No. of Recommendations: 9
If even the tiniest fraction of those law abiding gun owners over reacted and shot an otherwise innocent "visitor", we would see a lot more of it than the few cases we see reported.
I hope that I've been very clear in emphasizing that all of these are infrequent scenarios. The "day your number comes up" is pretty durn unlikely on both sides of the ledger - it's exceptionally unlikely that you will be killed by an intruder you don't know in your home, and it's exceptionally unlikely that you will accidentally kill an innocent person. But you have to consider both possibilities in whether you choose to have a gun or not. It's not like an umbrella, where "having it but not needing it" carries no consequence - and thus there's little balancing in deciding whether to have it and not need it versus need it but not have it.
See that word "violent" in the above statistic.
I'm shocked it's that low - "violent" to the DOJ means even assault, which includes any kind of threat. They don't even need to lay a finger on you to commit a violent crime against you.
I am not a threat to you or anyone else for that matter.
So you claim, and I'm sure you believe. But the reason we regulate many dangerous activities is because people who engage in those activities pose more of a threat to others than they care to admit. For example, we have speed limits because even though many people who drive fast believe that they're not posing a threat to other people, if they make a mistake at a high speed they can easily kill other people. We generally don't let people significantly increase the risk posed to folks around them - even if the ostensible reason they are creating that higher risk to other people is so that they themselves can feel safer.
If you're armed with a gun, you're vastly more dangerous than not. That's the whole point, when guns are owned with the intent of using them for self-defense. You pose more danger to innocent people if you make a mistake. You're a threat - not intentionally, but you pose a much greater danger to everyone around you while you're armed. All of those people who killed innocents who came to their doors? I'm sure if you asked them ex ante, they too would have insisted they weren't a threat to anyone. But it turns out they were.
