One does not have to look very far to find actual incidents where handguns were ineffective and it took rifle to take out the attackers.
One doesn't... and then you cite an example from two decades ago. An event which is still cited because it remains so unique among the noteworthy milestones of violent crime. That's interesting.
We will agree that we see the danger in America totally opposite. Like the classic is the glass half full or half empty. I see a nation that is actively under attack by enemies foreign and domestic.
We could agree on that, but as with my other points, I'm trying to determine how realistic and reasonable our views and our actions are. Our nation does not have more "mass shootings" than ever before. We see, as I've pointed out, cosmically low numbers of our citizens killed by terrorists. Even including the mass casualties of 9/11, it's a death rate so low that a product manufacturer would probably not even recall a product linked to those deaths.
And, let's put this in further perspective: Since 1975, about 3,030 American citizens have been killed by foreign terrorists. 2,996 of those died in airplane suicide attacks on 9/11. Nothing in the world could be farther from a "grab my rifle" response than that. So, if we were to (for some strange reason) allow that every single other American who died at the hands of terrorists in the last 42 years would have saved their own life if they'd had a rifle, that's way less than
one single person per year. In a population of over 323 MILLION people.
A statistician has a term for such a small percentage. That term is "Zero."
So, go on. Tell me again how we're actively under attack and we need to step up our personal defensive posture to ward off the wolves at our door. I'm listening....
Even worse is how many citizens are carrying weak caliber handguns. Motor vehicles have become the weapon of choice by ISIS. The attacker in NYC drove 8 blocks running down people. .380 and snubby .38 are marginal stoppers in the best of conditions. Shooting through the glass and body panel of moving vehicle? Forget it. Even with the thin lightweight materials vehicles are being made of today deep enough bullet penetration is difficult. Government and manufacturers recognize this with bullets such as Hornady Critical Duty and other heavier bullet types.
The average person who doesn't use and/or deal in drugs and who lives outside of the specific violence hot-spots in our nation's larger metro areas will go through their entire lives without ONCE needing to draw a weapon to defend themselves. Against anything. Some percentage will indeed reach for a gun to keep out an intruder from their homes, or to ward off a mugger, robber, or hold-up situation. An extremely small number might some day face a real predator type process-killer or some other kind of psychopath who just wants to kill them.
The number of people who would be in a position to even be within sight of a suicide attacker running down pedestrians in a motor vehicle is almost impossible to calculate because it's so INCREDIBLY rare. Maybe this will become a somewhat more common event. That's certainly possible. But right now we can say there's been about one. (I've read that there are 14 such attacks on record here, but only one was an Islamic terrorist incident.) Let's say that there were 200 people present on that street who were in a position to even see what was happening. Ok. Let's now assume that anyone who could SEE that scene could have shot the guy if they'd only had a rifle. That's a BIG stretch. There were probably about 10 who would have had anything like a realistic shot, but let's go with all those 200. That's 0.00006% of the US population who would have had any chance of doing something to stop that guy, if they'd just had a rifle with them...
NOT in their trunk somewhere in a parking space or on the 4th floor of a city parking deck, several minutes away, locked up, unloaded, in a case. But ALREADY IN THEIR HANDS, standing on that city street, in the 2-7 seconds either of them could possibly have had to shoot at that guy between the moment they realized something was horribly wrong and the moment he had passed by, out of their line of fire.
Is this a realistic call for (those few of us "gunny") American citizens to store rifles in their trunks? How? Why?
I realize that my view is not shared by most of the THR members. We can’t even get past open vs. conceal carry to touch on carrying larger, more powerful handguns. Moving past pocket carry is too high of cost in changing behavior.
Yes. Indeed, a sober and reasoned analysis of actual risks and odds and costs does indeed appear to suggest that inconveniencing yourself to react to THIS rising threat doesn't compute.
So more powerful effective weapons are left at home safely stored away because it is too uncomfortable to the individual to accept that events are changing very rapidly and they are not safe anywhere in America.
It doesn't seem realistic to say we're any less safe today than we were at other points in history. In fact, our rates of violent crime have dropped WAY,
WAY more significantly than our actual rates of death due to terrorism (foreign or domestic). Deaths due to violent crime happen in significant numbers. Changes in those rates mean sizable numbers of Americans who will live or die. Terrorism represents a tiny, TINY number of deaths. Even a 1,000X increase in the number of terrorist deaths per year wouldn't surpass our average everyday crime deaths. So yes, we are indeed safer today than before.
I am still waiting for documented self-defense shootings where the gun owner said "I sure am glad I didn't use a more powerful gun" or "I sure am glad my gun did not have too many bullets in it."
I'm still waiting for someone who understands math and statistics at least as well as my pathetic grasp of them to explain why I (or anyone) needs to put a rifle in their trunk to ward off the grave dangers we now face.
So far, ... crickets...
