There are (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year in the United States, and evidence to suggest this actually lowers the rates of various types of violent crimes (including "hot robberies", where the home owner is still in the house when it is being burglarized).
The right to self-defense is a foundational human right, and logically entailed from that is the right to effective means of self-defense.
In all civilized countries, these are called murders. Someone entering your home does not give you the right to shoot them.
Worse than all of the above they will do it again and again with few opportunities to get busted because statistically few of these crimes actually solved.
Your families safety is the only thing that matters here. If playing Rambo will increase the risk to your family you shouldn't do it. If shooting the intruder will increase the safety of your family by even the smallest fraction of a percent at the cost of certainly killing a burglar you should absolutely do so.
Lets say the harsh truth. The only people prowling around invading other people's homes are awful people of negative value to humanity. From a purely utilitarian perspective you shooting them today would just mean that they stop hurting actual people of worth tomorrow.
For your own moral health you shouldn't hurt them if it is possible to avoid it and preserve your other goals but there is no situation in which you ought to prize any number of burglars over even 1% chance of your family members getting hurt.
Your outrage isn't moral its a plea for greater harm in service of a dysfunctional moral code where your children are less important than the meth addict who is terrorizing your neighborhood.
Here's the reality of things:
- 3 out of 4 burglaries happen with no-one home
- 7% of that remaining 25% show "a form of violence". It doesn't mean shooting. Even a fistfight counts in there. So, 1.75% of burglaries happen with violence. This is even lower in countries which have already regulated guns.
- There are approximately ZERO burglars that want a confrontation when stealing from you. It is infinitely more trouble than it is worth to be caught. Even if they know they will win a fight. A fight means noise, it means being potentially seen, caught, etc. Burglars will abandon ship the moment anyone is up. Once again, gun ownership makes the likelihood of things getting violent much higher. If you know you can easily run away, you don't come armed. If you know you can get shot, you come in armed and ready to shoot
- The meth addict is deserving of treatment and help, not being shot. Do you think people fall into meth for the lulz?
- Utilitarian perspective on human lives is absolute dogshit and a show of a rotten society and mindset.
add gun control into the mix and this chance goes WAY down.
"If you startle them they could open fire sending a stray bullet into your kids room"
As could you by opening fire in an attempt to stop the attacker. Noting the majority of gun owners never use them, they are far more likely to cause harm them prevent it.
The "protection" argument is best served by reducing the number of weapons in circulation, not by arguing your ability to use one to protect yourself.
And while a home invasion does not necessarily give the right to shoot someone per se, it makes it quite a bit easier to satisfy the conditions for self-defense that I have laid out elsewhere in this thread.
Source?
> Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2013. Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/18319.
