Let me guess… Dallas? Or is that typical in other Texas cities too?

FWIW you sound like an actual responsible gun owner. After having a break in while I was home (yes, scary) people very much wanted me to have a gun. I have no desire. I could only see how, given the situation, a gun would have made things even more dangerous. This is not to mention my very bad problem with occasional sleepwalking. The last thing my mom needs for Christmas is an accidental suicide :( 

Guns are dangerous, there’s just no getting around that. Frankly, anyone who doesn’t *get* that probably should not have one.

BTW, a single cop did show up hours later, noted that I was not dead or raped, then left saying it was “probably just some crackhead.” Some crackhead who expected I was alone I guess :/

Not that long afterwards a neighbor was stabbed to death on her doorstep while coming home.

Needless to say, I have moved.

I was really nervous they’d see the gun as I reached for my wallet.  I had two fears, one, that they might see the gun and shoot me, or two, take it from me, putting my gun in the hands of bad people. Luckily, they never saw the gun.  I gave one my wallet, and each ran off in a different direction.  The threat to myself was gone and I decided I did not want to purposely put myself back into danger by chasing after one of them.  I went inside, called the police, then called my credit card company to cancel the cards.  All in all, I think that was more desirable than a gun fight.  Ever since then, I’ve stopped carrying my gun with me.  I think it resulted in more anxiety and complications than solutions.  It’s secured at a shooting range owned by a friend.  That’s the only place I ever use it now.

Despite all the crap I get from my shooting range buddies, I’ve never once doubted my decision that night.  They all talk like they’re trained Special Ops commandos that could’ve whipped out a pistol and shot three separated targets before any of them could have gotten a shot off (to say nothing about the potential for third party harm when you start shooting off guns in a fairly dense residential neighborhood.)

Actually, the most noteworthy part of the story is this all happened while I was on the phone, and I told the person who I was talking to I was being robbed at gun point, told them my location, and they hung up to call the police.  I felt pretty confident that if I took my time, a cop car would roll up and they’d all run before anything could happen.  A nearby resident who saw everything through his window also called the police.  Of course, afterward, I called the police too.  The police never showed up.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that a better crime deterrent than me owning a gun would be to have a local police force that actually bothers to show up when they get three calls reporting an armed robbery.  Criminals tend to fear cops more than they do the average citizen, even  in a state where a lot of people have CHL’s like Texas.  When the cops suck and criminals know it, the criminals get ballsy.

(Of course, there’s stil the possibility that this one really isn’t that different after all, and the NRA gets its way yet again, and we go back to griping about it until the next domestic terror attack.)

The case had enough similarities to the Tony Martin case, though, that they likely wanted to ensure it wasn’t similar. Martin also lived in an obscure area, and shot intruders into his home. Except he shot them with an illegal shotgun, had had his permit for even a legal shotgun previously revoked for shooting at someone’s car, shot the intruders while they were fleeing, and lied about where he was in the house during the shooting, making the prosecution able to successfully argue that he was waiting for the chance to shoot intruders out of revenge for previous breakins rather than fear for his life.

And so the police needed to make sure that this was actually a legitimate case; when they did, no charges were made.

The grand irony is that it was that hero of the right, Ronald Reagan, who signed the Mulford Act into law banning citizens of California from the right to openly carry a loaded weapon in public.  I just read his exact quote the other day, but can’t find it.  Essentially Reagan said there was no reason any citizen needed to be walking around in public with a loaded gun.

Also: you can’t look at my three examples and act like those are the only ones that exist. Did you seriously expect me to catalog every incident of defensive gun use that I could find, right here in BoingBoing’s comments? A discussion on statistics relating to defensive use vs. illegal violent attacks could be had, but I doubt you are actually interested in it.

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10shrtbl07.xls

There have now been enough of these mass-shooting atrocities,and enough blustering and inaction afterwards, that Perkins has been moved to make a ‘generic response’ cartoon twice.

How many atrocities have there been this year alone?  Anybody?

The important thing is that people are sad and/or outraged so we’ve got to pass a law posthaste.