Originally Posted by
Syme
Just for the record, violent crime in America is a lot more common than, say, house fires, and yet people who keep fire extinguishers in their homes manage to avoid being accused of paranoia. I dunno, just a thought.
You are right that most home intruders are probably there to take possessions, not inflict mayhem. I don't think it's hard to understand, though, why many people are uncomfortable with the idea that if their home is broken into, their only recourse is to cower in helpless fear and hope that all the intruder wants is money, even if that is the more likely alternative. It's the same mentality that leads people to wear a seatbelt every time they drive even though they are unlikely to get in an accident, or to keep a fire extinguisher in the pantry even though they are unlikely to have a kitchen fire, and so forth. Keeping a gun in the home, just in case a violent intruder does show up, doesn't strike me as any more paranoid than those things. I guess paranoia is in the eye of the beholder.
The moral dimension aside, it is ILLEGAL* to use lethal force unless someone's life is in immediate danger. If someone is raping your 9-year-old daughter and you shoot them in the head, you will probably go to jail for murder. I think, thankfully, that most gun owners understand the circumstances under which they can use their guns. Certainly the statistics seem to suggest that most do.
*Except in Texas, of course
EDIT: Looking at it from outside the particular confines of the "gun issue", this is an interesting example of how people generally tend to approach improbable but highly dangerous or damaging events; i.e. those events that are very unlikely to occur, but if they do occur, are very bad. Examples might be a large asteroid hitting the planet Earth, or various forms of economic disaster, or catching rabies from a dog bite (or, say, a dangerous killer breaking into your home). When it comes to the question of how to prepare for those events, some people say "Nah, it's too unlikely, you're just being paranoid" and others say "It might happen no matter how unlikely, so it's better to err on the side of caution and be prepared". I find it interesting how different people react at this far end (in terms of probability and severity) of the risk-analysis spectrum. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of which personality types, or demographic sets, or whatever, tend to react more strongly to the probability of the threat or to it's severity, because people tend to perceive that one aspect of the threat "overrides" the other, and I wonder what predisposes someone in either direction.
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