According to the NRA-ILA daily update that I received last night, on June 11th, the governor of Alaska signed into law a Vermont-style right-to-carry bill. I couldn't believe my eyes, frankly -- I never thought I'd see the day when another state would go "Vermont carry", even though Oklahoma has come close on one or two occasions.
Go, Alaska! *grin*
Right to carry what?!? Someone's kid?
Yea - Vt. does seem to be a "right to carry" place for most women, doesn't it?
Posted by: Shaw at June 13, 2003 10:19 PMLOL... I take it there's a high rate of "sperm-poisoning" (i.e. reproduction) in that state?
Posted by: Moggy at June 13, 2003 10:44 PMYES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted by: Shaw at June 14, 2003 12:13 AMThe funny thing is: it was easy to "get some" in Vermont. In (my birthplace of) Baltimore, they have the highest amount of VD in the country. I always end up in the weirdest places...
Posted by: Shaw at June 14, 2003 12:15 AMWow, I didn't know that about Baltimore, I figured the SF Bay Area would win tops in the VD department...
I have to admit, the first thing that comes to mind when you file "high pregnancy rate" under a post about extremely light gun laws in a particular state is to ask: is there a connection there in terms of "conservative" attitudes? (i.e. feeling the highest calling of a female is to reproduce, in favor of no restrictions on guns, etc.) It certainly strikes me as something that coule be connected, despite Parrish's tales of the area -- considering he calls himself liberal yet is the most conservative person I've *ever* known, I have to ask for outside opinions on the state! :*)
Posted by: Moggy at June 14, 2003 12:29 AMNo - It's just that I couldn't figure out what Parrish was saying until I saw the "NRA" referenced in his sentence. That and I'm thinking of a friend of mine who's preggies for the NINTH time - she's under 27.
*Nine* times, before age 27? Er, she does grasp what *causes* it, right? I'm 26 myself, the idea of being pg even once by this age is creepy -- 9 times is horrifying to think about. All I can say, man, is thank zog that can't happen to me! *shudder*
Posted by: Moggy at June 14, 2003 01:06 PMUm,
er...
yea - she does grasp what causes it. And that, right there, is the problem.
Posted by: Shaw at June 14, 2003 01:29 PMSpeaking of guns, I was wondering if someone here could make a recommendation for a first pistol - mechanically reliable, but not too expensive. I've seen recommendations for a .357 magnum, as the self defense capacity is good, and I can use .38 rounds for less noise and recoil for target practice. I know Sparrow likes .22 cal, and yes, they are lethal, but I don't feel comfortable waiting a few minutes for any potential assailant to lose enough blood to pass out. :)
I am in New York State (not NYC thank goodness), so obtaining a carry permit is probably going to be difficult, but hopefully not impossible. :/
Posted by: Matt at June 15, 2003 04:09 AM"I know Sparrow likes .22 cal, and yes, they are lethal, but I don't feel comfortable waiting a few minutes for any potential assailant to lose enough blood to pass out."
I should clarify that I like .22 cal for *FUN* not for self-defense. If someone breaks into my home, they're more likely to be staring down the barrel of a Mauser or even more likely to be confronted by my partner and myself with our matching pair of Tec-9s (yes, we picked up a second one.) For home defense, I love the Tec-9. It's accurate in pistol range (people who claim it's not accurate are usually trying to shoot rifle distances with it) it's inexpensive (if you know how to shop) and it's very reliable (if you keep it very clean. People who say it jams never clean theirs.)
For conceal carry in public, however, the Tec-9 and its cousins are just too big (unless you're a giant like my partner. At 6'6" he can carry a Tec-9 concealed in his jacket. It's just amazing.)
I'd reccomend not getting a revolver because in self-defense you want something that cycles quickly and revolvers do not fit that description. It's also much easier to re-load when all you have to do is cram a new magazine in. Yes, there are speed loaders for revolvers, but they're still not very fast compared to a pre-loaded magazine. Always carry at least one extra magazine with you. No matter how much stopping power your firearm has, it will take more than one magazine to put down someone on serious drug, someone large and determined or someone running on mounds of adrenaline.
You want to make sure you don't have too much recoil in your firearm because that, too, will slow your rate of fire and that's a bad thing when it comes to self-defense.
"I can use .38 rounds for less noise and recoil for target practice."
ALWAYS practice with what you carry. That goes for ammunition as well as firearm. ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS practice with what you carry. If you must practice with cheaper ammunition, end your practice sessions with the ammunition you will carry. ALWAYS. In the split second of crisis, you want *everything* to be familiar, including the recoil and noise of the bullets.
I also recommend firing off a few bullets (no more than a few because you don't want to damage your hearing) without hearing protection so that when a crisis situation comes (during which you will have no time to put on hearing protection) you will know what to expect when you squeeze that trigger. You don't want to be so startled by the loud noise you just made that you can't get another round off.
When in a life-or-death situation, fire until your gun is empty. Contrary though it seems, this will go better for you in court. If you put four bullets in someone, a lawyer can claim you were in perfect control of what you were doing and used unnecessary force. If you empty the magazine, your lawyer can claim that you were in mortal fear of your life and thus shot until the gun was empty. Don't re-load unless the guy is still coming after you. Sick though it is, it is better for you to kill the attacker than to wound him and leave him able to make up lies in court. There are some good books out there about the law, self-defense and firearms. Read one or two and consider talking to a lawyer before you start carrying. There are so many little nit-picky things like what you do or don't say before you open fire, how far away you are from your attacker, etc. that it is better to know *before* a bad situation arises. Self-defense is not just about being able to protect your life in a crisis moment, it is also about being able to protect your freedom afterwards.
I won't recommend a specific firearm for you, because everyone is different. What fits my hand well and doesn't offer too much recoil might be a poor fit for your hand and have too much or too little recoil for your tastes.
What I will recommend is this: join a firing range and make friends who will let you fire rounds through their pistols. Find one of the firing ranges that rent firearms to use on location (I'm sure there are plenty around you if you live in a populated area. Just get out the phone book and start calling around.) Take advantage of their rentals to try out different kinds of firearms to see how they work for you.
Unless you have the budget to be a collector like we are, your best bet is to never buy a firearm unless you have already fired that model and know what you're getting into. Even when you think you've found the ideal firearm, talk to other owners and learn about things like whether it's very finicky about cleaning (some guns are, some aren't), whether it's very difficult to take apart and put back together (some guns I can do in my sleep with bare hands, others require tools and are very difficult, others require a level of brute hand-and-arm strength that I just don't have.) Check into the cost and availability of the ammunition for the firearms you're interested in. There's no point in getting the perfect firearm if it uses ammunition that's so expensive you can never practice.
Also, find out more about the specific attitudes in your region. For example, here, I have no legal problems at all protecting my home with a Tec-9. Where you live, I'd imagine you would be crucified for using that particular firearm to defend your home. Different areas also have different attitudes about things like hollow point bullets. Find out which firearms, methods and ammunition are considered "frightening" in your particular region so that you can avoid using self-defense equipment that's more likely to get you branded as "evil" in court.
Now that I've given you way too much to think about, good luck choosing a firearm and getting a carry permit. Put some planning and patience into the decision and it will pay off in having an excellent firearm from the start.
Posted by: Sparrow at June 15, 2003 04:02 PM"Sick though it is, it is better for you to kill the attacker than to wound him and leave him able to make up lies in court."
When second-amendment activists start talking about murdering other people in order to keep them from bringing things to the court system, *that* is what totally undermines your whole argument in the eyes of those that might otherwise support you, to put it mildly. Yes, I admit that the judicial system is severely flawed, but the reason there is so strong a bias against guns is precisely because of the "better them dead than me in trouble" attitude, which in itself makes gun owners as a group look less like rational human beings protecting their rights and more like the "scary gun nuts" that others refer to them as.
Posted by: Moggy at June 15, 2003 05:32 PMMy partner woke up and I asked him the question and he added:
get whatever gun the local cops carry.
hollow points won't get you in trouble so long as they're legal in your state.
If someone is attacking me and is going to take my life, I have no reason to believe they won't lie in court.
I don't support intentionally walking up, putting the gun to their head and executing them, but the only way to ensure that they don't kill me is to seriously disabled them. To that end, I will empty my gun into them. If they are still coming after me, I will reload and empty the gun again.
(oh yeah, that was something else my partner added. Always reload. It still shows restraint (more restraint, even) if you reload but do not continue to fire. Additionally, the criminal may have others with him who are also armed and an unloaded gun is less than useless.)
Chances are, if I empty my gun into someone at the range at which I could reasonably consider to feel threatened by them, they will be dead.
I have no remorse about killing someone who was intending to kill me.
I have no trust that someone who was intending to kill me will not lie in court.
I have no problem with the fact that emptying my firearm into a criminal who wants to kill me will probably kill them.
Fence-sitters will always find any reason to slip to one side or the other of the fence. It is not my duty to misrepresent my side of the fence to them in order to try to trick them into slipping over to this side.
Posted by: Sparrow at June 15, 2003 06:52 PMI know I said I was off the posting thing, but I'm at Starbucks with my daughter and I read this exchange and could not help but comment. How often does someone enter someone else's home with the express purpose of killing them? The rationale behind gun use here doesn't seem to be self defense, because if it was, then one simple handgun (with no bells, whistles, or hollow point bullets) would be all that was necessary, right? More than that would have to be supported by some sort of paranoid fantasy about the government's takeover of our civil liberities, which to be honest, would be asking a lot of a government that for several years tried to classify ketchup as a vegetable. Sparrow, you and your partner seem better armed that most of the western world. Obviously, unless you're hiding some untapped uranium mine or the Hope diamond under the couch, I think you're probably safe where you're at. I'm always interested by anxiety of gun owners at their fellow man and their feeling of security in knowing they have a gun (apparently unaware that statistically, they are more likely to kill themselves or a loved one than actually stop a potential intruder). Seriously, because even in a bad neighborhood, break ins are usually theft related and thus present little immediate physical danger as long as no one tries to be a hero. This is not to justify or dismiss the severity of the crime, but rather, to point out a fact. Having a gun does not stop said break in or scare the thief away before the fact, it just makes it more bloody. Why do people steal? Also, I can hardly imagine our founding fathers envisioning Sparrow toting her tec-9 around the house when they wrote the second amendment. Then if they did, maybe they were wrong -- I know my father was wrong about a lot of things ;o)
Oh yeah, happy father's day out there to all the papis in da hood!
Posted by: MissIndependant at June 15, 2003 09:15 PMI'm hardly racked with anxiety. As a collector, I have a responsiblity to make sure that my gun collection is not stolen and used to commit crimes. No one is likely to break in if they think someone is home, but if they believe no one is home or if they believe they can sneak in and out without waking us, there is as much a chance that someone would break into my house as anyone else's -- more, in fact, since I have a large collection of something criminals would want. They can only get ten bucks for your television set but my collection of vintage WWII firearms is quite a valuable find.
Before you chalk gun ownership up as hopeless paranoia, you might want to read a few stories from people whose lives were saved by guns:
http://www.aware.org/success/successindex.shtml
Posted by: Sparrow at June 15, 2003 10:42 PM>The rationale behind gun use here doesn't seem to
>be self defense, because if it was, then one
>simple handgun (with no bells, whistles, or hollow
>point bullets) would be all that was necessary,
>right?
The Tec-9 is a simple handgun, operating on the blowback principle. No difficult locking cams or barrel-frame-pin alignment issues to deal with. It's loaded with 'regular' bullets, which to illustrate the grand ignorance of it all, are more likely to penetrate walls, schools, and the bodies of children than the hollowpoint - a bullet used by police and anyone not bound by the Geneva Convention as a military combatant.
>More than that would have to be supported by
>some sort of paranoid fantasy about the
>government's takeover of our civil liberities,
>which to be honest, would be asking a lot of a
>government that for several years tried to
>classify ketchup as a vegetable.
Perhaps you wouldn't be so cavalier if it were your rights that were the ones being taken away.
Maybe, perhaps, you'd think a little differently if your fundamental right to, say, your daughter was the one being challenged here.
>Sparrow, you and your partner seem better armed
>that most of the western world.
I'm no better armed than the local police.
>Obviously, unless you're hiding some untapped
>uranium mine or the Hope diamond under the
>couch, I think you're probably safe where you're
>at.
And that can be attributed by the civility of my fellow man brought on by firearms.
> I'm always interested by anxiety of gun owners
>at their fellow man and their feeling of
>security in knowing they have a gun
I trust my fellow man. I even trust him far enough to be armed.
> (apparently
>unaware that statistically, they are more likely
>to kill themselves or a loved one than actually
>stop a potential intruder).
Statistically, your child getting loaded on alcohol and killing me in a DUI is more likely.
Perhaps I should take your child away....
>Seriously, because even in a bad neighborhood,
>break ins are usually theft related and thus
>present little immediate physical danger as long
>as no one tries to be a hero.
So you're saying I should just give up my things and go about my way? Let my partner get raped just so some pathetic lowlife who illegally enters my abode gets to walk away another day?
Who's the one with their head in the clouds here, Beavis?
>This is not to justify or dismiss the severity
>of the crime, but rather, to point out a fact.
It does dismiss the severity of the crime - it's my home and life being violated, and you're asking me to stand there while it gets put at risk. Sorry- that's not going to happen.
>Having a gun does not stop said break in or
>scare the thief away before the fact, it just
>makes it more bloody.
I've stopped a breakin with a firearm twice now. The thief wisely chose to leave the premises before I shot them dead.
> Also, I can hardly imagine our founding fathers
>envisioning Sparrow toting her tec-9 around the
>house when they wrote the second amendment.
Our founding fathers envisioned the people of this great nation having the ability to function as a militia to defend themselves and their families and property from threats both foreign and domestic. That militia, in the scope of the era, was armed with cutting-edge military weapons including cannons, mortars, and rockets. I'd suggest reviewing some contemporary scholarship on the issue before opening mouth and inserting foot again.
> Then if they did, maybe they were wrong -- I
>know my father was wrong about a lot of things
>;o)
I'm sorry your parents weren't up to par - I sincerely hope you aren't repeating that mistake with your daughter. :)
Posted by: Robert Furtkamp at June 15, 2003 11:28 PM> (apparently
>unaware that statistically, they are more likely
>to kill themselves or a loved one than actually
>stop a potential intruder).
That particular statistical "fact" was built on a faulty premise.
Dr. Arthur Kellerman of the Emory University School of Public Health claimed in a 1986 New England Journal of Medicine study that having a firearm in the home is counter-productive. He reported “a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder.”
Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D., editor of the Medical Sentinel, the journal of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons pointed out that Dr. Kellerman’s analysis ignored the vast majority of benefits from defensive uses of guns. Since only 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of defensive uses of guns involve the death of the criminal, Dr. Kellerman’s study underestimated the protective benefits of firearms — in terms of lives saved, injuries prevented and related medical costs — by a factor of as much as 1,000.
So, no, statistically a firearm owner is exponentially more likely to stop a potential intruder or other criminal than to harm themselves or their family with their firearms.
The whole argument about the Founding Fathers not predicting advances in weapons technology doesn't hold water in any event. By that logic, the Internet would not be subjected to First Amendment protection because the Founding Fathers couldn't have predicted that technology, either.
Posted by: Zathras at June 16, 2003 12:25 AMActually, in Texas I believe you are allowed to use deadly force not only in protection of your life, but in protection of your PROPERTY.
This means you may shoot someone that broke into your house and is dragging off your TV, even if they are not threatening you personally.
Thank you, Sparrow, for that great post, and thank you everyone for the dialog. I am printing it out for rereading later.
Posted by: Matt at June 16, 2003 01:17 AM