Bitcoin Forum

How dare anyone suggest people don't have the right to keep and bear arms?

I'd love to see them suggest such a thing to Mrs. Herman and Sarah McKinley.  But they won't, because they basically are complete and total cowards.


Georgia mom shoots intruder 5 times in face, hides children
http://myfox8.com/2013/01/06/ga-mom-shoots-intruder-5-times-saves-children/

Young Oklahoma Mom Shoots Intruder
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw4B_XbW7ds


If you refuse to protect your kids from harm (including becoming orphans), you are the shittiest failed parent ever.

>fired six bullets at the suspect, five of which hit alleged suspect Paul Ali Slater in the face and neck area.
>He was taken to a nearby hospital and is expected to survive.

Guy must be made of steel

Damn! Gotta be some serious skull on that dude.

Or maybe just not enough functioning brain matter in order to make the critical kill area large enough that even 5 head shots were fatal.

Too bad the Amber Lamps got there in time.   :D

Mom needs a bigger gun!  Bet she gets a .45 or 12 gauge ASAP.

Or that.

This kind of thing is why I empathise with the gun owners out there way more than gun control people, it's not like any of them want this sort of thing to happen they're just far more realistic, this is also a complete textbook example of how I think self-defence should be carried out, leave the criminal alive if he gets the message, they'll also serve as a warning to anyone else dumb enough to rob her.

All the confusing statistics and endless abstract debate in the world will never convince the all-too-numerous emotion-based sheeple who fear guns and want only cradle-to-grave security. 

A different approach is required for the dim, irrational types:

To control the narrative and reclaim the moral high ground from the gun grabbers, we must rely on incidents such as these to illustrate the starkly asinine amorality of disarming law-abiding citizens.  Especially mothers defending their children, which no can dispute without looking idiotic at best and evil at worst.

Remember the names of these home invasion survivors and throw them in the face of the statists.  Their stories are our best weapons to fight and win the emotional battle for hearts and minds.

And what about introducing your kids to harm? (hint: recent school shooting).

It's smarter to kill the intruder. Dead people can't make an argument in court against you, and they deserve it anyways if they're breaking into your house.

She doesn't need a bigger gun.  She obviously knows how to use that one quite well.  To be able to put all five rounds loaded in a 38 special and hit a target the size of a melon from across a room, particularly while hyped up on adrenaline, is the halmark of a sharpshooter.  Furthermore, the most effective (not most deadly) handgun calibers, statisticly speaking, are the .380 automatic followed by the 22LR.  In every defensive case, your goal is to get the attacker to stop, not necessarily to kill them.  With that in mind, the above small calibers are well known for accuracy as well as their ability for follow-up shots.  The most important factor in a defensive handgun caliber is your personal ability to hit what you are shooting at, everything else is a secondary consideration.  Also, statisicly, the 45 is a terrible choice for a defensive handgun, because the recoil is so harsh that nearly everyone under 6' 2" and 240 lbs has trouble bringing the sights back onto target for a follow-up shot in any speedy fashion.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdr14xVetXM

The school failed to act 'in loco parentis.'  The parents failed by sending their kids to unsafe public schools (AKA shittiest substitute parents ever) run by libtards who think 'no guns allowed' signs actually work.

I'd like to see you meet a survivor of home invasions from the OP and be all "You had no right to save your life and defend your children using a weaoon.  Because Sandy Hook and stuff."

It would be really funny to watch you get your face smashed in by a justifiably furious hero mom.   :D

I don't agree with that in all cases.  If some drunk guy breaks into your house, and you flee up the steps with your kids; the deciding factor is wether or not he follows you.  If he just passes out on the couch, he probably thought he was home and was confused as to why his keys didn't work.  If he chases you up the steps, it's prudent to assume he has real ill intent on his addled mind, and he brought upon himself whatever happens next.  This guy was no burgler, he wanted something from the wife and kids.  If I was to hazard a guess, he was a serial rapist, and shooting him dead on the steps would have only improved the violent crime rate going forward as well as saved the taxpayers the money in prosecution and incarceration.

An armed society is a polite society.  What is rarely mentioned with that old saying, is the reason is that the 'criminallly impolite' have relatively short expectancies in an armed society.

Sorry, but thats just sick.
Noone except the law enforcement should be allowed to carry weapons...

If i have the chance and time to shoot 6 bullets in head and NECK of someone else i cant be in mortal danger - hence the use of arms is unjustified.

to me this just sounds like an argument for why drunk people should be prepared to accept the consequences of their poor decisions.

What a fascinating opintion you have.  Why don't you share it with Mrs. Herman and Sarah McKinley, the ladies from the OP?

Tell single teen mom Sarah McKinley, whose husband died of cancer on Christmas, that her child should be an orphan.  Tell her that her orphaned child's last memoir of his mother should be her screaming on a 911 tape as she's raped and murdered by her hunting knife carrying stalker.  Because only the police should have weapons, dontcha know?

And also tell Mrs. Herman that the last time her 9 year old twins see her alive should be while a home invader does god-knows-what to her.  Because it shooting a home invader after retreating to a closet is unjustified, naturally.

Please LMK ahead of time so I can laugh at you as they let you have exactly what you're asking for.   ;D

..and emotional outbursts as this are one of the reasons i wnt take people serious who think that carrying guns is a good thing.
If you cant even start arguing about something without such polemics, then you shouldnt talk about a metter like that at all. Not my opinpion? Ridicule? Still not following my opinion? Shoot?
Sorry mate, you just disqualified yourself.

We aren't talking about you, some self-rightous statist who has been programmed by the German educational system all his life.  If you had the time to shoot 5 bullets (38 special revolvers only hold 5 rounds, this ain't no Dirty Harry movie) at an attacker, it's because they were willing to keep their face in your sights instead of retreating, or even falling down and surrendering.  This guy did neither.  In order to even take more than one shot to the face without giving up, considering he didn't appear to have a gun himself, he had to be hyped up on PCP or some other major drug.

And even in the best hands, such as this obviously well practiced mother, firing all five rounds in a 38 special revolver (particularly with this kind of accuracy) takes several seconds.  This article doesn't give many details, but I'd wager that he got all five because the first four didn't stop him; and not because she just kept firing as fast as she could.  Those old west movies that show gunslingers shooting by slapping the hammer while shooting from the hip are total bullshit.  And even the fact that this mother was willing to run upstairs and call the cops first shows her consideration for the intruder; because it proves that she was willing to let him take anything and leave.  She lives in Georgia, which is a 'castle doctrine' state.  Said simply, this means that anyone who uses force to enter into your home is already presumed to have violent intent, and she could have waited at the door for him to break it down and shot him in the atrium, and she wouldn't even have been arrested.

In turn it would be even more rewarding to see you get castrated by one of those unfortunate parents.
I pray, I really do, for the sake of your children, that you may never have any.
 

No mate, you disqualified yourself with your first post.  There is no debate to be had.  No one on this side of the pond really gives a fat flying fuck what "arguments" against our human rights some Eurotrash might be able to present in an obscure Internet forum.  I get so tired of this bullshit.  If you want to have this debate, come to my house and we can have a little chat over tea and crumpets.  I bet you have no idea how many of your countrymen have moved to this country just to get away from asshats like yourself.  I've met several, particularly down at the BBC (http://www.bbcbrew.com/) and all of them would have preferred to stay in their homeland.

And make no mistake, myself and many others really do consider it to be a human right.

http://www.a-human-right.com/

Bugger off, wanker. 

Fastest shooter in the world: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=thCl_mYIUBE#t=131s

He's also a professional entertainer who practices hours every day to be able to do those trick shots.  He's amazing because the ability to do such things with a revolver is beyond 99.9999% of gun owners.  He's an aberation, not a example.

I did not say he's normal but you said that wild west hip shooter were bullshit.

99.9999% of the time, they are bullshit.  I was rounding off for expediency.

On another note, the laws of physics don't exclude the possibility that the force of gravity could suddenly reverse itself and destroy the entire universe in another 'big bang'; but I find that possibility rather not worth considering.

Castration?!  That's the thanks I get for answering your question?   :o

Heh, looks like I touched a nerve.  Poor little rage machine.   ;D 

Taking responsibility for the terrible consequences of poor decisions is hard, isn't it?

We all know you'd never have the courage to share your immoral opinion with Mrs. Herman or Sarah McKinley, demanding to their face they be disarmed victims.

It's obvious why the heroic home invasion survivors would take offense to you telling them they should have just surrendered to their fate, and left their children in harm's way.

So as a deflection, you wish random harm on me.  Odd that you fixate on my genitals.  Get some help and see a therapist please.  Creep.

"Emotional outburst?"  If you say so.   ::)  More like you wish to avoid the substance of my post, by psychoanalyzing and pathologizing perfectly normal speech.

I see a carefully articulated, and quite pointed, hypothetical situation with a little dig thrown in at the end for rhetorical effect.

Again:  Would you tell a survivor of a home invasion, to their face, they have no to right to use a weapon to protect themselves and their children? 

No, you wouldn't.  Because you know exactly what you would deserve (and hopefully receive) for doing that.

And blimey, who made you the qualification police anyway mate?   ;D 

http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-emotion
http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/anecdotal

thanks myrkul for this very useful website  ;D

Well, then, you need to learn to use it correctly. It might be an appeal to emotion, if there weren't clear logical benefits: the protection of her own life, as well as that of her children. It might be anecdotal, if such examples weren't so widespread and frequent.

Events like this:
http://news.yahoo.com/father-fatally-shoots-son-outside-pennsylvania-gun-store-022116082.html (http://news.yahoo.com/father-fatally-shoots-son-outside-pennsylvania-gun-store-022116082.html)
are widespread and frequent as well.

They are, because idiots are also widespread and frequent. Following simple gun safety rules would have prevented that. A gun enabled the small, physically overpowered woman to take down and stop her larger, physically more powerful attacker, thus protecting her children. It also enabled an idiot father to kill his son. Darwin would say both events are a net gain.

Most people are not rational and live in a demon-haunted world constructed of emotion, anecdotes, and other logical fallacies.

They are utterly persuaded by high profile tragedies that 'guns are evil' and no amount of statistical data or principled philosophy will convince them otherwise.

To reach those dim, bleating sheeple, an entirely different approach is called for.

Hence, we are zealously waving the bloody shirt and creating our of litany of anecdotes to counter the Marxist media's anti-gun narrative.

It's called rhetoric, the art of discourse. 

Ever heard of it?  No?  Time to learn.  From Wiki:


You've got the logos part down.  Good job, Sherlock!

Now try to understand the other two parts, pathos and ethos.

Your insistence we neglect these two and focus exclusively on logos is in itself a logical fallacy! 

Can you guess which one?   ;D

I agree 100% in the 2nd ammendment. If you think guns should be banned in America you are either misinformed or stupid. What I dont get is theres over 300,000,000 people in the united states, every time we have a shooting suddenly theres mass hysteria and call for reform, taking guns away from the countless responsible owners. People need to slow down and look at the FACTS. Guns protect our freedom, guns save more lives then they take, and "Assault rifles" are no different then hunting rifles, that is if they are semi automatic, which is the only way their availble to the general public. People need to stop thinking the police will be there to always help them, they wont. And if/when shit hits the fan a whole lot of "moms against guns" gonna get raped, robbed, and killed.

High-five Icebreaker, nice thread.  ;D

Let the socialist scrabble for higher ground to avoid their sick fantasy where the mom and her kids die as a sacrifice for the anti-gun movement. (In order to save others, of course)

Like rats fleeing the tide...

This also shows that low-capacity magazines also are no option even for self-defense. She used all six bullets from revolver and the nigger* was still alive because no vital organs been hit even with multiple headshots.

* I want to see some multiculturalists saying "judge people from his actions, not skin color!" The situation is always this way and I never heard opposite way (white man invading home of black women with kids).

Happens all the time. White guy usually has a blue costume on, though.

Guys, stop misquoting each other.  Both the article, and I, have pointed out that she used five shots.  The article implies, probably incorrectly, that the revolver was a six shooter.  Odds are high that it was either a 5 shot revolver, or another caliber.  The six round 38 special is a rare animal for a variety of technical reasons, and as far as I am aware, none have been mass produced in over 50 years.  You can get a 22lr revovler in 5, 6 & 8 round versions; and larger caliber revolvers (45?) in rather heavy & large 6 round versions, but a 6 round 38 special cannot be a compact weapon, and as such is uncommon.  

Anyway for zombies or escaped slaves a belt fed machine gun is needed to score a sure kill!

For human being any caliber can be deadly, but often the death is not immediate like in computer games. The women might have a collectible revolver just as good.

P.S. I envy how Americans have rare weapons such as Mauser C96, Luger, P38 and early versions of Tokarev TT-30. Looks like whole Europe arsenal is bought to USA.

That part was incredible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=thCl_mYIUBE#t=639s


Problem is, in Europe people are so used to being stripped of their rights that they find it normal that ''guns are dangerous because they kill people so they should be banned'', forgetting who pulls the trigger. Gun laws in EU will vary from country to country so in some places it may not be that bad (Switzerland is a good example) but I think in most cases they are very restrictive compared to US. For example in Poland gun permits are required for anything else than 19th century gunpowder guns (even then there are some limitations...), and only 1% of the population has a gun permit because they are close to impossible to get for sport shooting and impossible to get for self-defense (unless one works as a bodyguard or something similar). Before WWII a permit was issued after a quick background check, after Stalin came everyone was forced to surrender their arms and their permits were revoked. Nowadays even the police is untrained, shooting on average 20 shots a year. Not sure how it was last year, but 3 years ago 37 tons of ammunition were disposed of for $130k because they were no longer usable after being stored for years (probably not in the proper conditions).
But in UK it gets so bad that carrying a screwdriver ''without a good reason'' can mean trouble because murders are committed with it:

http://www.allamericanblogger.com/13474/in-london-its-illegal-to-carry-a-screwdriver-without-a-good-reason-by-the-way-knife-crime-is-skyrocketing/

I've got a former soviet weapon as well. 

Yeah, but you guys have all those ex-soviet nukes. The US still keeps track of theirs.

What model if it is not secret?USA keeps track of ex-soviet nukes too. Russians take all nukes with them when they left Latvia. In Latvia only research reactor remained. The USA asked to shut it down and send all fissile material abroad and our politics readily take goatse position and now Latvia is no more a nuclear superpower. I spoke with persons who worked there and they told that in case of need a nukes could be produced in less than year.

The USA is not only disarming their own citizens, it even disarms other sovereign nations. So You could sleep peacefully, there is not many nations that can have both nukes and different opinions than USA government. And if monkey comes in your house, use pepper spray.  ;D

What the Hell are you talking about? The article specifically mentions that the gun was a ".38 revolver" which is stated to be empty after six shots were fired. Presumably it was a .38 Special, which to this day is the single most popular revolver cartridge, with a 6-shot cylinder being most common for this calibre (although 5- and 7-shot revolvers exist), hardly a "rare animal". There were a total of 6 shots fired: 5 hits and 1 miss. Learn to read. ::)

Hitting monkey 5 times in head is still considered a miss!

For the record:

I wonder which one missed.

It's a right!!!!!!!!!

Was it a miss, or a "warning shot"? Which I fucking hate unless you have a full load blank and fire it with your arm outstretched above your head directly up into the sky, starter pistol style, to get the attention of an active violent criminal whose back is turned and you don't have a clear shot and backstop on.

I read it, I question it's accuracy.  I did a google search for other articles on this event, and among those that I could find, no others actually said that she fired 6 shots.  All of them said that she hit him in the face and neck 5 times, and a few mentioned that she had emptied the revolver but still buffaloed the guy by telling him that if he got up she'd shoot again, before running to a neighbor's house with her kids.  I find it very likely that it was a 38 special, but not likely that it was a six shooter.  I have zero evidence, mind you, but experience regarding how often early reporting gets details wrong makes me believe that the writer of this article interpreted "hit five times, empty revolver" to mean that she missed once.  How many reporters do you think have experience with a revolver, and how many only think of wild west movies?  A 38 special in six shots is rare, because they have to be the frame size of a service revolver.  While reducing the capacity by one reduces both weight and frame size significantly, making the 38 special a crediblely compact & concealable weapon.  Which is pretty much how they are used, and thus how manufactures make them.  While I wouldn't doubt that full size frame revolvers are still manufactured, perhaps for "cowboy shooting" competitions, the majority that exist are old handguns from the days that such revolvers were the standard police issue sidearm.  Their numbers are significantly outweighed by the number of 5 shot compact revolvers.  I don't even know if I'd trust such an old handgun to not blow up in my hand, considering the significant advancements in +P powder tech.  The 38 special was originally a black powder round, and has gone through a number of 'revisions' over the past 100+ years of it's existence.

Could she have used a 6 shot 38?  Yes.  I just don't consider that combination likely.

The sheriff said six shots were fired. The reporter didn't infer this, he cited the county sheriff as the source of this specific information, and he's not likely to be mistaken about such a simple detail. Maybe he is, but I think it's most unlikely.

[citation needed] Last time I checked, 6-shot .38 Special revolvers were very common, if not the most common type of revolver used today. Sure, 5-shot revolvers are pretty common, but I don't think six-shooters are anywhere near as rare as you seem to think. Besides, who's to say this woman isn't involved in "cowboy shooting" competitions? I mean, who keeps a revolver for self-defence purposes these days?

As I understand it, a .38 revolver offers a good combination of concealability, reliability, and stopping power. The relatively low ammo capacity is the only real drawback.

i think your imagination regarding self-defense scenarios is a bit limited. a .38 revolver is inaccurate at long distances, has a very low rate of fire and no capability to penetrate body armor or walls. i would recommend a hk mp7 pdw. if legal in your jurisdiction of course.

I think your imagination regarding self-defense scenarios is a bit over-influenced by Hollywood. Most defense incidents occur at very close range, and don't need a flood of lead. Most attackers don't wear body armor, and the last thing you want to do in a home defense situation is to penetrate a wall.

An MP7 is a fine weapon. If you're a bodyguard. For carrying in a purse or keeping in the nightstand, I'd pick a .38. Besides, the P90 is prettier.

just covering all the angles. most means you come out ahead in most self-defense scenarios. who wants that?


i think even in the US with the papier mache houses, you probably wont be able to shoot through an exterior wall. besides, if you want to "accidentally" shoot your husband/wife in your house, its kind of ackward to explain when you got line of sight. definite upside of a pdw in a country with so many bad divorces  ;D


i might be a little antiquated in that matter, but i would still feel a little unmanly with a purse anyway. a holstered mp7 and that cap
and no one will ever fuck with you!

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-S2Lky1RFqqk/TyoxsQAMEQI/AAAAAAAAFfs/_dcLeoo7Smo/s1600/jayne2.jpg

I'm sure, that as a manly man, you know that an MP7, as an SMG, is slung, not holstered.

Excepting a brick or stone facade, I can do that with a copper jacketed roundnose 22lr.  It wouldn't be moving very fast on the other side, which is good, but it'd go through.  Anything supersonic and a solid leading edge would not likely have trouble breaking through plastic siding, a sheet of 1/2 inch thick plywood and a sheet of 1/2 inch thick drywall board.

it can be holstered or slung.


i stand corrected. no wonder every little puff leaves you homeless  ;)

Ah, I stand corrected. It does, however, require a thigh holster.

I'm sure you also know that women, who tend to be physically weaker, not only benefit more from the addition of a firearm, but also benefit more often, being the target of violence more often than men.

LOL!  I live in tornado alley!

That's pretty sad! Can you name an area where they do that? (but not your location please)

Really makes me appreciate the brownstone I grew up in.

OTOH, there was someone killed a couple of years ago who lived in a brick house when the wall blew over and fell on them.

Though in the US, even brick houses are commonly wooden frame. If I ever build a house, it will be all-brick just like my parents' was.

lol how did this thread turn to construction? It does make you think though? How the hell can we keep our homes secure against hurricanes and tsunamis? I wonder if steel is a good option? Though that seems like it would have problems as well.

The places that are serious about storms build their houses (or at least one room) with cinder block walls, reinforced with rebar, and filled with concrete. Next best thing to digging into the side of a mountain.

Safety from a tsunami actually requires a whole different design strategy: make way for the water.

The truth is that for the vast majority of us, it's not worth making our homes secure from hurricanes and tsunamis. I'm probably more likely to be killed on my way home tonight than I am of ever being killed by a hurricane in my home.

And a tsunami would have to be going some to reach Tennessee. :D

Especially if you're in western TN. If you get hit there with a Tsunami, we've got bigger problems.

btw, what do you pay for a house made of foam (board)?
pick a size, i dont know whats common in the us, 1500sq?

in light of new evidence, i withdraw my proposal to use a mp7 pdw for home defense purposes. in order to limit damage to your property, owners of *cough*...houses...similiar to the one above should consider something with more appropriate penetration capabilities.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41IQs40i1yL.jpg

and buy some end-cutting pliers. you dont want to pull those of the wall....

Thanks for that, fornit... I haven't laughed that much all day.

I know you've said that women 'tend' to be physically weaker but I'm someone who attends a martial arts club where there's a twelve year old girl who could easily kick your arse LOL I think it's just a general perception that's been drilled into our heads really, the problem is everyone is different so there's no real way to say whether this is true or not, the only thing that is 100% certain is that female muscles are of a different shape than men.

Well, of course. exceptions don't disprove a tendency. Not every woman can be a black belt, though, and I bet a fully grown man, at the same level of skill, can beat that 12 year old. The point is:

Little old lady, armed with knife, vs street tough, armed with knife: advantage: street tough.
Little old lady, armed with gun, vs street tough, armed with gun: fair fight.

Human weapon is a crappy example for martial arts, but what if the old lady knows ninjitsu knife fighting? :P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlq2gw4LnIg

Go to 5:13

:D and I know the point, but it's daft, speaking as someone who's been doing martial arts for around 8 years there is no way to tell just from physical appearance whether a person is capable of winning a fight or not.

Edit: I finally found an awesome example, there's this guy who my teachers learned a lot from called Sensei Kase, he's dead now but on first glance you would never think he could do any martial arts at all

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXZZ4NOY9aI - sorry about the crappy music, but this was one of the only decent videos of him demonstrating I could find, he completely knocks about a guy far fitter than he is when he's being attacked.

And what if the street tough also knows ninjutsu knife fighting?

The point is, if you leave it to hand-to-hand, the advantage leans heavily in favor of the aggressor, who, by virtue of making his living through beating people up, has a vested interest in being the stronger.

Or, as an old advertising slogan put it:
 "God made man, but Samuel Colt made them equal."

That's true, but my point is that that kind of thing isn't dependent on a persons gender or physical fitness etc. :P

And a gun completely removes gender or physical fitness from the equation - totally ignores them in determining who wins the fight. Something no hand-to-hand fighting style or weapon can claim.

And which is easier to do, achieve 15th dan black belt, or learn how to hit a melon-sized target at 30 ft?

lolz I get what you're on about, shooting is easier most of the time but honestly, there are so many factors to think about when it comes to this kind of thing it's like with arguing about the newtown shooting etc. it's just a never ending cycle of hypotheticals, I can just as easily come up with a counter argument to what you're saying as with mine.

Wow, I've seen a couple like that, I just assumed that the foam was insulation and was just yet to be covered by the board.

I have to say, I'm not fond of a lot of modern houses. Modern materials and techniques look like they've just come out of the printer from the CAD program, none of that slight non-uniformity that gives a house character.

Not really. The best you can really say is that they might have a gun, too, and that still makes it a fair fight.

If I had to pick one single thing which did the most to bring about the Renaissance, it would be firearms. Cannon destroyed the age of the castle, and hand-held firearms destroyed the age of the armored knight. Without those, feudalism was doomed.

Nice one mom`s :D

Thank you for posting this.

We almost never hear of stories like this in the establishment-controlled mainstream media. Wonder why that is...

Well, right there you've asserted the lady is better off dead.

Then you have erred in your inferences as to the meaning of the 6 bullets.

Many handgun instructors suggest to empty the gun into the bad guy.  Many documented cases where the bad guy kept coming after being shot multiple times.

Stick to talking about things you know about please.

Oh, and by the way, many in "law enforcement" are not adept with weapons (and neither should they be).  Many qualify by a range test with 50 shells once a year.

Let me summarize this thread:

1) We are so unhappy with our deep mental illnesses and lack of respect for life, we think the act of killing alone is heroism.

2) When somebody knocks on your door, stay quiet and hide in the closet with a weapon.

3) The purpose of the right to bear arms is to protect us from petty thieves. 

 Nothing personal, threaten my family with death and I will shoot your brains out. I'm not mad at criminals, indeed I feel sorry for them and wish they would make another choice. But the choice to die is theirs not mine. If you want to break in and kill, rape, steal, with impunity ; try New York, LA, Chicago, D.C...But don't try a state that allows people to protect themselves.
Those who want to go unarmed are welcome to. But don't expect me to protect you. All the sensitivity and legal issues about this have caused me to rethink my training regime. I am no longer willing to intervene to defend a stranger. If I see someone being hacked to death by a crazy guy, I will draw my weapon and cover my retreat. It is just to legally risky to help. 

Sadly enough this has happened on the same block as me. Pretty lucky the guy chose the house down the street rather than mine, he might not be so lucky next time.

The 19-year old recently widowed young mother in the second instance was being stalked by her assailants before they forced her to take defensive action in the form of a kinetic response.

Let's summarize your asinine position:

1.  You're 19 years old, have a baby to protect, and your husband recently passed from cancer

2.  Some creepy dudes have been eying you and figure out you are alone and vulnerable

3.  They break in, to rape you or worse

4.  You should just give them what they want.  Maybe they won't hurt the baby.  They're just petty thieves and you should all hold hands and sing kumbaya.  Then maybe Scrabble and snacks, if they have time.

And Santa was never seen again...

Santa was a lie told to small children so they might be more trusting in the presence of old strangers.  Ever notice that a baby is always sceptical of a guy in a santa suit?  That's probably a rational response to old men they don't know.

No.

There are options.

For example, you might try:  "Leave him alone!  He's mine, I want to hack him to death.  Get away!"

Then when the perp comes at you....

Bahaha!

from my biased european standpoint (ca. 1,24 gundeaths per 100.000 population in germany) i would not exactly say that you should take the right away from somebody protecting himself or his family with a gun.
But taking into account that the original intention of this right makes much more sense in rural areas, where nature's law is more present and it takes a long time until somebody could help you if you're in danger,
it's by contrast relatively unhealthy for crowded urban areas as long as the overall social disruption is on a low level that guarantees a common solidarity of a society.

As soon as social stress starts growing and gaps between social classes expand during times of crisis, nature's law starts shifting in the foreground for individuals and in combination with high rates of gun possession this mixture doesn't look like solving the problem at all.
in the US it's easy for a socially disadvantaged individual to get his hands on a weapon as a tool to obtain value with pressure while an advantaged individual can also get a weapon as easily to prevent the other one from suceeding in doing so.
besides this raw battle for a living every other intention to use a gun is following from the growing psychological illnesses and social stress.

i still believe in the term "man is a wolf to man", this can only be overridden by a functioning and strong society based on ethical and moral rules handed on and adapted over time from generation to generation.
imo if an individual lacks these rules he shouldn't be in the position to possess a gun, because it's a very basic tool simple to use to realize his antisocial aims.
if at all, then possession of guns should go hand in hand with a strong education and regulation to guarantee it's not getting into the wrong hands, because besides the aspect of hunting or sports people simply don't need such a strong tool for self-defense in an intact and secure modern society. (there are lots of alternatives for this purpose like pepper spray, electro shocker or other things. I'm not too familiar with that stuff.)

on the other hand perhaps US society (ca. 10,3 gundeaths per 100.000 population) has already broken apart to a point where nature's law for survival is so present in the swarm's awareness, that this pacifistic thought approach is no longer valid.
On top american weapon companies profit from that situation a lot and arm society to a point where it becomes quite excessive regardless of the consequences while manipulating via media and lobbying politicians not to take any action.



here are some charts and articles i found quite interesting on the subject.
- Gundeaths in US since Newtown shooting:
   http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/12/gun_death_tally_every_american_gun_death_since_newtown_sandy_hook_shooting.html
- worldwide gun deaths vs gun ownerships
   http://www.businessinsider.com/shooting-gun-laws-2012-12
- List of countries by firearm-related death rate
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

edit: at this point i recommend the movie "Dear Wendy" for another diverse approach to this subject

Lol, took that piece of trash 20 minutes to break the door down.  Shooting called justified, nice.

That all sounds like you've done some research on the topic.  Sure, the US gun death toal is pretty high, but did you know that if you remove the statistics that come from cities of greater than 250K, the gun death rate is lower than in The UK, Australia, Russia or France?  Even if you remove the gun death total from those same large cities as well.  I'm not talking murder rates either, I'm talking about deaths from firearms.  If we were to include murder by blunt or sharp weapons of opprotunity, The British Isles don't look so civilized anymore.  Even Germany wouldn't look so good anymore.  If one considers just the rate of violent crimes overall, and not just those involiving a death, The UK already is higher than the United States even without removing major cities from the mix.  Australia isn't far behind, either; and Russia has been well over the US since the fall of the Soviet State.  You don't hear about such statistics because they really don't support the agenda of groups that tend to use such arguments.

It is not the place of politicians, or anyone else, to "fix" the social problems.  Those problems are the direct results of culture clashes, in large part; and are concentrated in areas where those cultures overlap.  This isn't Germany, so there is no way the US is ever going to be able to enforce a prohibition on parrallel cultures.  (We can argue about whether it really works for Germany some other time)

That all said, if we were to do an honest comparison between Europe and the US, we would be comparing individual US States to individual European States.  Comparing the US as a whole to individual EUropean states is deception, and a comparison of the US overall against Europe overall would have to include the Eastern former block countries, and Europe would look far worse than it should in reality, would it not?  If we were to compare very civilized & modern Germany to, let's say, my home state of Kentucky, how do you think that Germany would fare?  Germany does not permit personally owned firearms.  Ketucky is one of the most weaons permissive states in the United States, including the registration & licesning of Class III weaponry (Military arms; I.E. fully automatic machine guns, armor piercing rounds, incidiary rounds, explosives and weaponized vehicles such as tanks, silencers etc.)  If you've got the funds & a clean criminal record, you can get it here.

REally, I want to know how that woulc play out.  I'd be willing to wager that Germany looks more dangerous than Kentucky, from a violent crime statistics perspective.

Well, here are the official statistics (short version):
Police Crime Statistics (Federal Republic of Germany) 2012 (PDF) (http://www.bka.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Publikationen/PolizeilicheKriminalstatistik/2012/pks2012FlyerEnglisch,templateId=raw,property=publicationFile.pdf/pks2012FlyerEnglisch.pdf)
What's not in there:
5696 cases of threats with a gun

hehe  :D

http://www.kentuckystatepolice.org/pdf/cik_2012.pdf

Here is the link to the comparable document for Kentucky.  Interestingly, they don't produce a crime rate, only an absolute number of offences.  For all of Kentucky during 2012, the total number of crimes that are considered violent (i.e. Assault, Homicide, Kidnapping, Robbery, and Rape) is 36,965.  According to Wikipedia, Kentucky's population was 4,380,415 on July 1, 2012.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky#Demographics)

36,965 /4,380,415 = 0.0084386981598775 or 843.9 per 100K.  Did I do that right?

According to page 2 of your submitted document, total violent crime in Germany was 195,143 in 2012. This includes, as stated, Murder & Manslaughter, Rape & violent sexual crimes, Robberies, and Dangerous Bodiliy Injury (which I will assume is comparable to assault here).  No mention of kidnapping, is that not a crime in Germany?

According to Wikipedia again, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany) Germany had a population of 80,219,695 during the official census of 2011.  Which seems the most current numbers available, so we'll run with that.

 195,143 / 80,219,695 = 0.0024326071047765 or 243.3 per 100K.

Assuming we have good numbers, and there is no reason that I can see to assume we do not, and assuming I did that correctly, (I'm sure that if I did not, someone will mention it) we would have to assume that a German is about a quarter as likely to be a victim of a violent crime, randomly speaking, than a Kentuckian.  I must say, I did not expect that outcome.

EDIT::  Wait, brandishing a firearm isn't a crime?  Undoubtedly that number is too low to be relevent, but what else isn't part of German crime stats?  If you pull out a weapon to threaten another person here, that's already assualt even if the threat is hollow.  If you threaten someone bodily harm over the phone, it's terroristic threatening, which is a violent crime here also, filed under the catargory of assault.

EDIT2: Wow, I didn't know there was such an epidemic of kidnappings in Kentucky.  Another damn good reason to own a handgun.  Not enough to alter the overall outcome even if Germany's kidnapping rate was as bad, though.  I also noticed that both violations of gun possession regulations (i.e. getting caught with a handgun in public without a permit to carry) or getting caught with a gun in your possession while committing a federal drug violation (i.e. caught growing pot in the woods, and there is a shotgun in your truck) is almost always (I say almost, because I'm sure it's not a perfect corrolation) an automatic charge of assualt of a police officer.  There are certainly enough drugs and guns in Kentucky to make that combonation into a data changer, but I have no way of filtering out the real crimes here from the charges that police stack up on a perp.  These stats are not convictions, so the charges alone would contribute to the "crime rate".

I'm not sure what's included in the category "Straftaten gegen die persönliche Freiheit" (crimes against personal freedom).
That's 211643 victims there. That's a lot of victims.
(edit: that includes kidnapping, trafficking, stalking, threatening and "Nötigung"(coercion?))

That's at least "offence against the weapon act". Probably "threatening".

A better question, is would "crimes against personal freedom" be considered a violent crime?  If it is not in Germany, that's enough to move the numbers to nearly even, since kidnapping is certainly counted as a violent crime.  I'm pretty sure that any of those "crimes against personal freedom" would be a catagory of violent crime here.  Definitions matter a great deal in the context of statistics.  How can we even compare countries that report the same crime as entirely different classes of crimes?


Okay, would those be considered violent crimes?  They are here.  I'm gaining new insight into why it is that European nations appear so safe statisticly, while the US appears so violent.  It seems to be, in part, because your governments don't regard some common types of social crimes to be violent in nature, while ours generally do.  If someone called you on the phone and threatened you with bodily harm, would the threat alone be a violent crime in Germany?  It would in Kentucky, and I'm pretty sure that's generally true in the United States.  I know it's also true in California, Ohio, Indiana & Tennessee at least.  It's likely to be true in every state that my Kentucky State Deadly Weapons Permit is honored, which today is well over half of all of the states last I checked.

Gasp, a government manipulating statistics to make its subjects believe it's perfectly fine to prohibit the right to effective self-defense!? That doesn't happen every day...

Ok. Not reading it all. I'm just cheering for the mother! Woot! Go mom!

Notablely, I stumbled upon this article...

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/10/dean-weingarten/cops-more-likely-to-murder%e2%80%a8/

That attempts to compare the murder rate of sworn police officers against the murder rate of licensed concelled carry permit holders.  The not very official rate of police officers that committed unjustifiable homicides, while working or otherwise, is around 1.5 per 100,000.  Which if they were a nation amongst themselves, would make them safer and more trustworthy than Germans.  One would expect such a law & order group to be upstanding.  But here's the unexpected part, the rate of concelled carry permit holders that commit homicides (with a firearm or otherwise) is just over 0.5 per 100,000; making the self-selecting lot of those who pursue such a permit the most trustworthy group in the world.

EDIT: In the interests of disclosures of biases, I am among that self-selecting group.

EDIT: It appears that those above numbers were for domestic homicides, not all homicides; but the trend remains true.

Well, cops don't like to deal with living witnesses that could afford lawyers knowing the department will shoulder all the legal expenses.

People just want to protect their families. However, if it's justified to begin with, I'll keep shooting until the threat has stopped; unfortunately for the bad guy, that might mean more than is needed cuz he still looks like he's a threat.

Yes, I totally agree. You do NOT need a big gun for self defense, you need one you can shoot ACCURATELY.

5 Headshots and still no kill.... ???
I tought I get unlucky in Battlefield 3....

This study, by it's design, excludes any shooting that the police themselves can claim is justified.  So this only includes cases of homicide by police, that even the police weren't willing to sweep under the rug.  Intuitively, the real odds of being killed by a police officer are higher if one were to also include on the job shootings.  Since CCW license holders don't have an on-the-job justifiable shooting catagory, such a comparison wouldn't really be valid.

P90 is the greatest home defense weapon for woman and kids and they have 50 rounds in case they miss.   Light weight, no kick to speak of, great for lefties and not intimidating to learn. 

And damned expensive, hard to get in the US, and not very concealable.

1.  don't be cheap with home security (you can get for $1500), most people complain about the ammo prices though (and I say "don't waste too many bullets then".   That being said, I do not care that it took $15 worth of ammo to save my kids life and an AR15 could have done it for $7.....
2.  not hard at all.  only for a few months when people jacked AR prices up to $1800 because of the panic over regulation which never happened.
3.  better not to conceal what you are about to kill someone with that is threatening your life.   Not your "out and about on the town" type of defense.

The P90 is hard to get, because it requires a Class III weapons license, due to the fact that it's manufactured with a 12" barrel.  Perhaps you intended the PS90?

And it's very expensive compared to a 38 special handgun or a 22 rifle, both of which would serve quite well with practice.  And the price difference can pay for a lot of ammo for practice.  I personally carry a Sig Sauger Mosquito, a compact semi-auto chambered in 22lr.  The ammo is cheap and I can hit the target quite quickly, and I don't have to worry about a red mark on my forehead from recoil.

And it's better to conceal a weapon if you're leaving your house, because one doesn't really want to either alarm the liberals in a crowd or to alert the criminal to your defensive capacities.  Or do you think that defense of one's family only applies inside the home?

Now you know why I laugh when people call these games "realistic". The brain (which is what you're trying to hit) is relatively small compared to the rest of the head, and is well-protected by the skull, which has an annoying tendency to harmlessly deflect bullets which strike at an angle. A headshot has to be delivered very precisely to result in an instant kill. Many suicide attempters find that out the hard way.

the reason why we don't need guns in Europe is that we are smart enough to leave the house through the backyard.

I have a question for you. This is unrelated to the topic of P90/weapon choice (upon which I agree with you), but a question on gun related theory in general. First, I want to say that I am not in FAVOR of gun control, but I also DON'T despise it. So, my question is, would like a society in which everyone carries a gun? Or at least, every adult male? I mean sure, I understand that you believe it is important to protect your family, but do you not think that if every man in, say, a restaurant had a gun, and every one of them was inclined to use it if a break-in happened, do you not think it would increase the chance of stray shot(s) killing people rather than the chance that the robber actually has the intention to kill someone if they just cooperate?

Armscor has a new 1911 with 22 TCM ammo. Very nice. Google it for details. I don't know for sure but it may perform like the FiveSeven.

A number of adult females already carry guns, and I would prefer every sane woman carry and train with a couple, exclusively of what men do. If the extremely rare criminal with no self-preservation instinct decides to commit armed robbery in a society where everyone except children are armed, then they will be doing so to not only commit suicide, but hope that a crossfire happens. It is up to every sane adult to follow the firearm safety rule on "know what's beyond your target", not get tunnel vision, and avoid crossfire (and if anyone notices a crossfire potential, to shout "watch your crossfire!" repeatedly until trajectories are made safe).

Plus, in the case of a restaurant, typically most will be sitting down, and the rest will either be 1) in line 2) waiters, cooks, bartenders, etc 3) people paying and going to the bathroom, all standing up. The typical robbery is committed with very shallow penetration into the building, so those standing at the front will either take or give fire first, before anyone else can react. If it gets past the front, those seated will have an up-angle shot at the robber, and should have a clear sight picture, able to avoid hitting other seated people.

Here is a video of an attempted armed robbery in a restaurant:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsVCHE7ayPE

Somebody picked the wrong diner.

Your question is based on a society that is not already armed and is more or less moot.
The USA has 300M guns.   If we ban them, they do not go away as most are unregistered.   Therefore, there is no effiing way I will give up being armed when the people that seek to do harm will not obey any new 2nd amendment ignoring law.
But, why don't you look up the stats on accidental shootings vs. texting deaths or prescription deaths etc.   In a country of over 310M, it is very small.
I do not want to debate the entire merits of the 2nd amendment but another reason I support it is that no country in their right mind would attempt a land based invasion of a country that has an entire population armed.   The cost is too high.  Think Switzerland with 310M people.

I expected something like: Don't worry, a police car is coming in three minutes, hold on.

Yeah I don't want to debate the merits of the 2nd amendment either, just the practicalities. And I agree with you on your 2nd point, I think that smoking, twd, etc. is a much more important issue than guns.

Would you really want to trust every adult with a weapon? There are a lot of stupid people in this country,and adrenaline can make even smart people do dumb things.

yes. I think the default should be to trust. We do the same for a far more dangerous tool, the car. Any nut job can get a car and go on a horrendous killing spree. Driving is by far the most dangerous thing you do. If someone demonstrates they can't drive safely or sober, we take away their right to drive. I approach guns the same way.
As you point out, some will not rise to the occasion.

I'm going to answer this question in two parts, because there is a short answer and a long answer.

The short answer to "would you like a society in which everyonhe carries a gun?" is probably not.

The long answer is because we live in a society that, historicly speaking, has defaulted to permissiveness with defensive weapons, and as a result of that those who choose to carry a firearm in public are a self selected group.  Since they are self selecting, those same people make their daily choices based on the perceptions of risk versus inconvience.  When in an area, or choosing to proceed into an area, with a reputation of elevated risk of violent crime; such people are likely to carry.  The corrolary is that those same people are generally likely to leave the weapons at home when they travel in or through an area with a reputation of safety.  The percentage of people who carry all of the time is very small, and usually related to their occupation, i.e. cop, prosecutor, corporate investigator, etc.  The vast majority of this self-selecting group is very trustworthy with weapons, as my prior article should demonstrate.  As previously stated, I have a concealed carry license that is valid in upwards of 30 states today, but to be honest I rarely actually carry a weapon in public.  I live in one of the safest cities in the United States with over half a million residents, and it also happens to have one of the highest per capita rates of CCW license holders and the hightest per capita rate of class III weapons ownership in the United States.  So excluding the mandatory gun possession in Switzerland and like places, the highest rate of machine gun ownership on the entire planet, probably across all of human history.  Like Switzerland, crazy people are not unheard of, but misuse of those weapons is so rare that such incidents can be counted on one hand, if it's even happened here at all.

In summary, permission to carry a weapon is not equal to the practial reality that all adults would actually do so; and if a majroity of adults ever felt they needed to, then there are other things wrong with that society that gun control couldn't possiblely help resolve anyway.  I can see of no logical reason to not trust those who choose to carry that they know what they are doing.  Stats show that they are at least as trustworthy as the uniformed police in this regard, and gun control isn't going to improve that issue.


Those who choose to carry are under the same obligations as the police to not harm bystanders, and it's also a leap of logic to assume that every CCW gun owner is 1) carrying in the resturant and 2) willing to intervene on behalf of the store owner, or even other patrons.  Being robbed while heeled becomes a risk versus benefit calculation with regard to responding with force, since the robber doesn't know you're armed also.  Some choose to hand over the cash and deal with it latter.  But not having the gun means that is never an option if the situation were ever to arise.  I'm in favor of defaulting to the condition that my daughter has the choice to defend herself using whatever technology is available to her, at least until she personally demonstrates that she is not really an adult.  After all, we all know people who are just children walking around as adults; and if they should ever show that they are willing to harm others then they shouldn't be able to retain the right to carry a weapon.  But that is not most people.  That is, in fact, a very small fraction of adults; even in our childish and violent modern culture.  Again, history shows that those who are willing to go to the trouble and expense of getting a CCW license are exactly the kind of people that a free and safe socity would prefer to be in the majority among the armed in public.

Nice response, thanks :). In depth, and I think I agree with you on most things you said. I've just been wondering, wanting to get a look at what a gun-supporter's mind is thinking. I'm trying to formulate my own opinion on the matter still.

Yes. Innocent until proven guilty/found civilly liable.

Really strange what different cultures consider as heroism.

To clarify my own position, I'm not opposed to gun regulation per se; but I am opposed to efforts by anti-gun political factions attempting to impose social contraints that are presented as "sensible regulation".  For example, while the 2nd amendment most certainly does grant me the right to own & carry a weapon, that doesn't mean that I get to do so without conditions.  The CCW license movement that swept across the US during the 1990's is an excellent example of such.  I don't have to ask for permission to buy the handgun, but a formal process that notifies the police of my intent to carry concealed for my own protection is in my own interests, whether I were to call it a permit or a notice.  But the idea of people who don't understand how firearms actually work attempting to dictate the maximum number of rounds that I may have in my handgun is not "sensible regulation".  As noted, I carry a Sig Sauer Mosquito handgun, which is a medium compact framed semi-auto chambered in the very small 22 Long Rifle.  Statisticly speaking, a single shot from a 22LR isn't even lethal enough to even be considered a "lethal weapon" under the law, because less than 20% of adult single gunshot wound victims actually die, at least not from the initial trama.  (impact trama is the 'one-shot stopping power" that large caliber fans harp about)  So, should I ever get into a real firefight, I'm either going to have to be accurate enough to hit a vital organ (i.e. headshot through the eye socket, not likely under the influence of adrenaline) or I'm going to have to be able to hit my attacker several times rapidly to approximate the level of trama that a larger caliber weapon can achieve in a single shot.  Up to four when comparing a 22lr to a 45 Mag.  So artificial limitations on shot capacity only serves to favor the larger caliber handguns, is unlikely to ever have any non-negligble effect on the lethality of some crazed gunman on a rampage, which is the official reason for such a "sensible regulation".  Spend enough time listening to the anti-gun crowd and their ideas, and anyone who has any real experience with firearms will learn that the group is composed of two types of people; one group that doesn't understand how firearms work or how they can actually be used as a defensive tool to the improvement of socity, and another group that does know but is opposed to firearms for some political or ideological reason that is unrelated to their professed motivations.  It's the latter group that thinks up the details of the "sensible regulations" they then can easily sell to the former group, since the former group doesn't actualy know enough about firearms to know better and have long been conditioned to believe that pro-gun rights types are wrong in the head and shouldn't really be listened to.  I know that it's cliche, but it's still very true in politics.  Gun control isn't about controlling guns, it's about controlling the public debate; and the pro-gun crowd tend to be the least manipulatable group.  Even the long conditioned anti-gun crowd in Australia and Britain are starting to second guess their own presumptions, since they are finally acknowledging that they have a rising rate of violent crime while the US overall has a long running trend of falling crime.  While it's not fair to presume that the increase in CCW license holders is the only cause, or even the major cause, of such a falling crime rate; it is certainly a positive contribution to the net trend.  A fact that can be proven in every single state that has already passed such laws.

Would you care to elaborate?  What part of this story would you disagree with? 

Ive been over this with Americans a dozen times, a dialog is not possible because like i said the cultures are too different.

Dunno where you're coming from, but my take is this. Schools are disarmed. By law. "gun free" zones. Which in reality means that only the criminals/crazies will have guns.

This is just one of about a zillion reasons why my kids will NOT go to public schools. If no crazy shoots them up, they will have their minds filled with meaningless tripe that drives out reasoning skills.

I have yet to find ONE example of a mass shooting occuring where there were armed people capable of a response. They have all been in places where it is illegal to defend yourself. I regard such laws as an affront to civilised behaviour. Such laws should be ignored on the basis of reality.

Despite the rhetoric in the so-called news, cops do not have any duty to defend you. I am personally aware of at least three supreme court cases where this has been explicitly stated. In point of fact, even if they had such a duty, they would be unable to perform unless there was a one to one ratio of humans to cops.

Making the fantastical assumption that cops had the best interests of the sheep in their hearts, they are at best agents of vengeance after the fact. Given their abysmal 3-4 percent solve rate, they aren't even good at that. Most cases are broken by citizens. This is even obliquely admitted in the shows that glorify the police on ID and similar channels.

In the event of a sudden, armed attack, your two best assets are a cool head and a gun. Contrary to all the bravado and bullshit I frequently hear, in such an event you SHOULD shoot to kill. Not a head shot, though, unless you are insanely skilled. I'm a very good pistolero, and I would still shoot for the center of mass. Head shots are tough, and in that split second decision you do not have that kind of time. If you do, you can probably defuse the situation without shooting. The cooper pattern is your friend. (two to the chest, safety to the head. Quick.) Should the assailant survive, sure, let 'em live. The gun and you did their jobs. Said assailant is highly unlikely to try it again.

Again, contrary to popular opinion, a headshot is not invariably fatal, as demonstrated by the article in the OP. Dead center between or just above/below the eyes, pretty much. Deviate just a little, and the frontal sinuses do their job, absorbing impact and deflecting the bullet. Obviously less likely with more powerful bullets, but the most common pistol is a .22. Nasty little bastard, but not much peripheral damage. It's like being hit with a heavy needle. It either hits something vital or just punches a hole.

For home defense, especially for women, my recommendation is a shotgun. 12 gauge with a pistol grip, as the recoil is less likely to knock her down than a traditional buttstock. With a shotgun, you don't have to be real accurate, and the sound of the slide racking will put any potential assailant in a cold sweat. Up close, there just is no substitute unless you are an expert.

Personally, I prefer two pistols, but I am an expert shot. For my wife, I want a mossberg 500 "persuader" at easy reach.

Hopefully, she'll never need it, and I won't need my pistols except at the range. But it is better to be prepared. I would rather be heard by 12 than carried by six.

Show/Hide

So, you just execute hit-and-run quasi-libel attacks on us instead? Brilliant.

Horseshit. I can put 10 on target in less than 2 seconds with ANY decent autoloading pistol. If you do not shoot, and are unaware of the capabilities of guns, you should educate yourself before making blanket statements.

Hell, you can put 12 .32 caliber balls in the head and neck with ONE shot, if you're using .00 buckshot in a 12 gauge at less than ten feet.

Also, you should bear in mind that small cal bullets do not necessarily STOP an assailant right away. Forget tv. In reality, the physics of the situation make it impossible to blow an assailant seriously backwards without doing the same to YOU.

I've been shot in the leg with a .25. Went clean through my calf muscle. Didn't even slow me down as I was running the fuck away. Didn't even hurt till the adrenaline wore off. Guns are not magic. They are constrained by physics. A follow on shot, or multiple follow on shots, could be very easily justified if the assailant don't STOP. A .38 special is not a particularly powerful gun. They're a compromise between recoil and penetration power. If it's not a dead accurate shot (which is highly unlikely in such scenarios) then follow on is not only justified, it's inevitable.

+10000

Ever considered the possibility that it's your cultural upbringing that's in the wrong?  Because I certainly have, and concluded otherwise. 

What if there was a uniformed policeman who was in the room with the mother and children, and had fired the five shots at the same man under exactly the same conditions.  Would your culture have considered that man a hero for doing his job, and for being in the right place at the right time?  If not, why not?  If so, then why not the mother under the same conditions?  Really, I'd like to know.

In the wrong? I guess statements like that are the reasons why a lot of people say that they don't like Americans.

Most people in Europe with a differentiated opinion don't judge the way you think about guns, they just find it suspect.

Meaningless tripe that drives out reading skills?!?! I've gone to public school my entire life (up until this year when I went to a private high school) and my head is definitely NOT full with "meaningless tripe that drives out reasoning skills." In fact, public schools often have better teachers than charter schools because charters can pay teachers less than public schools. I have no idea where people get this weird stigma against public schools, but it's utter bullshit and doesn't make any sense.

You're too close to the issue, and obvious to everyone by yourself, well conditioned. While it's true that most public schools actually can pay higher wages than private schools, there are mitigating factors that result in a great many of the very best teachers choosing to teach in a private school setting, or simply leaving the profession.  My wife went to public school for 12 years, and is very well educated.  I won't imply that it cannot happen.  But I went to a private school for 12 years, and have had teachers that were considered the best in the entire state in their subjects, some of which had PhD's.  Today, my wife has a BS degree in Biology, and worked for a time as a microbiologist for Proctor & Gamble; but she is a stay at home wife & mother who homeschools five children from age 13 down to age one.  I'm not required to do so, but every few years I have my older kids take standardized tests, just so that I can compare their progress against their age peers.  When my oldest daughter was 10, she tested equal to an average (nationally, not state) high school junior (second semester) across all subjects.  My oldest son (who might literally be a genius, like my brother) took the same test at aged 8 (while running two grades ahead) and rang in as a first semester freshman.  In college.  (My little brother once took a IQ test with me, that was also a application exam for Mensa.  While both of us passed; the test was geared for a young adult.  I was 18 starting my first year of college, while my brother was 11.  I just squeeked in with an IQ of 136 and a percentile of 98.5 or so.  My little brother rang the bell on that test, and maxed out it's measurable range at 160+ IQ and a percentile of 99.9.  Today, my little brother has two degrees and is working on a third; but also has a mild case of Asberger's Syndrome, and has never held a job that pays more than $9 per hour, never been on a date with anyone as far as anyone in my family is aware, and is morbidly obese with absolutely zero career ambition; while I have five kids and have earned six figures for the past 6 years straight.  Raw IQ is no indication of success in life.)

This is not to say my kids are particularly smart (which could be true, but), it's to say that a homeschooled education is the only way to get the quality of education in this country that compares on equal terms with the quality of the public education systems in most of Europe or Asia.  At least for any reasonable tuition level.  You will one day look back on your public (and private) school career and either feel like you've been cheated of a quality education, or feel like those were the best years of your life. Either outcome is sad, IMHO.

BTW, I have a mild case of dylexia, so if I start moving letters around, it's because I'm tired (and MS Internet Explorere doesn't handle long form entries well) not because I'm illiterate.  When I went to (private) school, they tested for dylexia but didn't find mine, but when my father attended the same exact school decades before I, they treated his left-handedness as a mental dysfunction, and spent a great deal of time and stress on forcing my father to write with his right hand.  It's not like modern medicine didn't already know better by that time either.  All schools are institutions, and all institutions suffer from bureaucratic inertia and entrophy.  As a homeschooling parent; however, I can change my childrens' curriculum at any time, should I learn something new or discover an error.  In fact, I do this regularly.  Google, Wikipedia and Youtube are regular contributors to my childrens' education.

That is part of the issue.  It's not about the guns, it's about the basic human right to defense of self.  It has very little to do with a small metal object that makes loud noises.

http://www.a-human-right.com/

I was going to reply the public school issue, but I got pretty well Ninja'd by Moonshadow. While my circumstances are not the same, my conclusion is.

I graduated early via the California High School Proficiency Exam. Supposedly, it was indicative of what you should have learned by 12th grade. I have NEVER taken an easier exam, on anything, including the laughable written tests that pass as driver exams. That was 2 and a half decades ago.

I have worked in food service most of my life, which can be cause for ridicule, but it also put me in close contact with the results of the public education system. It has gotten HORRIBLE. 18 year old children in today's America don't have a skill set, unless you count texting... badly. They are not fit for ANY job upon exiting high school. As a manager in that field, you pretty much have to start with basic reading comprehension and what would have been third grade maths when I was in school. And it was awful then.

But they can talk up the "merits" of social welfare, and various war related fantasies. And they can play the hell out of video games.

They are taught to NOT question ANYTHING. We have at least two generations of engineered morons. The few who manage to get an education usually did it by non traditional means, or just plain ignored the curriculum like I did. From third grade until I escaped, the only things of value I learned were during my (frequent) periods of detention. I quickly discovered the bias that teachers have against books. Their idea of punishing me for asking inconvenient questions was to send me to the library. Which was where I wanted to be anyway, so this was hardly "corrective" action.It did, however, allow me to self educate and find that the "exam" that had a 75 percent failure rate was the easiest fucking test every put in the english language.

Hit rewind a couple of decades, and public schools were alright. My dad learned two useable trades before he graduated high school in 1954. I graduated in 1984, and everything of value I learned was outside of or in spite of the system. It continues to get worse.

There were some good teachers, too. But they were universally hated by the establishment, hamstrung on what they could teach, and most gave up in disgust within a couple of years.

As for the pay in public schools being greater than that in private schools, I have seen no evidence of that. And I have looked. My preferred model is homeschooling, but right after that is private. Because I have some say in what and how my child is educated. They still idolize the state entirely too much, but they do at least teach some subjects of value, and teach them well.

With this I will drop the derail, as this is a subject worthy of it's own thread.

In the Philippines, it is against the law to own or possess (much less carry) a firearm without a proper license (and that includes registration.)

That does not stop entire regions from being fully armed, both concealed and openly carrying. The only people who die are either criminals or rebels fighting against government forces.

These people have been carrying a weapon since the Spanish invasion and colonization a few centuries ago. They've just upgrade from sticks, to knives, to guns. For some reason, the 1911 in .45 ACP is still very popular despite the proliferation of 9mm glocks and other firearms.

I personally just have a single stacker with me everywhere. (And it's legally covered.)

First, as far as pay, I never said PRIVATE, I said CHARTER. There's a big difference. Anyway, the results of the public education system are much less due to the teachers or the schools than it is the parents. If a parent is constantly driving their kid and motivating him (or her) to do well, they will do well. They will learn more. If there's no motivation, and no discipline if the student is not doing well, then they will get nothing out of it. If you believe your child should, or could, be ahead of where the normal education is, there is almost always a public advanced pull-out program. I have been in one since fourth grade. I was taking junior-level maths as a 7th grader, without problem. You just need to look. Plus, going to a public school was one of the best things that could have happened to me in my opinion. I got to learn how to interact with other kids of all demographics, a skill that you DO NOT get to learn if you are homeschooled, but which is an invaluable tool in almost every profession today.

You're implying the home school is a dungeon? BS. All my friends' homeschooled kids have spent plenty of time on extracurricular/social events, and while I did independent study (closest thing you can get to homeschool without leaving the public school system) from 8th grade until 1-year-early graduation, there was no lack of offline interaction, as I could choose practically anything at any school or organization for electives (including PE, such as a dojo, swim class, sports league, etc); I just needed a supervisory adult to sign off on my attendance and performance. From what I know of actual homeschooling, those same choices are available, and encouraged, by all non-isolationist/cultist-type parents.

And to bring this back on-topic (self-defense), there's something that I noticed as an independent study student (and reminded me of when I was full-time in public schools from K-7), and which anyone else should be able to see, is that public schools (and maybe private and charters too, I never experienced them) are about as secure as putting yellow tape around a baby in the middle of a prison of baby rapists. So many open points of access, not controlled by armed security at all times, gates, holes in fences, short fences that you barely have to put any effort into climbing over... it's a wonder there isn't a massacre at least once a year at every single "gun free" public school in America (save the extreme statistical outlying amount of schools that are secured properly).

IIRC, I was only ever challenged once (by an unarmed faculty or staff member, who must have been posted there for a specific one-time threat) at the back gate of one school I was taking electives at, and another time by a lady behind the lobby desk, after I graduated and needed to take pictures of a performing arts event there during school hours for the local paper (as a professional, I chose to be an overt interloper despite knowing I could get in the back). The rest of the time, there wasn't even the slightest difficulty to getting in and out, through that wide-open back gate. At another high school, all I had to do was open the unlocked door to the music room, right off the street. Need I go on about the amount of weapons I could have brought in my rolling briefcase, instrument cases, the multitool with a blade I carried in a belt pouch both pre- and post-9/11... my adult appearance and maturity when I was 16 would have only been a mitigating factor IF SOMEONE ACTUALLY WAS THERE to see me, and try to stop me. Except for those 2 instances of little more than human shields, there never were. Scary stuff.

If the right to self-defense is only going to be half-ass protected only in the home, by SCOTUS, then the home is going to be the safest place of learning. You take your chances once your kids step past your fenced curtilage and you're not able to protect them without breaking some "gun control" law that only ever controls innocents out of being able to legally defend ourselves.

This has always been a weak arse argument that pro-mandatory education people make, with the way the education system works children are forced to interact with each other they don't interact with each other by choice and that is always going to lead to conflict much like as if they were in a prison environment. Then there's the fact that if they defend themselves in any way in my experience they almost always find themselves getting in trouble because it makes the schools look bad, social interaction should always be by choice and some people don't learn well in a classroom environment particularly when they've got someone being an absolute cunt to them every single day.

People being homeschooled can easily learn how to interact with people, it's called going outside, I do it every day and I'm technically homeschooling and not going to university, sure, everybody I meet isn't necessarily my age and in some cases I'm bloody grateful for that ( The amount of times I was close to getting into a fist fight with those twats was ridiculous and it was because I was forced to deal with them ) it also means you get to deal with a wider range of demographics rather than the surly arrogant prick of a teacher who just wants their pension or the gaggle of douchebags that belong in a mental hospital rather than a school.

You don't get to learn how to interact with people being cramped up in a classroom all day while having to ask permission to take a dump when you need to, if you really think that you haven't been out in the real world properly and I'd also like to point out that I've met much more interesting and unique people on the internet, particularly here that I can even get along with well than the people I've met in my hometown.

You're gonna be forced to deal with people in the future. You can't just hide from interaction you don't like forever. And, I'm not just talking about interacting. Sure, if you're homeschooled you get that easy. I'm saying, at the school I went to, there was a majority of families in poverty, and even one kid who lived in the park next to our school. It's that kind of interaction that you most likely won't be exposed to.

The way we're going, the majority of homeschooling families (who have meetup groups) will be in poverty if they aren't already, and associating with homeless children.

There were two times that I suffered violence at public schools. And thank luck that these were the worst of it.

In 5th grade I was playing touch football on asphalt, and the goal line was a shallow drainage ditch. My memory generally sucks that far back, but I think I committed pass interference on the receiver and bumped him into the ditch and over into the dirt past it, as I was trying to intercept or block the ball. He didn't seem bloody or unable to stand afterward, or in verbal agony, so I thought he was okay, and after I said sorry and we helped him up, I walked off and knelt down to tie my shoe, and he screamed "I kill you!" and pushed me flat on my face. Knees and hands scraped, and "I kill you!" became the catchphrase of the rest of the year. I'm pretty sure he got checked out and didn't have any internal injuries or broken bones, otherwise he probably wouldn't have been able to have his swift revenge and I would have been in a lot of trouble. No hard feelings, I think we were friends before and again sometime after.

As an aside, the "bad kid" of my elementary school years was Jesus Pulido, and he fought with any adult he could many times, maybe a few of the scrappy kids, and jumped the back fence running away from school in the middle of the day at least once, also through the back gate when it was left open. I don't think the district ever knew what to do with him; maybe compulsory education meant he couldn't be expelled because there was no other place for him to go, and there was no "bad kids' campus" like the local high school district had. I wasn't able to find him easily on Google.

The second time was my last year, at the highschool with the wide open back gate. There was a kid there who seemed not to know his own strength/that it wasn't appropriate to punch people in the shoulder that hard multiple times, even if he tried to explain it away as jest/that I could yellow card him, as I was the music department head's teacher's aide (and TAD to the other faculty). No hard feelings there either, I just felt sorry for him.

To a point, this is true enough.  However, the environment that a child is expected to learn within has as much as an affect on his/her outcomes as the motivation of the 'rents.


I don't need to look. The public school system, and even a few of the private schools, have repeatedly contacted my wife & I to get my kids into their "gifted & talented" programs.  That may be an experience unique to us, however, I can't be certain.  I know my own parents were offered similar conditions if they would remove me from the private school I was in, and put me into the public school.  I would have jumped at least one, and maybe two grades in the move.  My dad said no.  I was bitter about the whole thing at the time, but now I understand.

Public schools need the stats, private schools need the prestige that successful graduates bring.


This is a myth.  One that is not improved by the common name of "homeschooling", since it's a misnomer.  It's a rare day that my kids stay home.  My daughter has cross country practice four days a week right now, and an all day coop class on Fridays. Coop is an elective school, wherein the students take classes from other homeschoolers' parents.  I've taught Praxeology, (Whatever Happened to Penny Candy? and Whatever Happened to Justice?) and am considering offering a course on investing stradgeties (Rich Dad, Poor Dad; What the Rich Teach their Children that The Poor Do Not and The Clipper Ship Stradgedy) or Cognative Programming (How to win freinds and Influence People).  While some private schools do offer courses like these, I've never even heard of a public or charter schol offering anything like this, and that is another point at which you are at a disadvantage to private or homeschooled children with your education.  While it's possible for a child with truely invested parents to get a very good education in a public school, it's not possible for anyone to receive a complete education, simply because there isn't enough time.  Since all public schools, and most private schools, must focus on a general education; they can't really commit time or resources to the kinds of elective education that homeschoolers can.  If your father was an economist, it's more likley that you will be an economist or a businessman in a related field of work, because children really do learn from their parents and their parents friends.  As a homeschooled parent, I can introduce other children to the particular skill sets that publicly educated children generally don't have access to.  It's not as if the 1% is actively keeping this information to themselves, it's the very nature of publicly funded education that limits your educational opprotunitities.  Honestly, which is more likely to offer you an advantage in a career as an adult; Algebra 2 or Praxeology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology)?  Now, be honest with yourself.  And think about this, we teach all children mathmatics; why don't we teach all children Economics?

I would recommend any and all of those books, BTW.

EDIT: I forgot to mention my eldist son's electives.  He's much more of an academic then his sister, but still has a weekly bowling league. In the past, he's attented regular groups such as Choir, Music Theory, Karate, he has been in several church plays as an actor and backup singer.  My son is the introvert, like myself; so he really isn't 'into' social things; nor is he nearly the athelete his sister is (which isn't to say she's some kind of star, either), but has competed on a rifle team with his 22lr Marlin adn want's a competition class youth recurve bow for his upcoming birthday, so he can shoot in an archery team that is near our new house.  He will probably be taking a piano class soon, but we have to wait until I can get my father's baby grand moved into our new home.  That piano has been in my father's family for four generations at least, and looked rough when I played under it as a tot.  Yes, I was born into the 1% and I'm not ashamed of the fact that I was born with advantages that my family could provide.  As mentioned, my brother fell out of the 1% years ago dispite all his gifts, and has no visable prospects of returning by his own efforts.

OK, I'm not going to say that a public education is BETTER than a private/homeschool one, because that obviously isn't true. What I am trying to say is that going to a public school isn't some kind of sin, and it's not as if going to the public school automatically results in a "dumber" child. That is a myth. Plus, what if your family cannot afford to homeschool or send you to a private school? My dad worked an 8-5 job and my mom worked from home on her own graphics business. We didn't have enough money to send me to a private school, and neither of my parents had enough time to homeschool me. It didn't matter though, I still got an excellent education at the school I went to.

On topic, I'll just say that there has never been a mass shooting at a private school.

Also, I have to correct myself, as you pointed out. It was someone else who had mentioned teacher's pay scale at private schools, and I got mixed up. Your point is noted and acknowledged. Charter schools didn't exist when I was in public school, so I actually have no opinion on their efficacy. I do object to being taxed for them, but I object to the existence of tax. I am an anarchist. Nevertheless, as far as it goes and given the world we live in, I have no experience of charter schools.

I will say that both statistically and in my own experience, your results are atypical. While high school does to some extent prep a person for college, it does nothing for your real world life. I would go so far as to say that the vaunted "socialization" that seems to be the only remaining fallback of those who object to homeschooling is detrimental to your real world life. It's the socialization of a prison. You are FORCED to interact with people who you have nothing in common with, and that's the least worse part of it.

If you are a geek, or any other "marginal" grouping, you WILL be bullied. I experienced this in EVERY school I went to. (My dad is an electrician. We traveled like military people do)The only "positive" I could derive out of this is that I learned very young how to fight for my life. So, from my experience, the only thing I got out of this vaunted socialization is the ability to kill with my hands. Is that really what the social engineers want? Granted, it's a valuable skill, but they overtly discourage any sort of self defense, so obviously they are either lying, or this is an unintended consequence. By the time I got out, I was convinced that being in a group larger than five people was likely a deadly peril. I went from being a friendly, if somewhat awkward, kid to an angry outcast who HATED my species. Took me a number of years to get over that. You can keep your socialization. There is no way my morals will allow me to inflict it on my children.

As to the rest, Moonshadow Ninja'd me again, so I'll leave his words to stand for me as well.

Good for you, but that makes you the exception, not the rule.  I'm sure that you already knew that, though.

Futhermore, homeschooling isn't expecially expensive, although it can be.  Private schools are much more expensive.  Public schools exist to provide a basic education for the middle class, which is a fine goal unto itself.  However, IMHO the system has been corrupted by personal and private interests, so that the public school districts have many hidden agendas which burden their budgets; resulting in a declining quality of education dispite a decades long trend of rising educational budgets.

And turning back to the topic of the thread, sending children into a forced social situation in order to learn to manage hostile personalities (what advocates might call, "toughening up") would be considered child abuse under any other context than education. I am of the opinion that the 8 year old "wimpy kid" learns nothing of lasting value by being exposed to an age peer bully; instead learning (at best) conflict avoidance or submittion to authoritarian personality types.  These are skills that can be taught as easily in a high school controlled environment, if they are really needed.  I, for one, have never had the experience of getting into a fistfight as an adult, particularly at work.  If you get beat up by a bully in school; you get to be suspended for a time, and get to see that same bully when you both get back.  Teh same experience as an adult in a workplace gets one of you fired and/or arrested while the other gets a lawsuit settlement for the "promotion of a hostile work envirnment".  School social envirnments don't translate well to the adult world, unless your adult world is a penitentiary.

I think you missed one important aspect, and it does teach a lesson. Not a good one. In most cases, contrary to "pop culture" bullshit, the bully is a popular kid. Often a jock. He don't get suspended. The wimpy kid does.

Yet ten years later, if the "wimpy kid" gets his anger under control and dedicates himself, he's running a successful company, and the jock is pumping gas.

Your last sentence is so spot-on that I think I'm going to put it in my sig :)

If we can afford to pay for public schools through taxation, it should follow that we can afford them without; otherwise, we have a much deeper problem than not being able to afford schools without the aid of the wealthy.

Not sure I catch what you're trying to say... are you trying to say that we can afford public schools without being taxed? If so, that is absolutely not true. Even with taxes, public schools have been having to cut out more and more extra curricular and elective classes. If you're trying to say that you should be able to afford a private school if you can pay tax to public schools, that isn't true either. The amount that you spend on taxes to public schools is miniscule in comparison to the significant majority of private schools. Even in grade school, many private schools charge upwards of $5,000 for one year of tuition, and in high school a lot of them are upwards of $10,000. Kind of ironic, I'm paying more for my high school tuition now than I will be for college in a few years.

You're welcome to it, but I would recommend that you correct my letter salad. I can tell I'm getting tired.

The average public school district budget nationwide was about $12K per year per student, K through 12.  Many private schools (particularly Catholic or Baptist elementary schools) are well under that number.  However, many private schools are much more than this number.  Decades ago, my parents sent myself, my sister and my brother to a private elementary grade school that charged $8K per semester.  It could easily be twice that now.

Logicly speaking, if we can afford the public school now with taxes, we can afford it without the taxes and paying for it privately.  That's a mathmatical truth.  However, we can't really afford the public schools' budgets anymore, and that is a major contributor to municipal debt and insolvency today.  So one can take that both ways.

Look at it another way:

No wealth falls from the sky; to pay for public schools, the public is taxed; ergo, public schools are entirely paid for by the public.  If public schools are paid for through taxing the public, and no extra money is being injected into schools without the help of the public, then this means that schools are being paid for with private funds.

Remember, the state is not magical, and does not generate wealth; the state has but two functions: get money, then allocate money.  So if the state collects money, then places that money in schools, it should follow that people are entirely capable of paying for schools voluntarily, as they are already paying for schools involuntarily.  A public school is no more expensive than a private school, except when regulation is enforced.

Of course, when I say bigger problems, I refer to the major divide where few entities suck up the wealth like a magnet, thus leading to an effect making the rich richer and the poor poorer, but, beside all that...

School is kind of a non-essential nowadays since people no longer need human beings to teach them, we've had libraries and now the Internet for a while now; if a person wants to learn, they'll of course do it, but if they do not, now we're faced with an important question: is it moral to force a person to learn in the way we want them to?

I have to admit, this didn't happen in my school, and for the most part neither did the kind of bullying that seems to happen too often these days.  There was, literally, no drugs or weapons within my school when I went there.  And I attended a private, all boys, high school as well; suit, tie and black leather shoes required.  We didn't have weapons there either (drugs, probably; but it certainly wasn't blatant) but we didn't consider a pocket knife a weapon at that time either.  My high school had a dedicated faculty position called the "disciplinarian" who was second only to the principal himself.  I'm sure you can imagine that any such behavior incidents were handled in a completely different manner as compared to the public school systems.  No one was ever 'suspended' from my school, and if you were expelled, it's a fair chance your parents wept for your lost future.  In my grade school prinicpal's office, she kept an old paddle on the wall, mostly to intimidate the students.  In my high school, the disciplinarian kept a horse whip on the wall.

Not exactly an ideal environment for low stress learning either, in recollection.

I have always taught at private schools. They are a world apart from your average public school. The parents are paying tens of thousands per year and they expect a serious attempt at education. No dumbed down Texas text books, no standardized tests, and the guards/teachers are armed. Save the compromises and feel good measures for the PTA, rich kids actually learn at school and are kept safe.

Yes, but then there's still that issue with the horsewhip...

That doesn't happen anymore these days ;)

Probably not often, but I wouldn't be so sure that it never happens.  I'd wager that there is a wavier somewhere...

Well, at least at the school I attend, it doesn't happen.

Let's test that theory.  Get hammered, steal your father's favorite car, snort cocaine off of the back seat with a pair of hookers, and total the car into the founder's statue at your private school.  If they don't produce a horsewhip after that then you can assume you're safe.  If your mother says, "boys will be boys" then you're destined for Harvard.

liberty for everyone, socialism is a schism :P 

How random.  Bot, much?

Which culture? I'm born & bred English and very supportive of gun (and other weapon) rights.

You'd probably be surprised at how little time it takes. I think the current recommendation is around 4 hours/day. Some people eat 1/2 that just taking their kids to public school. By the time you've cut out all the distractions and extraneous stuff that goes into a regular school day, that's a good amount of time. I was surprised when I first heard about it but thinking back to my school days (a decent education. But I got lucky, the nearby community's school was a cesspool. Even then it took me a long time to shake the statist indoctrination) it is not really out of line.

Haha there's a few problems with that theory
1. My dad only has one car, and it's a 15 year old Honda CRv
2. There is no founder's statue at my school (although there are a few important statues)
3. There's no way my mother would says "boys will be boys" haha

My kids probably average around 3 hours a day, engaged in deliberate study of academic subjects.  However, that's just about every day, including Saturdays and most of what most kids consider "summer vacation".  They still complain about the amount of time that their studies (and chores) consume, right up until I threaten them with enrollment and a 7am bus ride.  When they are really small, they think the bus is cool, so I occasionally take them on a public bus trip. (navigating the public transit system is a useful skill in it's own right)  My younger kids are not really old enough for "school", at 4 & 5, and are so close together in size and age that most people assume that they are twins.  They are my rough & tumble boys, and they fight like Cain & Able.  There are a number of differing learning styles, and professional teachers have to learn techniques for hitting as many of them with each lesson as they can, in order to teach effectively to their entire class. This actually takes up as much class time as anything, and isn't something that can be avoided. But homeschooling allows the teaching parent to tailor the lesson to match the personality & learning style of the child.  This is a huge time saver, and very effective once it's well implemented.  What takes the most time is actual lesson planning, but I'm willing & able to spend the money to have that cognative labor performed by others, by buying curriculium developed for homeschooled children that fit their learning styles and our ideological parameters.  Currently we use Sonlight for my older children.  (sonlight.com)  But one can homeschool a child well for free, using nothing but a library card and a little guidance from a website like this one...

http://www.oldfashionededucation.com/

Or this one...

http://www.amblesideonline.org/

And other online resources such as this one...

http://www.khanacademy.org/

And this one...

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/


Money is a trade for time, in education as much as anything else.  BTW, my kids have access to both Kahn Academy & MIT's Opencourseware via their Roku.  The meatspace lecture model is a dying educational paradigm regardless of it's quality.

1) You might have to limit yourself to only one hooker at at time, that's a tiny back seat.

2) There's always some 'important' campus feature that would be very expensive to repair.

3) Yeah.  Well, I didn't get to go to Harvard either.  I was accepted to MIT, but dad said, "Congratulations son, now how are you going to pay for that?"  Turns out, the Montgomery GI bill stipend isn't enough to attend MIT.

Since this thread has turned into an education thread, here's my input:

Stuff My Kids will Learn (though probably not from any school except my own.):

1. Unarmed Martial Arts. Striking. Grappling. Taekwondo. Karate. Kick-boxing. Kung Fu. Jiu-Jitsu. Aikido. Wrestling.
2. Armed Martial Arts. Sticks. Knives. Firearms. How to field strip and clean a 1911 and an AR-15.
3. How to shave the old fashioned way. Or at least with a double edged safety razor.
4. How to make money selling lemonade or whatever. Sell them for bitcoins.
5. How to make paper wallets for bitcoins.
6. How to use encryption. Use GPG. Public Key. AES. And why secret decoder rings are no good against Dad.
7. How to pick the right wife; if he plans to get married. (husband, for my daughter.)
8. How to Throw a Ball. (and how to catch it.)
9. How to Tie a Tie. How to dress up.
10. How to Build a Bookshelf. With a hammer, nails, screwdriver and wood.
11. How to Squat, Bench, Deadlift and Press with a barbell.
12. How to Swim and How to Scuba Dive.
13. How to go camping or Climb a mountain.
14. How to fish.
15. How to change the oil in your car. (And how to drive, of course!)
16. How to change a flat tire.
17. How to cook a steak.
18. How to invest in mutual funds or index stocks. (And how to spot ponzi schemes!)
19. How to get a scholarship for school.

I'm sure I'll think of other things that are probably not taught in school.

While I agree that those are all nice, and I've already engaged my older children in most of those, my wife & I long ago agreed to invest time and money to teach a few things that we consider "life skills"; i.e. skills that any independent person might need to know how to do to save their own lives.

The first one on the list should be self-evident, but very few schools teach it.

Swimming.

In Holland swimming lessons are compulsory and part of the school curriculum in primary school. The kids even have to learn how to swim with full and heavy clothing and shoes on ;)

The vast majority of public school districts in the United States are not nearly as logical as that.  If anything, swimming is a competitive sport; so not only would they not actually teach you to swim as a beginner, they wouldn't dream of letting you in the pool with your shoes on.

However, the YMCA sponsors swimming lessons for a very low cost.  Homeschooled children like my own take them during the school day, usually.  And the swim lessons sometimes include survival swimming as young as 3 months old.  Yes, you can teach an infant to swim.  I've seen it first hand.  But most moms would be hard pressed to do to their own child what is required to teach an infant to swim.  But once they learn, it's awesome to watch.

Yes, I agree with the "Life" skills. Swimming is in my list, just not at the top.

My brother and his kids do triathlons: swim, bike, and run.

There are videos I've seen of infants below 12 months old that can swim or self-rescue if they somehow drop in a pool deeper than their height. I think I'm going to save some of them (I saw them on youtube) to show to the wife.

Things I have seen or know to be possible for infants and very young children:
0. Sign language (ask for more milk, more food, carry me) without crying. Below 12 months.
1. Swim 1 year old.
2. Unarmed martial arts 3 to 4 years old. (grappling arts can start younger.)
3. Armed martial arts 5 to 6 years old (with a full size 1911 at that.) supervised by soldier Dad of course.
4. Climb trees and stuff ... as soon as they can walk and run.
5. Barbell exercises without weights. 8 years old.
6. Barbell exercises with weights heavier than their body. 15 years old. (Maybe younger.)
7. Bike. 3 to 4 years old.

I know all those because either I've seen it on a video, or I've actually witnessed it personally.

Funny you should mention this, because I recently encountered a one year old that could sign some of these things while working in the Sunday morning nursery at church.  I asked if she was hearing impared, because she kept signing "more" (tips of fingers on each hand together, and tapping tips of fingers to each other repeatedly) after running out of wheat wafers.  She wasn't, and I asked why she is learning signing, and the answer is that they can communicate quicker with signing than speech, even though they can understand their parents fine.  It was kind of surreal watching a baby who can't walk or talk doing sign language, even if it was only single word communication.

There's this DVD called Baby Signing Times and other similar baby sign language things. After 2 years old, they can start talking in sentences to you, but at 1 year old, they tend to be limited to single syllables or maximum of 3 syllables.

My eldest, who is now... 18 months old, can identify different animals and objects but for some reason refuses to count, although he knows he is 1 year old. heheheheh. As for signing, apparently he seemed to have skipped that since he can articulate what food he likes already; and I didn't teach him to sign for more milk. And he knows how to operate the iPad and Samsung tablets, at least to go to the kiddy games installed there (mostly colorful shape apps with sounds.)

He does truncate everything I say to the last one or two syllables. Dog is dog, but butterfly is just "fly" or "ter fly.". But he calls all the heavy equipment "big tractor" which is 3 syllables, so.. I dunno how that works.

And I get called a fruit sometimes .. Papaya.