There's also a large political faction who believe that a private right to kill people is important and inherent in gun ownership.
"private right to kill people" - hah. I assume you value the lives of criminals more than the law-abiding.
If you burglarize my home, attack me, or otherwise commit felonious acts on my property, my person, I have the right to stop that threat. You do not believe that people should have the right to protect themselves?
Just because you have an easy button for homicide doesn't mean it's called for in every hostile situation. Courts agree. Try killing someone for robbing your house.
There is no such thing as shooting to disable. You always aim for center of mass and if you do not feel threatened enough to shoot to kill then you shouldn't be shooting at all.
Now the caveat to this is if you shot an intruder and they're still alive, but now injured to the degree where you can safely disarm them and keep a gun drawn on them; current U.S law makes this a problem. You can get in legal trouble/sued by someone who broke into your home with a weapon intent on killing you, but only if they live.
This means not only are you shooting to kill - you're now dumping an entire magazine into the person to make sure they are dead.
E:
To the people who downvoted, how would you disarm an intruder with a gun? Ask them politely to put the weapon down? Run at them with a baseball bat (and risk getting shot)?
Or maybe shoot them in the arm or leg? Where major arteries are and the shot is still likely to be fatal and also has a higher chance of missing entirely.
Life isn't Call of Duty and shots to the legs/arm don't just "injure", they kill. So I'll repeat myself: there is no such thing as shooting to disarm or disable in real life. Only in fantasy first-person-shooter land.
In either case, their survival puts you in legal trouble under current law. You should be shooting to kill if you feel deadly force is justified. If your intent is not to kill, then deadly force was not justified.
Good luck aiming for a hand. I advise you go to a firing range and see how often you can hit the arm of a moving target without taking time to aim (remember: taking time to aim = you are now the one being shot). You'll have fractions of a second to get someone in your sights and take the shot.
It'll cost $30-40 to use a range, rent a gun, and buy ammunition for an hour. You'll leave with a more informed opinion of how operating a firearm works.
My post was in response to you making it sound like wounds to the extremities would be equally likely to kill as wounds to the center of mass, which is definitely not true.
And thanks, I've already got a range membership.
My point was you should never shoot to harm, only to kill. That means no hand shots. Period. Regardless of the chances of a fatally wounding shot.
My point - furthermore - was that it isn't a guaranteed "disabling" shot. It's still possible to kill. The thought of "shoot to disable" is a misinformed thought educated on nothing but Hollywood movies and video games.
Sorry, I don't care about a violent criminal's life enough to try and take a well-placed shot at a small, moving extremity.
No police officer would attempt this, either, if they're following their training.
Center-mass shots are more reliable, and more importantly, more reliable under stress (larger target).
"Patching up" my aggressor is the least of my concerns morally and legally.
In most jurisdictions this is completely legal under most circumstances. You can't always kill someone fleeing your just-robbed home (state-specific laws), though.
If someone breaks into your home with the intent to felony, in my state, yes, you can use lethal force to stop the threat or apprehend the alleged felon.
In terms of law, case law is critical here, to my knowledge only Texas allows that, after a verbal warning. And like e.g. Oklahoma, I expect judges to eventually nullify that.
Have you ever tried to apprehend a violent felon? They'll typically attack you, resulting in a case for traditional self-defense.
If you need guns, call the police.
No thanks. Try to take my right of effective self-defense away (as the U.K. started doing in the '50s) and you won't like the consequences.
I'll take my much safer area plus my immediate means to self defense over your constables that are a hour out.
Violent crime in UK is much lower than in US. UK crime statistics are more robust than US crime stats.
In particular: The US uses a different definition of violent crime. The US doesn't bother to include a bunch of crime that the UK does include.
United Kingdom: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-s...
“Violent crime contains a wide range of offences, from minor assaults such as pushing and shoving that result in no physical harm through to serious incidents of wounding and murder. Around a half of violent incidents identified by both BCS and police statistics involve no injury to the victim.” (THOSB – CEW, page 17, paragraph 1.)
United States: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/c...
“In the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses which involve force or threat of force.” (FBI – CUS – Violent Crime)
In the UK a push that results in no physical harm could be counted as a violent crime. That same push, resulting in the same lack of physical harm, would not be counted as a violent crime in the US.
> your constables that are a hour out.
That's weirdly wrong too.
This isn't a hypothetical and happened to me 15 years ago. I yelled I had a gun and would shoot him if he came through. He kicked a few more times then ran away.
The cops didn't show up for 17 more minutes.
His/her life matters, so you can't take it even if it means defending your own.
(Obviously sarcasm, but that's the thought process of these people)
One reason I bring this up is that a "duty to retreat" requirement manufactured by the Massachusetts courts was used to convict a man in the early '80s who wasn't willing to do that. There's a previous better known case were a woman was convicted because she didn't try to climb out of the high windows in her basement apartment.
Massachusetts is viciously anti-gun. Except, of course, towards the connected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_University_of_Alabama_in_...
(Can't wait to see the study cited that considers suicide a "risk to you and your wife's lives")
If I need guns, I'll use the one on my hip.
You know, the one that the Supreme Court of the United States of America asserted that I have a right to keep.
History has shown repeatedly that humans are prone to emotional responses. And people that were otherwise law abiding right until a moment of anger now have easy hip-level access to a 'thing' to act out their anger.
Take the case a couple years ago of the retired cop that shot a guy in the movie theatre during previews for throwing popcorn at him. (Guy called his baby sitter during previews, the retired cop yelled at him to be quiet, guy threw some popcorn back at the cop, retired cop shoots guy dead) If this retired cop, who was a law-abiding citizen his whole life and was professionally trained in firearm safety and usage couldn't control his anger during an argument about a guy using his cell phone, I don't see how the average American can be trusted.
And speaking of guns in movie theatres, there's the case of the guy who accidentally dropped his handgun under his seat during a kids movie and then left. Luckily the ushers found it and not a kid. Guy had the nerve to go back to the theatre and demand it back.
I don't see how the average American can be trusted to keep their gun safe.
Pearl clutchers have warned us of "blood in the streets!" and "Dodge City!" every time a state switched to shall issue licensing. Well, there are now 45 shall issue states, holding more than 2/3rd of the population, and its never happened, history does not show what you claim. Sure, there are occasional bad incidents (the VPC paper did find a few) ... but if in this HN topic you're going to claim police are the acme of responsible gun use, we're not living in the same reality.
We have a legal system that determines innocence or guilt. Before that systems assigns one or the other, they are alleged criminals.
We, a civilized people, do not punish alleged criminals, because they are, by definition, not guilty of a crime.
Which, I should point out, isn't punishment. Which 15155 never said we could do, he only talked about what you can do in felonious acts, defend yourself, and about a value system that puts criminals above the law-abiding.
Not even alleged criminals; the right to self-defense usually requires that the threat comes from someone without a legal privilege for the act, but the requirements for actual criminality (particular mens rea) are not necessarily required to trigger the right to use force in self-defense, even lethal force.
And this makes sense: the right to self-defense is not about the criminal culpability of the one against whom violence is permitted, its about a limit on the criminal culpability of the user of violence.
Now, one can argue that in some jurisdictions the details of the rules on self-defense are drawn overly broadly, or that they are applied selectively and in a discriminatory manner. But I don't think the general principal that people will not be held criminally accountable for use of force reasonably scaled to deal with an imminent threat which had no legal privilege to be made, independently of whether the one making the threat met the legal standards for criminal culpability in so doing, should be even slightly controversial.
As long as once the threshold of lethal force is reached, all lethal force in reply until the threat is over is legitimate.
Midway through it's now almost total ban on guns the U.K. made self-defense with more force than being used on you illegal, first in the courts in the '50s and then by law in the '60s. Outlawing effective self-defense then makes it that much easier to outlaw guns altogether.
https://www.askthe.police.uk/content/Q589.htm
> The only fully legal self defence product at the moment is a rape alarm.
This is the sad state that the UK is in at the moment.
If a violent aggressor who is shot happens to survive, the court can decide their fate later, but that's completely separate from the right to self defense.
This is the law that we, a civilized society, live by. If you don't like it, there are countries (UK!) where self-defense is almost entirely illegal - they may be more fitting.
Furthermore, we decree the right to self-defense as a _natural_ right, not one that could be potentially amended away.