"Shoot him! Shoot him again!"

[William Thornton]

The words in the title are those of an Atlanta area husband who had his wife on the phone in one ear and a 911 operator on the phone in his other ear.

The wife was at home alone with her nine year old twins when a stranger knocked on the door. She caller her husband at work who told her to get her gun and hide in the closet upstairs, which she did. The stranger broke in the house with a crowbar, evidently heard people upstairs and went upstairs.

The wife was on the phone with her husband who calmly says, "If he opens the door, you shoot him, you understand?"

He opened the door. She shot him...five times and missed once. At the moment he is still alive.

In the context of gun control, the timing of such a dramatic incident is striking. The woman has a gun and uses it to pepper a miscreant thug with bullets, in self defense. The gun was a .38 caliber semi-automatic. Pull the trigger and the gun shoots. Pull it again and it fires another. I'm guessing that it too her two seconds to pull it six times. Millions of Americans have such guns in their homes for self defense and recreational use.

The husband is heard to tell the 911 operator, “She shot him, a lot.”

Good for her and her two children. Gun control might have some gray areas and some prickly aspects but this example puts any policy discussion in a vivid context.

[Sandy]

The fact is that this is anectodal. In contrast to the number of incidents of gun violence in this country where someone dies as a result of being shot, there are just a tiny handful of incidents where an armed civilian intervened and prevented a shooting. I applaud this woman's bravery, but it needs to be noted that she didn't have a military assault rifle.

[Haruo]

What I usually hear quoted as a counter to this sort of anecdote is a statement that statistically Americans who keep .38s in their homes, with ammo handy if not preloaded, whether for self-defense, for recreational purposes, or whatever, are much more likely to suffer the use of their gun in an accidental shooting (whether by themselves or by one of the nine-year-olds who knows about locks) or to have their gun intentionally turned on them or a loved one (whether by an intruder or by an enraged family member, 9 or older) than they are to actually use the gun successfully in the way you recount here, William.

I am not skilled to understand and judge the validity of the statistics cited.

[ET]

Well, William, since you opened this can of worms, I guess I'll make a contribution.

Sandy, for your reading: 15yr old boy, 12 yr old sister and 1 AR-15. Two adult, male home invaders. Guess who "won"?

BTW, Sandy, the Sandy Creek guy didn't have a "military assault rifle". He had a legally purchased, semi-automatic rifle that was legal even with Connecticut's "assault rifle" ban, which was more strict than the '94 ban. One cannot buy a "military assault rifle".

You want to dismiss the incident because it is anecdotal and supposedly only one of a set of "tiny incidents". Well, the number of incidents where a so-called "assault" rifle is involved is somewhere in the less than 1% category of crimes.

Nor did I see anything about this school shooting in the Tennessee Tri-cities area (N.E. TN): (some irony here related to the current debate: an armed school resource officer held the guy at bay and the cops eventually showed up).

There was also . Dude with a concealed carry permit stopped a shooting at a mall by a guy who had stolen an AR-15. The good guy didn't have to shoot. Just pointed the gun at the shooter and the shooter shot himself.

When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

[ET]

[Tim Bonney]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... illed.html

The above article points to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health that you are 4.5 times more likely to get shot yourself if you own a gun than if you don't.

As Hauro has alluded to, the stats I've read have said consistently that while some people do manage to defend themselves with a gun, many more people are harmed by owning a gun. So if you are playing the odds and roll the dice on gun ownership you'll lose more times than you will win.

That is what's wrong with anecdotal evidence. It doesn't tell you how many other people shot themselves, their own child, got shot with their own gun, or had their gun turned on them by an intruder who found the gun etc. We need to look at facts and not single events.

[Tim Bonney]

Oh, and if we are going to talk about events with guns, a student attacked others today in California with a gun.

In the US there has been 695 gun deaths since the massacre in Newtown.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... oting.html

Yep, 695 gun deaths since Newtown.

We control talks, we control missles, we control bombs, we control explosives, we control many weapons that we don't allow the public to have. Why can't we control assault weapons? We can't we even control the manufacture of certain guns?

[Haruo]

The New Scientist report that Tim cited is an example of what I find myself incompetent to evaluate reliably (to my own satisfaction that is). It contains, for example, the assertion that "A recent study found that treating violence like an infectious disease led to a dramatic fall in shootings and killings."

What? "Merck's new 2014 violence vaccine is 89% effective against the three main strains of thuggery in the current flu season."?? And then when I click on to view that "recent study" I find that no, they didn't inoculate folks against violence, they went out and walked the streets in depressed urban areas changing people's minds about violence by "direct intervention". Not only do they claim double-digit success in reducing violence, but "Retaliation murders fell by 100 per cent in 5 of the 8 communities covered."

What??

Etc.

I am not skilled to understand...

On the other hand, I suspect that having a gun around the house would not enhance our safety.

[William Thornton]

What weapons should the public not be allowed to own?

Since every use of a gin is an anecdote, Is there any gun law that should be enacted in the interest of the greater good that would affect the anecdote I shared here, or the Newtown anecdote?

[KeithE]

[Sandy]

I don't think any further gun laws should be enacted, with the possible exception of repealing concealed carry laws in a few states. The argument that "good guys" carrying guns deters bad guys from using them can't be supported if the bad guy doesn't know the good guys walking around have a gun with them. There are laws already on the books which would take care of the problem, if they were properly enforced. That, and ending the registration bypass loopholes, accompanied by police sweeps to pick up guns without legal registration, would resolve the issue. If you want to own a gun, and you walk in to a sporting goods store to buy it, you shouldn't be able to walk out of the store with the gun in your hand until your background check paperwork has cleared.

Gun advocates love to cite Switzerland as an example of a nation where private gun ownership is higher than in the US, and yet it is a country without rampant gun violence, shooting and especially mass shooting. But if Switzerland's gun control legislation that is on the books were enacted in the United States, the NRA and its constituency would be screeching like stuck pigs. And on top of everything, there is a 65% tax levied on the assessed value of guns each year, to cover the cost of the additional law enforcement they feel they need to protect their citizens from gun violence. They are a great example of what can happen when a government tightly controls gun ownership and spends the money to provide the necessary oversight, instead of giving it back to its wealthiest citizens in the form of tax breaks.

The NRA is an overblown propaganda balloon. In this last election, with all the money they laid out for the campaigns of their political supporters, they were less effective than Karl Rove's American Crossroads in electing candidates they supported.

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/ ... lanks?lite

[Ed Pettibone]

[Dave Roberts]

[Tim Bonney]

[Stephen Fox]

Marsh of the UVA Project on Lived Theology, and the son of Bush 43 Judicial Nominee Charles Pickering's pastor Robert Marsh, is comparing the NRA culture and its religious enablers like Richard Land to the Lutheran Church complicitous with Hitler, Bonhoeffer resisted in Germany in the 30's.

Joining him in distinction to William Thornton and Land are Wake Forest's Bill Leonard--see Abpnews.com; and Catholic Scholar GArry Wills.

See this closely

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/20 ... ur-moloch/

The NRA is entangled with the religious political wedge strategies of Pressler and the late Jesse Helms. Its underbelly is sinister. Where Is Thornton's prophetic word to the NRA and the 75 percent of its rank and file to the left of Lapierre and the leadership.

Where is Thornton's understanding of the easily googled expose on the politics of the NRA for "NRA Solidarity" NPR Morning Edition a few days after the Newtown Massacre in December.

Thornton has an interesting anecdote. I'm glad the bad guys got what was coming. But Thornton is too bright to suggest this anecdote or even thousands like them should be the prevailing point from which better gun policy should derive.

On that front I hope the Biden Commission has a bigger ear to New York Governor Cuomo than to Statham Mayor Thornton.

[Ed Pettibone]

[Tim Bonney]

So Ed, you are ok with guns such as the CT killer used? Semi-automatic weapons? Large Magazines? If so why? What purpose do they serve other than as WMD?

Oh, and I'm opposed to people owning handguns too but you can't tackle all the gun problems at once.

[Ed Pettibone]

[KeithE]

[William Thornton]

Any of my mod/lib friends favor confiscation or mandatory buybacks?

[Dave Roberts]

[Stephen Fox]

Tommy Stringer is a Bob Jones Grad and St. Senator.

My response to his guest column was published last week in the Greenville Journal

http://greenvillejournal.com/opinions/i ... avity.html

[Haruo]

Seattle had a very successful buyback the other day, even turned up a used missile launcher.

[Stephen Fox]

easy google Garry Wills NY Rev books