being shot: > Results. After adjustment, individuals in possession of a gun were 4.46 (P < .05) times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not in possession. Among gun assaults where the victim had at least some chance to resist, this adjusted odds ratio increased to 5.45 (P < .05). * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2759797/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2759797/ Generally, the idea that firearms make one safer in the home does not seem to be borne out by the statistical data.
      - zthrowaway 5y ago
        Okay... that doesn't change a thing though. People still have the right to defend themselves. I don't care if someone is stupid with a weapon. You can find occurrences of a weapon, tool, vehicles, any object, being used improperly and in an unsafe manner that can cause harm or death. All you illustrate is that being a responsible gun owner is important (which is not debated whatsoever in any firearms community.) The vast majority of law abiding gun owners are responsible with their weapons.
        throw0101a 5y ago
        > Okay... that doesn't change a thing though. People still have the right to defend themselves. The numbers seem to indicate that having a gun is actually more detrimental, on a 'net' basis, to one's well-being than not having a gun. Having a gun is more dangerous for you and yours: > But about 30 careful studies show more guns are linked to more crimes: murders, rapes, and others. Far less research shows that guns help. * https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-guns-do-not-stop-more-crimes-evidence-shows/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-guns-do-not-... > We use epidemiological theory to explain why the “false positive” problem for rare events can lead to large overestimates of the incidence of rare diseases or rare phenomena such as self-defense gun use. We then try to validate the claims of many millions of annual self-defense uses against available evidence. We find that the claim of many millions of annual self-defense gun uses by American citizens is invalid. * https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-thr... > Results. We found no robust, statistically significant correlation between gun ownership and stranger firearm homicide rates. However, we found a positive and significant association between gun ownership and nonstranger firearm homicide rates. The incidence rate ratio for nonstranger firearm homicide rate associated with gun ownership was 1.014 (95% confidence interval = 1.009, 1.019). * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4167105/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4167105/
_hypx 5y ago
It's not that hard to arm a society when war breaks out. That is the same mentality that countries like Switzerland has. The "2A argument" is quite a bit different, and has very few similarities with what is going on at the start of a war.
- Etherlord87 5y ago
  If you give out guns to people who never used them, they won't be as effective. Also I think you're underestimating the logistic difficulty of storing and transporting tens of millions of weapons (and ammunition) before blitzkrieg cuts you off. You could have a storage in each city, but you still need to move the guns to smaller towns and villages, as well as enemy spies could sabotage such transports...
  - _hypx 5y ago
    You're trying to rationalize the situation in the US, not looking at it objectively. You can quickly train people to use a firearm, including long before fighting starts. You will need to store a vast amount of military equipment anyways. Storage is highly unlikely to be an issue.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >You can quickly train people to use a firearm, including long before fighting starts. 1. It took months to vaccinate the US population. Training them to use guns would most certainly take longer. 2. Your previous comments seem to suggest you're anti-2A. What's your position here then? Are you against gun ownership, but think that if some enemy wants to invade us, there's going to be enough advance warning that we can train and arm everyone? >Storage is highly unlikely to be an issue. And what about transportation?
      - _hypx 5y ago
        You need close to 100% vaccination rates for vaccines to really work. Not so much for creating a makeshift army. This is an example of framing of the issue, and in this case it is deeply misleading. Nearly everyone wants what makes us safe. The problem is that certain groups in America have transformed that into something dangerous while disguising it as a form of safety. At some point, society will move away from this kind of thinking regardless of how it is perceived today.
bufferoverflow 5y ago
It's not super rare. We see how it plays out all the time. Protestors protest, government comes down on them hard - mass arrests, mass killings, mass civil destruction of liberties. We literally saw a version of this in Canada a month ago, where actually peaceful protesters were declared terrorists and got arrested and their money seized. It's not always about some other country's government coming on you hard, your own can be just as rotten.

throwaway_4ever 5y ago

> It's super rare Is it? How do you define super rare? I live in a low crime US suburb and still personally know 3 homes that have been invaded: friend's next door neighbor, a house 200ft away, and the literal across the street neighbor.

_hypx 5y ago
Home invasion means forcefully breaking into someone's house where there are people in it. It's very different than a burglary. Burglaries are common, but the former is rare.
- zthrowaway 5y ago
  And having a firearm to protect your life in that rare situation is still important… The police are the cleanup crew, those first 5-10 minutes you’re on your own.
  - _hypx 5y ago
    The danger of owning a firearm, especially if it is always armed for such an occurrence, is more dangerous to the household than the risk of home invasion (which again, is rare). It is an idea that people defend using the concept of "safety", but in reality is motivated by fear or hypermasculinity as the main cause.
    - daenz 5y ago
      You don't seem very open to changing your perspective, but if you care to peruse a subreddit dedicated to reporting defensive gun use in the news, it contains a ton of stories that you've likely never encountered[0]. You may disagree with many of them, but some are absolutely defensible, like an ex-boyfriend breaking into woman's apartment and beating her until she is able to shoot him[1][2] (from the front page of that subreddit). My point is, become familiar with the frequency that these reports happen before you make the claim that it's rare. 0. https://www.reddit.com/r/dgu 1. https://kfor.com/news/local/oklahoma-woman-shoots-and-kills-ex-boyfriend-during-break-in/ 2. https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/wickliffe-woman-shoots-boyfriend-after-being-struck-multiple-times-boyfriend-later-arrested
      - _hypx 5y ago
        I get the feeling you have that problem in reverse. All defensive gun use is very rare. Certainly, rarer than the opposite (offensive gun use). Combined with suicide risk and accidental deaths or injuries, it is rarely justifiable. Study on this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2848468/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2848468/
        daenz 5y ago
        The CDC reports 60,000 to 2.5M instances of defensive gun use per year[0] 0. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.html#:~:text=Estimates%20of%20defensive%20gun%20use,defensive%20gun%20uses%20each%20year https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.htm....
        _hypx 5y ago
        The numbers regarding defensive gun use is very likely to end up being a classic example of commercial interests affect scientific research. Nearly all of the high numbers come from a handful of sources that have connections with the firearm industry. There are many methodology problems with their numbers too. In the relatively small amount of research on this subject that is not influenced by commercial interests, the numbers suggest that defensive gun use is very rare: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0091743515001188 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00917...
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > And having a firearm to protect your life in that rare situation is still important… Firearms in the home actually increase your odds of death: > Access to firearms is associated with risk for completed suicide and being the victim of homicide. * https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M13-1301?articleid=1814426 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M13-1301?articleid=1... Specific examples of domestic violence against women: * https://www.vox.com/2015/10/1/18000522/guns-domestic-violence https://www.vox.com/2015/10/1/18000522/guns-domestic-violenc... There's one study that showed that even carrying a gun on your person increases your likely hoot of being shot: > Results. After adjustment, individuals in possession of a gun were 4.46 (P < .05) times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not in possession. Among gun assaults where the victim had at least some chance to resist, this adjusted odds ratio increased to 5.45 (P < .05). * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2759797/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2759797/ Generally, the idea that firearms make one safer in the home does not seem to be borne out by the statistical data.
    - zthrowaway 5y ago
      Okay... that doesn't change a thing though. People still have the right to defend themselves. I don't care if someone is stupid with a weapon. You can find occurrences of a weapon, tool, vehicles, any object, being used improperly and in an unsafe manner that can cause harm or death. All you illustrate is that being a responsible gun owner is important (which is not debated whatsoever in any firearms community.) The vast majority of law abiding gun owners are responsible with their weapons.
      - throw0101a 5y ago
        > Okay... that doesn't change a thing though. People still have the right to defend themselves. The numbers seem to indicate that having a gun is actually more detrimental, on a 'net' basis, to one's well-being than not having a gun. Having a gun is more dangerous for you and yours: > But about 30 careful studies show more guns are linked to more crimes: murders, rapes, and others. Far less research shows that guns help. * https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-guns-do-not-stop-more-crimes-evidence-shows/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-guns-do-not-... > We use epidemiological theory to explain why the “false positive” problem for rare events can lead to large overestimates of the incidence of rare diseases or rare phenomena such as self-defense gun use. We then try to validate the claims of many millions of annual self-defense uses against available evidence. We find that the claim of many millions of annual self-defense gun uses by American citizens is invalid. * https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-thr... > Results. We found no robust, statistically significant correlation between gun ownership and stranger firearm homicide rates. However, we found a positive and significant association between gun ownership and nonstranger firearm homicide rates. The incidence rate ratio for nonstranger firearm homicide rate associated with gun ownership was 1.014 (95% confidence interval = 1.009, 1.019). * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4167105/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4167105/

_hypx 5y ago

It's not that hard to arm a society when war breaks out. That is the same mentality that countries like Switzerland has. The "2A argument" is quite a bit different, and has very few similarities with what is going on at the start of a war.

Etherlord87 5y ago
If you give out guns to people who never used them, they won't be as effective. Also I think you're underestimating the logistic difficulty of storing and transporting tens of millions of weapons (and ammunition) before blitzkrieg cuts you off. You could have a storage in each city, but you still need to move the guns to smaller towns and villages, as well as enemy spies could sabotage such transports...
- _hypx 5y ago
  You're trying to rationalize the situation in the US, not looking at it objectively. You can quickly train people to use a firearm, including long before fighting starts. You will need to store a vast amount of military equipment anyways. Storage is highly unlikely to be an issue.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >You can quickly train people to use a firearm, including long before fighting starts. 1. It took months to vaccinate the US population. Training them to use guns would most certainly take longer. 2. Your previous comments seem to suggest you're anti-2A. What's your position here then? Are you against gun ownership, but think that if some enemy wants to invade us, there's going to be enough advance warning that we can train and arm everyone? >Storage is highly unlikely to be an issue. And what about transportation?
    - _hypx 5y ago
      You need close to 100% vaccination rates for vaccines to really work. Not so much for creating a makeshift army. This is an example of framing of the issue, and in this case it is deeply misleading. Nearly everyone wants what makes us safe. The problem is that certain groups in America have transformed that into something dangerous while disguising it as a form of safety. At some point, society will move away from this kind of thinking regardless of how it is perceived today.

bufferoverflow 5y ago

It's not super rare. We see how it plays out all the time. Protestors protest, government comes down on them hard - mass arrests, mass killings, mass civil destruction of liberties. We literally saw a version of this in Canada a month ago, where actually peaceful protesters were declared terrorists and got arrested and their money seized. It's not always about some other country's government coming on you hard, your own can be just as rotten.