351
Missouri man fatally shoots his mother at home after mistaking her for intruder
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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What is wrong with some people? The chance of someone with intent to cause bodily harm trying to break into a residence when someone is home is essentially zero.
That's why you've got to grab your cool guns and start blasting immediately -- you might never get another chance.
It's low but nonzero, and depends on your exact location.
But what's wrong with them is the constant stoking of their fear by Fox News and similar media, that tells them that the illegals are breaking into their houses to steal their wives and rape their jobs, or something.
Nearly ~~600,000~~ 900,000 burglaries occur yearly in the US, with 27.6% occurring while occupants were present and 25% of those incidents involving ~~an assault~~ violent crime on the occupants. (https://insurify.com/homeowners-insurance/insights/burglary-statistics/) That comes to ~~37,500~~ ~62,100 ~~break-in assaults~~ victims of violent crimes from break-ins in the US per year, divided by 123.6 million households in the US comes to a 1 in ~~3,296~~ 1,990 chance of a household's occupants being assaulted in a break-in each year. That's ~~68%~~ roughly as many incidents as being injured or killed by a firearm anywhere in the country each year as tallied by the GVA. Hardly zero, unless you also mean to minimize US gun violence.
Though either of these stats are hardly able to be applied broadly across the entire country given their driving force of poverty and its extreme regional & local disparities.
Edit: Actually those 600,000 burglaries only account for 69% of the US population. The actual number is ~900,000 nationally, bumping the math's number of violent crimes including assault, robbery, and rape experienced in homes up to ~62,100 or 1 in 1,990, surpassing being a victim of broad gun violence as tallied by the GVA when removing instances of justified self-defense.
I feel like you're minimizing the part where it's 0.03% by contrasting it with what you take as the given that individual gun violence is a likely threat in most of the country.
Gun violence can be a problem without it being a specific actionable concern for the majority of people.
It's why it's not contradictory to think we should work to reduce gun violence, and also not find it necessary to be armed in anticipation of imminent violence.
I don't. As I said, poverty & organized crime is a driving factor in both burglaries & gun violence moreso than any other metric and heavily skews those statistics between localities. Many regions will have rates 3-4x that. I also feel like you're minimizing the part where it's 1 in ~~3300~~ 1990 per year, which applied over even just 50 years comes to ~~1.6%~~ 2.5% of people experiencing it in their lives. Hell, the total burglary number of ~~600,000~~ 900,000 is nearly thrice the rate of house fires in the US.
It would absolutely be inconsistent to cite gun violence stats as a cause of concern for the average person (2) (3) while dismissing being assaulted in a burglary, nevermind being burgled at all, as an essentially zero chance.
As an interesting point of reference, UK home break-ins occur at a rate of 578,000 yearly for a population with just 27.8 million households. That works out to 2% of households yearly being burgled, and per the first source over half of those occur while someone is present in the house (twice as often as happens in the US). Here's another source citing a 1.27% rate of domestic burglary for the year ending in June 2023, and that's vs the US rate of 0.728% (1.7-2.7 times higher). I can't find any sources for what percentage of these break-in lead to assaults on the occupants, but for even the more conservative number of 1.27% from earlier and 50% of those being occupied homes, a rate higher than 6.90% of those occupied burglaries leading to assault would place the odds of being assaulted in your home in the UK higher than in America. This article working off of 2020 ONS data cites that of the 64.1% of incidents where someone is home 46% were aware and saw their burglars, and of those 48% reported being threatened and 27% reported force or violence being used against them. Plugging that into the most recent rate of 1.27% being burgled, that comes out to a 1 in 989 chance yearly of being a victim of violent crime by burglars in your own house, double that of the US.
I wonder what's different about American households that so dramatically shifts both the number of break-ins as well as how/when they occur. Poverty certainly plays a role, where the UK's poverty rate after housing expenses is twice that of the US (22% vs 11%). Doesn't explain the nature of the break-ins though.
Edit: See math from earlier post, actual number is 1 in 1,990 yearly, or a 2.5% chance of experiencing violent crime in a home invasion over 50 years. Also makes the rate of burglary nearly thrice the rate of house fires in the US. Updated the math throughout the UK paragraph to match.
I don't want to ruin your little gish gallop, but the act of "home invasion" is fundamentally different in the UK and the US.
You and your little pro-gun cult friends have ensured that criminals have easy, widespread access to handguns, turning "somebody stole my iPad" into "somebody stole my iPad and then shot me in the spine".
You've had over 20 years to prove your bullshit claims of "guns prevent crime" and not only are crimes not significantly prevented, you've created a massive excess of far more serious crimes.
Yes, I alluded to this by rhetorically asking why US burglars are half as willing to break in while an occupant is home. Still wondering why that would ever be.
Household burglaries ending in homicide make up 0.004% or 1 in 25,000 break-ins, and with national firearm injury rates being roughly double homicide rates that should mean roughly 1 in 8,333 break-ins leave the homeowner injured or killed to guns. That would math to 108 households in 2021 with occupants killed/injured by guns in 2021, or over 1 in a million yearly odds. Compared to the near-identical odds between the 2 countries of being assaulted or having other violent crime done against you if you see the burglars (27% vs 26%), it's a weird edge case to focus on while dismissing the entire collection of crime it's a minuscule subset of.
Also wild to see "you'll be shot while complying" in this argument, normally it's people saying anyone practicing self-defense thinks they're Rambo and that they'd be better off just ascribing best-intentions to the assailant and giving them what they want.
Again, the point of this isn't to say that concern about gun violence is wrong or nutty, it's to argue that concerns about violent home invasion are even less paranoid than that.
You are being extremely disingenuous when you say that since you're only counting household burglaries. And I'm sure you know it.
The truth is that 2021 was the deadliest year in U.S. history for guns, with 2023 close behind.
Let's look at some actual numbers.
In other words, the CDC doesn't track all gun deaths.
Meaning that even the gun deaths the CDC tracks are not a complete record of those types of deaths.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
And you would have us believe that only 108 of those happened in someone's house?
Also from that study:
But hey, a lower gun death rate than El Salvador, so there's nothing to worry about.
I'm literally commenting on how the person above me claims American firearms ownership makes "the act of “home invasion” fundamentally different in the UK and the US." by "turning “somebody stole my iPad” into “somebody stole my iPad and then shot me in the spine”." Household burglaries is the context of the conversation.
No, I am claiming that ~108 incidents (could be 1 or more victims per) happen by a burglar's hands. You know that, you just said I'm being deceitful for limiting it to those parameters, and now you're lying about them.
Correct, and I haven't cited CDC data. As I've said many times now, I've cited Gun Violence Archive's numbers, whose sole mission is to catalog as high of numbers as they can. Their 2016 combined homicide & suicide stats exceed your source's numbers at 38k. I've also been using the higher number of ~60k deaths & injuries from someone else's gun per year instead of ~45k combined homicides & suicides.
Because in a discussion of someone's claim of "essentially zero" risk of harm from someone in a home invasion, the actual risk is currently very close to the widely-agreed-upon, internationally-lambasted, domestic-politics-dominating risk of harm from another's gun. Or hey, we'll count what you purposefully do to yourself as well and say it's 2/3 of the way there.
I really don't understand how saying "home invasion isn't a boogeyman, being harmed from it is as likely as gun violence" has been interpreted as "you're saying gun violence is a boogeyman" other than everyone here taking the top comment at face value and losing all basic literacy when the circlejerk stops.
Even assuming all your stats were true, how many of these people reported being killed? You’re not defining what that force or violence includes, but most of them don’t call for deadly force as a response.
That's a direct quote from your article so where does the "37,500 break-in assaults" number come from when it's 3x higher than what your source lists?
Furthermore,
Meaning you're 4x more likely to be shot by someone than assaulted during a burglary
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
You're wasting your breath. Gun owners are extremity selective about the statistics they choose to care about.
If they're supplying them, they're usually bullshit and if they're demanding them, it's usually sealioning. Their fixation on numbers vanishes the moment those numbers don't say what they want.
He can vomit up all the numbers he wants but if guns actually solved the problem, America would have the lowest crime rate in the world. Instead, they have crime rates that are practically identical to countries with comparitive levels of wealth and education.
Only in America, there's a layer of murder on top of every crime, because "responsible gun owners" keep arming criminals with their unsecured firearms and dogshit laws.
No need for hypotheticals here, we've got hard examples of stats & studies that either are or aren't bs. Although the only bit I talk about on gun violence is from the GVA, but you're welcome to call them BS if you wish.
At ~20,000/year, it's 1 in 17,500 people. Or 1 in 6,180 households to keep comparisons equal.
The point of the comparison isn't to downplay gun violence, as should have been evident by how I'm arguing an equally-likely violent home invasion isn't something to dismiss.
Specifying assault specifically was a mistake on my part, as I said the math came from the article's citations on all violent crimes experienced by occupants during break-ins multiplied against the year's 583,000 burglaries. Of that 26% number, 18% is assault while 6% is armed robbery and 2% is rape. I'm not sure where the article's 11,000 claim comes from, as that number is uncited and would represent a substantial decrease vs the numbers they have citations for, which showed consistent values year-to-year in the mid-2000s though at a significantly higher overall rate of burglaries at 3.7 million/year. The closest number I can think of would be if they're just counting specifically aggravated assault, which using the cited percentage of occurring in 4.5% of occupied break-ins would come to 10,125 instances in 900,000 break-ins.
And actually, re-reading the article shows the 600,000 burglary number only accounts for 69% of the US population whose law enforcement reports numbers to the FBI, real numbers from the FBI are 900,000 for the past couple years making that number's discrepancy even worse with the math's number of 62,100. I'm not able to find any more recent data on either a % or a hard-number of home invasions resulting in assault or other violent crime victimization, if you have any please share.
Coming at me citing suicide stats in a crime discussion, nice! And not even applying them correctly, using the number of deaths as a stat for being shot at all. I already referenced a more accurate, if still flawed, number by summing injuries & deaths from the GVA above.
Suicide victims aren't even cold before the pro-gun community sweeps them under the nearest rug, desperately hoping that if they're quick enough, nobody will notice that means reduction is extremely effective in suicide prevention.
You're still more likely to be shot by someone, it's just the "someone" might be you.
But it'll never be one of your kids with one of your guns, will it buddy?
Pardon me for not considering actions I have control over in a discussion on the likelihood of violence one doesn't have control over. And again, I'm citing larger numbers for gun violence victims than what they are citing incorrectly.
At 1 in ~2000 odds (10 in 10,000 suicide rate, 50% firearms for ages 10-24), or literally the exact same odds that I'm saying a person should be prepared for based on their consequences, those are absolutely odds I would act to minimize if I lived with a minor or anyone suffering mental health issues.
Just here to point out that it'll never be your home, will it buddy?
You have control over who you vote for. I suspect you don't vote for the politicians who will reduce suicides.
Bernie -> Hillary -> Bernie -> Biden since I've been eligible to vote, so just barely. You realize about 1/3 of gun owners vote left, right?
If a third of gun owners vote in favor of making sure this sort of thing never happens, I'm all for that.
But you seem to be arguing that this sort of thing is an unfortunate outcome of a necessity. Which seems to go against what the people you vote for think and want.
Hillary, who you voted for, wanted to eliminate the Castle Doctrine, which makes this sort of thing legal.
So I think you need to decide whose side you're on.
No, I'm not some fucking lib toeing the democratic party line, and criticizing someone for that is "RINO republican" bullshit with a D at the front. I also think her policy against police abuse of waxing poetic about its tragedies while advocating for further funding is bootlicking bullshit, I think her stance against abolishing the death penalty while downplaying its minimum 4% false positive rate in killing innocent people fueled by a 69% rate of official misconduct and 15% rate of judges overruling jury decisions to enforce the death penalty as "very unfortunate & discriminatory" is blatantly prioritizing bootlicking over actual justice, I don't think her stance at that time to merely reschedule marijuana as schedule II rather than full legalization is sufficient, and her policy of "the cops can have a little stop & frisk, as a treat" is more of the above. And no, I don't support eliminating the castle doctrine or passing duty to retreat laws for one's own home either.
But I'm sure if I instead cited these disagreements as why I didn't vote for any candidate you'd be perfectly understanding, right?
And what about this situation makes you think "this sort of thing" was legal here? The shooter was charged with manslaughter & armed criminal action with a bail of $100k.
Obviously it's not legal to murder your own mother who isn't breaking into your home.
But it is legal to murder someone who is breaking into your home.
Even if the only thing they're armed with is the rock they used to break through your window and you can just leave.
Yeah, yeah that's indeed where I draw the line. I don't think a person is morally obligated to ascribe best-intentions to someone breaking & entering (again, they'll be violent toward you 26% of the time), I don't think a person is morally obligated to be a victim of violence in their own home, I don't think a person is morally obligated to evacuate what is meant to be their safe haven, and I sure as shit don't think anyone else either with a badge or without is coming to be the good guy for you. And as defense, I don't think it is murder.
Your first link is some insurance company corporate website that has no reason to be truthful. The second link won't reveal its sources unless you pay, but also shows that violent crime is far less of a problem now than it has been for decades.
So your fearmongering isn't even supported well by your unsourced data.
Every number I pull from the article is backed up by a separate primary source they provide. Their citation for overall burglary numbers, as linked (little blue 1), is from the FBI's crime tracker. Their citation on the specifics for burglaries, including % where the owner is present and stats on violent crime victimization as part of burglaries, comes from a DOJ report that they link. The # of US households was just me googling and pulling the first result, but census data puts it at 125 million.
The 2nd source is just using FBI data as well, extrapolating the reported crime amount from the reported population over the whole population. The official FBI number of 673,261 burglaries divided by .75 (% of population those account for) gives 897,681, and the FBI's chart over time (counted in burglaries per 100,000 population rather than households) does indeed show that burglaries, as with all violent crime, have gotten considerably safer over the past 10-20 years.
Still far from 0, and still more common than the crime that's America's blight onto the world.
Suicides, school shootings, gang gunfights and other major problems caused by the massive amount of gun ownership in this country is also far from zero. But that doesn't seem to concern you.
It’s probably naive of me, but I keep hoping that if we had better data on that, it would persuade at least some.
The chances of that breakin are essentially zero. Even if it happens the chances of defending yourself are very low, and if you’ve properly secured your deadly weapon, pretty much zero. Meanwhile the chances of accidentally or in fear harming or killing someone inappropriately are much higher, and if the weapon is ready for defense, harming an innocent is even more likely.
Can we put numbers to that and prove it to convince at least some? Or is it a religious topic?
There is tons of data. People don't give a fuck about data that doesn't tell them what they want to hear.
The number one killer of children in america is guns, the second is cars. Yet the anti-gun & anti-car dependency movements are struggling. Nobody gives a fuck about dead kids until they know them personally.
You replied to a thread where I literally did
Never happened to you so the scenario is invalid?
I've had armed men break in my house on Christmas Eve. Fuck me, I had a bear wonder in my dog door, laughably on Christmas Eve again. Had a wolf hybrid come in another time. He was my buddy though, knew him.
I hope you're never helpless and defenseless.
Don't leave us hanging. Was the wolf hybrid on Christmas Eve too?
Yes. Then there was the year the vampires came...
Then on Christmas Day he was opening his presents and boom, out jumps a mountain lion.
Did you have a child die screaming and terrified on their classroom floor at the hands of a legal gun owner? Were you ever hunted in a mall by a teenage extremist with a semi-automatic rifle?
Actually fuck it, did you even shoot the "armed men" or dog-sized bear, or did it turn out you didn't even need your guns in the bullshit you just made up.
That's very clearly not true.
Believe it or not, this is not the first time on Lemmy someone has justified owning a gun to protect themselves from bears.
And this statistic still stands:
There have been 67 fatal black bear attacks (and they would be the only ones small enough to come through a dog door) in North America since 1900. Most of them were defensive attacks.
https://wiseaboutbears.org/about-us/bear-attacks-2/
There's a very easy thing to do if there's a bear in your house that doesn't involve shooting it- leave and call animal control.
It also means you don't have to get rid of a bear carcass and clean bear blood off the carpet.
Isn't it funny how they always have this self-aggrandizing reasons for owning a gun? They're always "defending their family" (until their child uses their gun to blow their brains out) or "preventing tyranny" (when they're not enthusiastically voting and funding fascists).
It's never just "I own guns because they're fun", it's always the hero fantasy. I guess if they were honest, we wouldn't tolerate the endless bullshit they cause.
There are gun owners who just say, "I own guns because I think they're cool" or whatever. I've met them before. I even have a friend like that. He's fine with gun regulations, he just thinks guns are cool and (before he moved out of California), he liked to go out to the desert and shoot cans. He had no hero fantasies. He didn't even keep his guns easily-accessible. I have a lot more respect for people like him.
I know they exist (because I've also known them) but you'll never find one on the internet because the more horrific the social cost of American gun laws grows, the more grandiose the justifications for doing nothing need to be.
Imagine telling victims of gun violence "sorry, we can't make a token efforts to make sure gun owners aren't unhinged domestic abusers because some people think guns are fun and we don't want to inconvenience them".
We'd have gun regulations in a heartbeat if these "problem pretending to be the solution" gun owners were honest about why they want guns and when they'd use them -- it's why they lie about it in the first place.
I wonder if the armed men looked anything like this.
What was it wondering about?
STATISTICALLY it's invalid. Even your examples are not applicable because it sounds like they didn't want to cause you any bodily harm, they just wanted a house to easily rob of Christmas presents. Same thing with the bear and wolf, it didn't come in there wanting to hurt you, it just wanted food.
In both of these cases the best defense isn't shooting at an unidentified figure in the distance on an assumption that it's someone coming in with an intent to hurt you