And sometimes they take everyone back into the storeroom and shoot the compliant sheep, one-by-one.
Not sure why you picked this weapon to pick on. TV perhaps? The 1911 is an excellent weapon and, indeed, nothing says STOP!!! like a .45.
I’m not a lawyer( but I read a book once ). Not sure that a person who is in fear for their safety is ‘escalating’ as much as the guy branishing the gun, committing a crime.
Discussions like this, often about guns in the US, harden my impression that the US public seems to live in constant fear.
Criminals! Terrorists! Rape! Home invasions! Tyrannical Government! Stranger Danger! Pedophiles! are around every corner.
Where I live, violent crime is a very rare occurrence. I’m not in constant fear of my life and security.
Another impression I have is that as a USian living in the US you probably should fear your police forces more than any criminal. Criminals at least get punished when they do wrong and hurt people.
No one is asking you to be sorry. Using the word “fuck” is different than the sexual and racial terms that you quoted. Points can be made without using those terms again. Instead of ‘it was nasty’ you could explain how the language used was both sexually and racially offensive. Points can be made without repeating it.
We’ve found it’s better to just fear both! Seriously though, having lived in Harlem for fifteen years now I’ve never been broken into or had anyone I know up there have anything that required a call to the police. You are correct in saying that it’s safer than most people believe, but faith is a hard thing to change.
This is one of those discussions where I’m glad that the Atlantic very wide.
It’s just a pond. Don’t rest too easy!
If I felt so at risk at a restaurant that I needed to bring a gun with me, I’d stay at home.
I guess I’m hopelessly naive or something, but I don’t have a tactical plan for escaping from restaurants, nor do I perform a mental threat assessment of the other customers.
I’ve found it helpful to send the wife in first to take a surreptitious photo of the fire escape plan just so we can plot our sightlines for the visit. It makes it anything other than fast food, but isn’t safety paramount?
People are mostly shooting up environments that are familiar/significant to them. (Which is why the particular schools were targeted, despite the fact that in the case of Columbine the shooters knew there were armed police there.) But yes, there have been attacks on police stations, but since the gunman tends to get stopped pretty quickly, they don’t seem to make national news. You’re artificially separating out people who commit gun rampages who manage to kill a lot of people without being stopped by an armed person (who may be present but unable to stop them, as in that one mall shooting), and those who commit gun rampages where they’re immediately stopped - the first just gets all the media attention, it doesn’t mean the second doesn’t happen. Looking at the venues, the oft-repeated myth that gunmen are just going after gun-free areas is obviously wrong.
Your sarcasm meter is very broken.
That is silly. That is like saying “If I felt like I really NEEDED my seat belt, I would not drive.” Nobody can predict exactly what will happen. The odds of being the victim of a person who intends to do you harm is quite small, but not zero.
I don’t intend to get into an accident or get sick today. But I still use my seat belt and have health and life insurance.
OK. Let’s assume that what you say is true. Attacks on non-gun-free zones are just as likely, but often result in death. That changes the logic that gun-free zones are less safe how? Just different paths to the same logical conclusion.
Then you end up with a situation like an acquaintance of mine. She has a concealed carry permit, but didn’t take her gun into a movie theater on a particular afternoon. She left it in her glove box, where it was stolen. Now someone willing to break into a car has a gun. Super.
Don’t take away the fun @jlw and I are having.
My neighbor had a whole gun collection which was stolen when someone broke into his house. Now a whole mess of criminals have guns because he thought arming himself to the teeth made him safer. Super.
Do you want mandatory guns at restaurants?
If society is so fucked up that taking a gun to dinner to protect yourself from lunatics in restaurants is a proportionate response I’d say that something really needs to be done (about the lunatics, not their guns).
If it’s likely that I need to get into a gunfight to protect myself, I’d really rather not be there. I wouldn’t feel safer because I was armed. If being regularly armed is necessary for protection, society has some real issues. I just don’t think it’s really that dangerous out there.
And even if, by spectacularly bad luck, I find myself at a restaurant that is getting held up, I’d rather just hand my wallet over and call my insurance then get involved in the crossfire when someone else tries to solve the issue more directly. I’d hope that people that do concealed carry know when they should just hand their wallets over too - and to be honest I think most do.
I’m sure lots of people concealed carry around me all the time without an issue. And I’m sure they can and will continue to do so at Chipotle. The people that I know that concealed carry don’t wave the things around and take photos of them, even if it’s constitutionally allowed. I think it’s assholes that have to be all blatant about it that make people uncomfortable and result in businesses asking them not to bring their weapons in.
ETA : firearms aren’t allowed on site where I work, so one guy here parks on the street instead of the parking lot so he can leave his gun in his car. Seems sensible to me!
And sometimes they take everyone back into the storeroom and shoot the compliant sheep, one-by-one.
Yes, times such as those are why I said “almost never” instead of “absolutely never”. They happen, but they’re still incredibly rare.
Overwhelmingly, if you want to get out of a robbery in one piece, you surrender your valuables without a fight. Almost every time you’ll be fine, because almost every actual “robber” is out for money - not homicide charges. You can get away with a robbery a lot easier than you can get away with killing people for no reason. If nothing else, you get pursued a lot less vigorously over chump change rather than spilled blood.
The incredibly rare cases like the one you cite typically aren’t about money - notice that the perpetrator in that incident was an employee of the restaurant and attacked his coworkers. How much do you want to bet this was a disgruntled employee “going postal”? And we’ve already been over the whole mental health issue already in this thread.
Not sure why you picked this weapon to pick on. TV perhaps? The 1911 is an excellent weapon and, indeed, nothing says STOP!!! like a .45.
I wasn’t critiquing the quality of any particular firearm, I was using an example of a commonly owned and commonly romanticized one that has a very powerful presence in American gun culture.
You yourself seem to illustrate the odd affection many people have for the weapon. As I’m sure you’re aware, it’s a military handgun that saw use in both World Wars, and many millions of them were made and floated around afterwards. It’s a cheap and simple weapon, it’s iconic and immediately recognizeable, and it’s easily copied and cloned. Consequently, it has ended up as the AK-47 of handguns - it is a symbol as much as it is a killing tool.
And for your infomation, I don’t watch television. 
Law doesn’t factor into the equation. Conflict escalation is essentially anything you do which makes a conflict more difficult to resolve peacefully. Conflict de-escalation, or conflict resolution, is the opposite - it is taking steps to diffuse tensions and reach an outcome which involves the least harm.
If a person robs you at gunpoint, the quickest and most reliable way to resolve the conflict is to surrender your valuables without antagonizing the attacker. In all but the most absurdly rare situations, the thief will flee with the valuables and the conflict will have ended.
If you’re feeling brave and confident, you can try to talk the person down, employing reason and empathy to convince them to change their course of action. This is more dangerous, as accidentally provoking the attacker with your words can effectively escalate the conflict further, but if you are successful it can have a more lasting and profound impact on the attacker. Of course, it helps to have training in conflict resolution before you consider such action, because it is inherently more dangerous than simple compliance. Again, it is always fastest and safest to simply surrender your valuables without provocation.
Or you can draw a weapon, which by definition instantly escalates the conflict. You’ve just raised the stakes. Before, the robber felt like they were in control and were getting what they wanted - their motivation for starting to shoot was rather low, because once again, they want money, not homicide charges.
Now the robber feels like their life is on the line - they see someone pulling a gun, meaning their life is in immediate danger and they need to react instantly without time for a reasoned decision. They are forced to make a split second choice - fight or flight. Surprise surprise, it turns out that desperate, nervous people who have guns in their hands tend to take their chances shooting rather than running when forced to choose how to save their own lives.
Sometimes no one shoots, and it turns into a standoff. But that’s still far worse than just giving the asshole your wallet and letting the police sort him out later. Sure, you keep your wallet, but now it’s all but certain that bullets are going to fly unless someone de-escalates the situation.
If you want to avoid a firefight at this point, you need to come to some sort of agreement - meaning you need to talk them down. That’s going to be a lot harder now that they’re swimming in adrenaline and millimeters from pulling that trigger. And if you really wanted to talk them down, you should have done it before you pulled a gun.
No, drawing a weapon on someone really only ever has one real purpose - attempting to kill them. Even if you only intend to “threaten” them, you’re still threatening to kill them. The only reasonable expectation you can have in that situation is starting a fight to the death.
I’m fairly certain your fun is safe. Firearms have been mentioned, the parade of humorless knobs is guaranteed to continue until the thread is locked.
The thing is when reviewing this people get ordering backwards. The “gun free zones” were a response to shootings happening in the same kind of place repeatedly, for example schools. These “gun free zones” weren’t always the case, and were only made so after shootings happened in a (in my mind, poorly thought out) reaction to do something about a situation that very little short of martial law would prevent. (For something that’s exceedingly rare on a day-to-day basis anyway).
The other thing is, someone who’s messed up in the head to the point where they are going to be committing a mass killing, they don’t give a damn about what an area is declared and the punishments behind it.
It does seem like there should be a checklist for all of the usual suspects and once they weigh in with their usual comments we could then move to close the thread early…
