At 10:20 AM 7/8/98 -0700, mark@unicorn.com wrote:
>someone decides to rob and kill me and I point a gun at them and they run
>away, they may well just rob and kill some unarmed person instead; so the
>murder rate won't drop, but *my* chances of being murdered in that instance
>went down 100%.
If they intend to rob and kill you, then you should certainly defend yourself with any means at your disposal. But assume instead they only wish to rob you; pointing your gun at them may escalate the situation rather than resolving it in your favour. If you misjudge them and/or their weaponry, you may find yourself killed or badly hurt at the end of the encounter rather than merely robbed.
Obviously it can be difficult to discern the robber's exact intent. You can argue that your decision to use/not use your gun will be based on the unique situation; my point is that it's easy to construct hypothetical examples both for and against having a gun on hand. Does anyone know of a study that compares the outcomes of a particular crime type (e.g., mugging) between cases in which the victims had guns and those in which they did not?
>Quite possibly; we're not saying that owning a gun will magically make
>you invulnerable, nor that everyone needs to. We're saying that even if
>gun ownership didn't reduce murder rates to some extent, attempts to ban
>them are far, far less useful than other actions.
I agree. I'm not necessarily in favour of severe gun controls, just questioning the utility of owning a gun.
>Not neccesarily; we might decide to stop crossing streets, but we would
>probably work out ways to reduce the risks associated with crossing
>streets... e.g. armored bodies, remote drones linked to brains in vats,
>etc. We'd want to reduce the risks, but there are numerous ways to do
>that.
Presumably the brain vats would be located in a *very* secure place ;->
Ken Kittlitz ken@audesi.com AudeSi Technologies Inc. http://www.lucifer.com/~ken http://www.audesi.com