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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Reposting on request from Zorba:

The discussion of defensive gun usage in a major survey in the CW thread got me thinking about an experience I had some years back. I thought I'd tell the story to illustrate the sorts of things that can happen around violent or potentially violent situations. For what it's worth, I'm not sure if I classify this as a defensive gun use or not, but it qualifies under the terminology of the survey. It was very much a memorable night, and made me rethink the way I carry guns and the sorts of scenarios I prepare for.

First thing: I was drunk. Dancing-in-public drunk. My girlfriend and I had attended a wedding of some friends, someone else was the DD, so I took full advantage. At the time, my girlfriend lived with another single girl in a house outside town. Isolated, quiet. Cornfields and scattered houses. The housemate had been on a date, and the two of them were back at the house when we got dropped off. We said hello and left them to do whatever people on dates do on darkened living room couches while we went upstairs to bed. I passed out almost immediately.

The GF woke me up a short time later, there was a commotion downstairs. A strange man had arrived and was banging on the main door of the house, loudly demanding to speak to the housemate's date. I went downstairs, the date said he knew the man, that it was his pastor. He said he'd handle it, so I went back upstairs. As a precaution, I retrieved my carry gun and kept it close to hand. At this point, I was regretting the drinking. Waste of a good drunk.

Outside, the date had gone out onto the porch to talk to the guy, we could hear muffle conversation, then escalating in volume. There was a series of loud crashes, and the housemate started screaming that she was calling the police. Fuck me running. I remember clearly getting out of bed the second time, gun in hand, wearing basketball shorts, dress socks and nothing else. An ironic thought occurred to me: "so this is why people look like this on 'Cops'". Not the sort of situation I had envisioned when I started carrying a firearm.

I got downstairs and the date was bleeding from his face, apparently his pastor had assaulted him. The housemate had called the police, but it would be over twenty minutes before they arrived (given where we were, that was probably a fast time). Meanwhile, the pastor had discovered a hatchet that had been left out of the shed and started walking around the house, hitting the siding with the hatchet and shouting for the date to come back out and talk to him. Needless to say, that dude didn't seem enthused about the proposition. The crashing I'd heard had been the date falling into and through the screen door on the porch after the guy decked him.

The GF was curious, but I sent her back upstairs, told the housemate to lock the door behind me, and went out onto the porch. I might be tanked, but it was not my first rodeo. I leaned against the wall of the house (casually, I hoped) both to stay steady on my feet and to conceal the pistol I was now holding behind my leg. The situation was fairly simple: The man would have to make a 90-degree turn to come up the steps to the porch, after which I'd be within arms reach. I set my line at the bottom of the steps. If he tried to come up onto the porch, I would shoot him.

For a lunatic who was banging a hatchet on the side of a random house at 2AM in the middle of a cornfield, the pastor sounded lucid. He just wanted to talk, he felt bad, the whole thing had gotten out of hand etc. etc. Whole time he had the hatchet in his hand. In my hazy state, I decided to go with simplicity. "Put down the ax, go back to your car, and drive away". He'd try to argue something, and I'd just repeat it. This went on for maybe ten minutes. I was feeling like a broken record, but finally, finally he walked away. He dropped the hatchet, got into his car, and drove away. Shortly thereafter, the police showed up.

I went back to bed.

The coda is that the date didn't press charges, turns out the "pastor" was a self-proclaimed one with a long history of mental illness, sort of a street-preacher type. The housemate had to pay for the siding repair herself. The police were little help, and the prosecutor's office wasn't interested in dealing with a mental patient over property damage.

So that's the story. It's weird, but in my very limited experience it looks a lot more like the median "DGU" than a shootout in a pawn shop. These are the sorts of stories that do not generally make the papers or the police reports, but happen on a daily basis, many many times.

So just to be clear, the gun was never actually used except to make you secure in the knowledge that you could use it?

To my knowledge, the guy never saw the gun. I did not display it, I did not mention it. I don't think the housemate or her date saw it either, though as I said, I was on the liquor a bit and not really dressed for concealment.

Russia never dropped a nuke, yet other countries thinking it is capable of doing so, enables Russia greater leeway in foreign policy; notably invading Ukraine.

Thus not even possesion is required, merely convincing others of it is.

That's all well and good but I wouldn't go on to describe every foreign policy move this enabled as a 'use' of nukes.

In much the same way that having a tire jack, air compressor, and spare tire in your trunk might make you feel secure enough to embark on a long drive through relatively rough conditions where assistance might take a long time to arrive.

That is, if you didn't have these tools available you might not take a particular course of action.

And if they become necessary, you thank your respective Gods for having them.

If you've been in a situation like this, the difference in that "secure knowledge" of having a gun vs not having one is.... significant.

Having the gun enabled JTarrou to confidently approach the "Pastor" and verbally talk them down. Having a use-of-force upper hand that allows you to de-escalate a situation is using it.

Of course, but if we're going to count 'defensive gun use' as 'any time a gun made its owner feel safe' we're getting dangerously close to making policy based on feelings. Should we count every time the presence of a gun made someone feel unsafe as an offensive gun use? I don't think police departments would support that sort of standard.

The law does support that kind of standard, so long as the fear is reasonable and provoking fear is intentional.

Assault: ["intentionally place an alleged “victim” in reasonable apprehension of great bodily harm."](

https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/what-is-assault-with-a-deadly-weapon/)

Brandish: " For purposes of this subsection, the term “brandish” means, with respect to a firearm, to display all or part of the firearm, or otherwise make the presence of the firearm known to another person, in order to intimidate that person, regardless of whether the firearm is directly visible to that person." (emphasis mine)

If it's done subtly it can be hard to know how to score it, let alone prove it in a court of law, but that doesn't make it any less real or game changing. There's a very real chance that the "pastor" was able to correctly infer that JTarrou was armed from his behavior, and that otherwise he wouldn't have backed down so peacefully. I've been in a similar situation, where out of place confidence clued me in that the people threatening me were almost certainly armed, and that I couldn't afford to risk trying to de-escalate the way I otherwise would. My inference happened to be proven correct, but the presence of weapons changed things on both sides well before they came out.

Should we count every time the presence of a gun made someone feel unsafe as an offensive gun use?

We already do that. What do you think "brandishing" is?

I meant merely glancing and seeing someone open carrying in a non-threatening manner.

Would you count every single traffic stop ever as a 'gun use?'

I meant merely glancing and seeing someone open carrying in a non-threatening manner.

At some point you have to stop counting the crazies, otherwise Paranoid Pete has 7.9 billion defensive gun uses per hour since "everyone's out to get him". I think we've drawn the line in a decent spot, where it has to substantially affect your behaviour before it gets counted.

Would you count every single traffic stop ever as a 'gun use?'

Let's ignore all of the ones done by unarmed officers.

No, I wouldn't. I'd only call it a gun use if the officer would have otherwise called for backup (or taken some other protective measure). Furthermore, I'm not sure about counting on-duty police officers in defensive gun use statistics, since they can also initiate force instead of just responding to it.

As I said at the beginning of the story, I'm a bit on the fence on the classification of that night myself. If you're criticizing the methodology of the survey, that's fair enough so long as you recognize that most of the time when a gun is present in a dangerous situation, it is not fired, and sometimes not even brandished. Maybe there needs to be an intermediate category, but the point is, this is why people want guns, and because the situation resolved peacefully, that can be lost as a data point. We should not take the moral restraint of legal gun owners as an argument to disarm them.

Bottom line for me is, I was going out on that porch with or without a gun. Having the gun gave me a better plan than bringing a knife to a hatchet fight with a guy who outweighed me by a hundred pounds.

If you're criticizing the methodology of the survey, that's fair enough

Thanks, I was.

We should not take the moral restraint of legal gun owners as an argument to disarm them.

Perish the thought.