Good man with a gun

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If I see a man walking around with a gun I don't actually think "gee! there goes a good fellow" instead I call the police and get the crazy dude arrested

Does this actually happen, or is this something you are imagining?

In my experience, context is really important in the perception of people armed with guns.

I have seen people with rifles on rural roads in Vermont and assumed they were hunters. I did not assume anything about their moral characters, but correctly assessed them as non-threatening.

The guy running down the street in Manhattan with the blocky handgun, though, he seemed immediately dangerous. Thankfully, he was not crazy and when he realized police were converging on him from multiple directions, he dropped the gun and surrendered.

The guy with the Colt 1911 over by Times Square was obviously dangerous and criminal. I was quite anxious about him until I got around the corner and far away. There is nothing you can do in the face of such a threat but evade and hope, unless a good person with a gun, a cop for example, intervenes. It's a really bad feeling to know you are so at the mercy of another person when that person is obviously bad.

If the situation is remotely like the one in the news story, then you are facing a bad man with a gun, the nearest cop has already been shot and help is going to be some time in coming. In that moment, if a car pulls up and a man gets out and pulls out a gun and points it at the bad man, I don't think you will be assuming he is crazy or reporting him to the police as a threat.

I see stories in the paper from time to time reporting someone got narked on while waiting for a buddy to go hunting; cyberdad may have just turned them in for suspicious behavior. Good work cyberdad.

/\LOL I see people with holsters in the local grocery,hardware,feed store all the time during hunting season.The cops here would laugh if that was called in.Its a small town of around 700.It would look out of place in a large metro mall unless it was security.

I have no problem with farmers carrying weapons on their property for shooting pests...I do have a problem with people carrying weapons in public like vigilantes...

People forget George Zimmerman types pretending they are protecting themselves and other people

I'll go out on a limb here and guess that you don't know anyone who hunts or anything about hunting?

A person lying about defending themselves while they go out of their way to murder someone doesn't make an argument against other people actually defending themselves or against any particular means of defense.

Raising George Zimmerman in this context is like saying W is an argument for not having a President.
Or the liquidation of the Kulaks as an argument against an income tax.

With all the guns and carry permits in circulation there must not be very many of what you call George Zimmerman types out there.

Actually I do. In Australia there are laws that require licensed gun owners to store their weapons on their property in a secure wall cabinet kept under lock and key. The exception is when they have to transport their weapon to a shooting range or to a designated hunting area but the weapon still has to be secured in a bag/case and unloaded with bullets stored in the car separately. In Australia you need a permit to store, transport and use a firearm in addition to a recreational hunting permit.




I raise his case because he represents the reasoning behind those who lobby for public carrying of a weapon for self-defense. Luckily in Australia sauntering around with a loaded weapon will land you in jail

Australia has a different culture. This story is really about the United States.

Your experience with hunters and hunting rules in Australia is not applicable for the simple reason that US hunters don't have to abide by Australian law and the more complicated reason that, for example, New South Wales and Virginia don't share a common culture.

The same problem of cultural ignorance and miscommunication exists within the United States, with many anti-gun people not understanding or caring to understand the viewpoint of gun rights people and vice versa.

To gun control people, the representations of gun control people by gun rights people seem bizarre and incomprehensible. Likewise, to gun rights people, the image of gun rights people projected by gun control people is a clear sign that those people are out of touch with reality.

Meanwhile, there are many structural reasons why imposing tight gun control nationwide in the US is not going to happen, so the crusade to achieve that end is a doomed waste of time and energy.

Projecting nasty and false image of dangerous, murderous, crazy gun nuts at people in the gun culture is not going to sway any hearts and minds or help move toward any reasonable compromise.

And such compromise is a rational, achievable goal. My point in posting this thread is that making sure that no law abiding person has the ability to defend themselves against armed attack is NOT a reasonable, achievable goal. My hope is that the recent horrific events in the news item can help some people to recognize this.

Issues like bad vigilantes and problematic open carry laws don't counter that basic point about defense against an armed attacker.

This is an excellent point. There are so many people legally carrying guns out there that if any remotely significant fraction of them was looking for excuses to shoot people, there would be huge numbers of George Zimmerman cases and they would be happening all the time. That just is not what is happening.

And what's driven this increase in gun ownership and issuance of carry permits during this decade has for the most part been anti-gunners. When Obama took office 8 years ago it was expected that a wave of federal gun laws would follow so people stocked up. Again after Sandy Hook the same thing happened in expectation of emotion driven increases in federal gun regulation. You could not even find a place to park at gun shops and had to park down the street. They weren't jut going in to look around, either. Gun sales, especially for AR-15's and AK's, exploded. I could not even find ammo and accessories on line to buy because everything was being bought up. Our gun club has made money hand over fist from non-member user fees to the point where we have recently acquired more property adjacent to the existing land to expand onto.

Anti-gunners only need to look in the mirror when they wonder why there are so many guns in circulation.

Btw; cyberdad has a long reputation here of being in the anti-gun camp. About all you can expect to get out of him is hyperbole and "this is how we do it in the land down under" etc...

Luckily? CCW holders in America are literally more law abiding than the police, we commit fewer crimes per capita than the people charged with upholding the law, plus we can actually shoot straight.

I feel the need to point out how murky the actual George Zimmerman case was, unless you're willing to believe that Zimmerman was determined to kill a random kid on the street, and so fiendishly cunning that he was able to convincingly fake defensive wounds and arrange the crime scene to support a self defense scenario, on the fly, with no one witnessing him doing any of this. Personally, George never struck me as particularly crafty, so I tend to go with the 'nosy neighbor spooked a kid and got jumped', tragic and stupid version of the narrative.

While I accept Australia and the US have different gun cultures there is one stat that should concern Americans.
According to CNN politics Approx 65% of Republican voters supported the acquittal of George Zimmerman.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/20 ... oll-finds/

What this means is that the concept of a person carrying a loaded weapon and shooting an unarmed person in a vigilante action appears to be perceived as normalised behavior on the conservative side of US society.

I suspect that there's another group where support for the Zimmerman verdict runs even higher: law professors.

For the same reason that some people have thousands of Records/CDs, books, barbie dolls, etc. because they like them either for their utilitarian purposes, historical purposes, or just to be completists. People collect things, and guns re one of the things that people collect.

FWIW, there's a store here that proudly displays a Lahti M-39 that one of the original owners bought back in the early 60's when the Finnish army surplussed them. It's an incredible piece, and awsome to think that a sniper and a spotter would manhandle one of them through the woods to countersnipe Russians during the Winter War and Continuation War. --It's a HEAVY rifle.