the greatest benefit from guns is their deterrent qualities, which are very difficult to quantify. We never hear of the thefts or violence or other horrors that don't happen because potential perpetrators cannot manage the risk that their victims may fight back.
How is gun ownership supposed to prevent theft or violence? It seems like it instead paves the road to escalating to violence in less-severe scenarios.
I suspect it is very difficult to qualify because there are no such qualities in practice.
They don't, but they if you're _not_ if you live in a gun-hostile nation. And knowing you might be is a deterrence, for the same reason knowing you might get caught by the police is.
>How is gun ownership supposed to prevent theft or violence?
Well, because of the risk of being killed if you try to commit a crime against someone with a gun. The cause-effect there is pretty clear.
Do you start shooting when the odds are that high that someone might shoot back? Maaaaybe, but not as soon as you might if you were surer that you would get away with it.
I've lived in Maine my entire life—from the most rural parts to Portland—and this is just nonsense. There is absolutely no way that even 10% of people are armed in public.
>Do you start shooting when the odds are that high that someone might shoot back? Maaaaybe, but not as soon as you might if you were surer that you would get away with it.
Perhaps you'd like to consider what JUST happened in Lewiston last October.
There was a combined six minutes between shots fired at the two locations and officer response, four at the youth league event, and only two minutes at the bar.
I didn't say nobody's ever going to try it. Some people are going to break, and show up with a lot of firepower and a plan. All I said was people will try it later than they might if they were sure most of their victim pool wouldn't shoot back.
This is an extraordinary claim that demands at least some evidence in order to be taken seriously.
>A youth league bowling tournament would be an exception, given the preponderance of children.
To the contrary: if you honestly believe that somewhere between 10% and 25-33% of Maine adults are carrying for protection—and, once again, there is literally no way that this is even close to true—it would make even more sense that the adults there would have been carrying To Keep Our Children Safe(TM).
They don't. As with many things in life, they have to estimate that risk. A would-be home invader correctly estimates this particular risk to be higher in jurisdictions where guns are legally permitted -- and especially in areas where keeping a gun in the house is known to be common.
Does that would-be home invader themselves own a gun that they are prepared to use, which would tend to neutralise this risk? Possibly. I don't know how that probability varies with legality of gun ownership, but I would expect that in both cases (gun ownership legal, gun ownership illegal), more home invaders than home owners have access to guns. If that's true, then more home owners with guns fired act as a deterrent.
>It seems like it instead paves the road to escalating to violence in less-severe scenarios.
Yes, it probably also (not "instead") does this. There's no dichotomy here.
At the end of the day, the reasons for and against legalising gun ownership are similar to the reasons for and against arming your military. Doing either one raises the stakes -- the hope (assumption) being that the other party will then find the stakes too high to engage, even if they themselves are similarly armed.
And shooting somebody if they have a gun, just in case they shoot first, seems to be considered normal in some circles in the US: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69013312, so carrying a gun seems like a big risk.
"Would it explode or just punch a hole" depends on the energies of the impact involved. If there is only enough energy to break chemical bonds, it would punch a hole.
As energy of the impact gets higher the hole gets deeper. Probably punching all the way through the ship.
Once the impact energy gets strong enough to break nuclear bonds, the story changes. Now we have an e=mc^2 event at the impact site. It isn't just the impact energy anymore. At minimum, the punched hole just got wider and potentially radioactive as byproducts go on adventures. Once the hole is wider than the ship, I think that counts as "exploded".