Moderators: carlson1, Charles L. Cotton
lots more at link aboveAs Democrats press for unprecedented curbs on the right to bear arms, a Colorado Springs, Colo., pastor is recalling a high-profile incident in which a member of his church who was carrying a gun saved dozens of lives.
I was commenting on some other story out there on the Net and one of the comments was from some Canadian who said that firearms weren't really needed other than allowing "sportsmen" to have registered bolt and lever guns to hunt with, etc. He brought up that worn out mess saying that firearms were hardly ever used in defense, that they are usually taken away from their owners and used against them, blah, blah, blah...I had to point out that firearms are used successfully, in the USA, millions of times for self-defense...its just that the MSM won't report on it. It makes the local news sometimes but hardly ever gets past that level. It doesn't fit their liberal-progressive ideological agenda and they simply ignore it.jmra wrote:Doesn't fit the message the MSM wants people to hear. A very small percentage of the population will ever be aware of this story.
This bothers me a bit. "The right people". I gather from the article that those folks are current or former LEO's, which is a good idea for volunteer security. In other circumstances, I'd be concerned about who makes the choices and what constitutes "right". I wouldn't go to a church that precluded my right to carry by saying that they had "the right people" taking care of business.My church is safe because we have the right people carrying guns.”
It happens, just not nearly as often as gun-banners would like to have you think.grim-bob wrote:I always just ask for data or a specific well known example of when someones weapon was taken away and used on them. I'm sure there are stories out there but I've yet to have anyone be able to come up with factual data or even a specific event of it happening.
ELB wrote: Clayton Cramer collected almost 4,699 news online news articles between 2003 and 2011 about citizens using guns to defend themselves. He wrote a white paper on this collection, extracting some interesting statistics from this. It was originally published as a free document on the Cato Institute's website, I think, then converted to Kindle format and sells for about $3. Well worth the three bucks, and Clayton Cramer certainly deserves the support:
Tough Targets: When Criminals Face Armed Resistance from Citizens (White Paper) [Kindle Edition]
He has a chapter specifically devoted to a gun being taken away from the person wielding it. Out of the nearly 5000 stories, he counted 238 instances where a gun was taken away.
But note: the interesting part of this count was that in only 11 instances was the gun taken from the good guy by the bad guy.
In 227 cases, the good guy (often with no gun to start with) disarmed his attacker.
Having all the good guys armed is not going to be error-free. Some will do dumb things, some will have shooting accidents, some will commit crimes, some will get killed by their attacker anyway, etc. But any kind of serious look at the stats shows the "the good" far outweighs the bad when citizens are armed.