Can you give me examples of crimes or situations that were thwarted by citizens carrying legal firearms?
Asked by
LuckyGuy (
43867
)
January 17th, 2013
I know the NRA publishes a few cases every month but I consider them right wingers bordering on extremists. And I don’t trust extremists of any type. I believe the truth is somewhere in between.
I’d like to know first-hand stories from you or a family member, not a friend of a friend of a cousin of a friend.
Here’s mine:
About forty years ago, my Dad worked as a broker selling candy and cigarettes to distributors that delivered to the many local small shops in NYC. He was licensed to carry in the City (not easy to get) and carried a .32 S&W revolver that was considered old even then. One day, while leaving a customer’s shop in broad daylight, some “youths” came from nowhere and blocked his path. They didn’t say anything. They just made it impossible for him to walk to his car. He opened his jacket and said “You don’t want to do that.” while flashing the gun in the holster. They fled. While unscathed, he was a wreck for weeks.
He would have been around 60 at the time and that convinced him it was time to retire.
There was no record of the “crime” because nothing happened. Police were not called. The incident will never be listed on the side of responsible citizens carrying guns. Yet until he died, my Dad believed that S&W saved him. (I still have it and even added it legally to my carry permit as a piece of family history. It will never be fired.)
I’m sure if this happened today, the ending would be different. He would either be shot, or charged with “Brandishing a weapon”. Either way, the “youths” would still be on the street.
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13 Answers
Interesting. And mine is 40 years old.
It might be like asking for examples of how prayer worked to cure cancer and demanding to see the control data.
When I was a child I was playing in the back acreage at my grandparents house. The house was in the middle of nowhere (dirt road, they had a barn, etc). Out of nowhere two neighbor dogs jump out of the trees and start growling and barking at me. The dogs encircled me and wouldn’t let me leave. I don’t remember their specific breed, but they were big dogs, and I couldn’t have been more than 6 at the time.
Thankfully my uncle, who had moved back in with my grandparents, noticed, and came out with a hand gun. He fired the weapon into the air a few times and the dogs ran off without a fight. Quite possibly saved my life, almost certainly saved me some stitches.
More importantly though, lets not pile on gun owners or gun rights here. We clearly need to take a look at guns in this country, but they aren’t the problem…. they’re simply a symptom of the problem. If we outlaw guns entirely whats to stop the next mad man from driving his car through a mall, or taking 30 minutes and learning how to make a bomb on the internet? Common sense regulation should clearly be put in place, but lets not turn this into a senseless crucifixion of one of our basic rights.
@tedd I mean no disrespect to your uncle, and I’m glad to know that you weren’t harmed during the incident, but banging together a couple of large frying pans would likely have had the same outcome—creating a loud, irritating noise and driving away the dogs.
@PaulSadieMartin Maybe. But if the dogs continued to show aggression and attacked me or him anyways…. I’d rather have a gun than a frying pan.
“It might be like asking for examples of how prayer worked to cure cancer and demanding to see the control data.”
@LuckyGuy , LOL
@tedd Speaking as the three-straight-year champion of the Mountain Man Rendezvous Women’s Frying-Pan Throw, a frying pan can do a hell of a lot of damage, even at a bit of a distance. And, it’s just as easy to control the trajectory. You also get the added benefit of “Oh holy fuck it’s a crazy person throwing frying pans!”
The closest thing I have is this. A male neighbor some six years ago came over one night and much to my surprise, handed over 4 assorted handguns for temporary safekeeping. The reason…he and his wife were having a terrible fight. He took the guns back eventually. Two years later!
Yes. When a local ranger that carried a weapon kicked a bow hunter out of the woods that had shot an arrow at me while riding my horse on trail. The guy had had a few and his damn arrow zinged off a tree 2 feet past my head. Luckily the ranger just happened to be patrolling the logging trails where I was riding that afternoon and pulled me over….—for lack of a better word—- when he saw me galloping at light speed out of the woods.
Last time I went off trail, a little more adventure than I had planned on.
I also started saddling up my horse with a bright red blanket.
Uh…hello, when was the last time you saw a deer with a rider on it’s back? Bah!
Here’s a fresh one from yesyrtday here
Both of these can be easily independtly verified from regular news so you know it’s not just right wing propoganda. The second one really amazed me.
The first happened in the last few years or so. A young recently widowed girl with an infant child living in rural Oklahoma called 911 when these guys who had been stalking her were outside her door. She had a shotgun and was asking the 911 operator what to do.
She said the police were on the way and to do whatever she needed to do to protect her baby and herself.
She had barricaded the door with the couch and when the police arrived they found the first guy who broke in the door slumped over the couch dead from the shotgun blast. The other guy took off and decided her husbands leftover cancer painkillers weren’t worth his life but was later captured.
She was not charged with anything as it was clearly self defense.
The second incident involved a car which accidently went off the road and into the river and mostly submerged.
Bystanders tried repeatedly to get the doors or windows open and couldn’t. A former cop who was carrying a pistol happened upon this, sized up the situation and carefully aimed the gun at an upward angle and shot out the window thus enabling rescue of the children and parents trapped inside.
Obviously he was well trained with guns and knew how to aim precisely without harming anyone.
But clearly, lives were saved that day with proper use of a gun.
But in neither of these cases did anyone need an AR-15 with a 90 bullet clip to get the job done :)
Just ordinary guns plus a lot of training and/or common sense.
TO VERIFY
I can’t do links from iPhone but you can Google the first one from the details.
The second was less well known but it happened in Utah. The driver was Joe Morgan, the hero was Chris Willden.
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