Homeowner shootings of would-be burglars are prominent features in TV broadcasts and newspapers.
Most of the national news stories go something like this: A homeowner shot one of two alleged would-be burglars Saturday night, according to police. The department reports that the assailant and another man kicked in the door to a home in the 100 block of Sunny Slope Drive while the homeowner was there with his child.
The homeowner, who had armed himself with a .45 caliber pistol, confronted the two men inside the home. The homeowner, fearing for the safety of himself and his child, fired one round at one of the perpetrators, striking him in the back of the left leg. The other unknown male fled the scene and was not located.
Here’s another one: A local homeowner shot an intruder recently when the burglar attempted to break into the man’s house.
Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the home on Adams Street around 3:30 a.m. after hearing reports of a “prowler” in the area, according to the town’s sheriff’s news release.
Deputies also received a call from a woman who told them that her husband had shot an intruder inside their home. Deputies found the man in the residence suffering from two gunshot wounds. He was taken to the hospital where he was treated for his injuries and later arrested and remanded to jail.
Still another tells the story of a 68-year-old man who allegedly shot two burglary suspects, injuring one of them critically. Officers were called to the man’s home just before 10:30 p.m. on a report of a burglary in progress. The victim told officers he heard noises in the front of his house and went to investigate. He encountered two men and fired his handgun at them.
Then, following another bloody weekend in Chicago, the city’s mayor branded the shootings unacceptable and the city’s top cop demanded more gun control laws. Chicago’s murder rate has dropped since concealed carry became legal.
Concealed carry practices paid off during one weekend recently when a vet carrying a gun returned fire stopping a massacre before it happened. The original shooter ended up in the hospital, but nobody ended up in the morgue, which kept the death toll for the weekend down to fourteen.
“Fourteen isn’t pretty,” one city official commented, “but it’s better than twenty or thirty.”
There’s a hard truth in these accounts for gun-control advocates. Conceal weapons permit holders are extremely law-abiding citizens, one report shows. In fact, it has been proved that individuals employing the “more guns, more crime” logic apparently are using shoddy research as the basis for their claim.
“If you look at information from the Justice Department, they have something called the National Crime Victimization survey,” a prominent university official explained recently. “What you find is that guns are used in crime about 250,000 times a year.” John R. Lott Jr., economist, Yale professor, and president of Crime Prevention Research Center, told one town hall meeting. “If you look at similar surveys of people who use guns defensively, it’s about two million times a year. So basically, people are using guns defensively to stop crimes about four to five times more frequently each year than guns are used to commit a crime. Most people don’t realize that.”
The truth is that individuals with gun-permits are extremely law-abiding, research demonstrates. “Less than one percent of licensed firearm holders have had their permits revoked due to misdemeanors.”
Guns also empower women more than modern feminism, according to other researchers, too.
“The confidence from learning to shoot a pistol is far superior to any gender studies course,” according to one Detroit police official.
The police chief gives credit to armed citizens for a recent drop in crime. Detroit experienced 37 percent fewer robberies in 2014 than during the same period the previous year, 22 percent fewer break-ins of businesses and homes, and 30 percent fewer car-jacking attempts. Police Chief James Craig attributed the drop to better police work and criminals being reluctant to prey on citizens who may be carrying guns.
“Criminals are getting the message that good Detroiters are armed and will use that weapon,” said Craig, who has repeatedly said he believes armed citizens deter crime.
It also has been estimated that between 200,000 to 300,000 righteous use of a firearm in the defense or possible defense of innocent life go unreported each year because the firearm is either never discharged or an armed citizen never reported the incident even after discharging their firearm since no deaths were involved.
In each case the armed, law-abiding citizen says he or she believes they may have been killed, kidnapped, or severely injured if they hadn’t pulled their pistol, according to another survey published last year.
At the same time, home invasion is perhaps the most frightening and dangerous of all violent crimes (it is committed out of public sight usually without fixed time/escape constraints and innocent occupants, often women and children are rarely able to flee).
It is becoming somewhat commonplace during daylight hours and at night in both urban and rural neighborhoods, police say.
Criminologist Gary Kleck estimates that 2.5 million Americans use guns to defend themselves each year. Out of that number, 400,000 believe that but for their firearms, they would have been dead. Professor Emeritus James Q. Wilson, the UCLA public policy expert, says: “We know from Census Bureau surveys that something beyond 100,000 uses of guns for self-defense occur every year. We know from smaller surveys of a commercial nature that the number may be as high as 2 or 3 million. We don’t know what the right number is, but whatever the right number is, it’s not a trivial number.”
In the meantime, study after study show that criminals avoid armed citizens. Take Kennesaw, Georgia, for instance. In the early 1980s, this suburb of Atlanta passed a law requiring heads of households to keep at least one firearm in the house. The residential burglary rate subsequently dropped 89 percent in Kennesaw, compared to the modest 10.4 percent drop in Georgia as a whole.
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Top o’ the morning!