Are you a member of the NRA ?

bertsmobile1 said:

You don't have gangs kicking down peoples doors any time of the day or night, ransacking the house, raping the women , and beating up the males if not abducting the young boys into their rank & killing males that they think may oppose them.
So it is a matter of degree.
I will always remember a work collegue who put it like this.
His child was ill & they ran out of water.
If he went to the well the gangs would kill him
If his young son went to the well he would be abducted.
If his elder son went to the well he would be beaten near death.
If his wife or any of his daughters went to the well they would be raped and perhaps killed.
If the child did not get water she would have died
What would you do in that situation ?
When his daughter died, he had enough so they put a bomb in their house and blew it up then spent 6 years getting to Australia.
By doing that it protected his extended family from the gangs as each one would blame the other.
They also could never ever contact any member of their extended familiy or friends.
And he was an educated man, a school teacher.
If the USA really wants to stop South Americans crossing the border then helping governments provide an effective police force would be a lot more fruitful than building a wall.
Being born dirt poor, I have had the priviledge of working with just about every group of illegal immigrant that has come to Australia with the exception of the current batch of Muslems.
Each & every one of them wanted the same thing.
To bring their children up in a safe enviroment and to work hard enough to live a reasonable life.
The idea that hoards are going to cross the border for the purpose of killing Americans is another dellusion.
Bad governments like to keep their population scared.
A scared population is less likely to toss out the current government.
In a anxious state the human mind is most receptive to suggestion and fear is the most anxious state your mind can be in.
Most criminal gangs use fear as the method of control, as do a lot of mainstream religions.
Most media uses anxiety to put your brain in a state where their customers ( the advertisers ) message will sink in.
This is one of the reasons why you feel so good when you spend a few days in the woods or on one of those cruises to nowhere if you have no contact to the outside world.

You are old enough to have suffered the effects of the cold war and in particular the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Even down here people suffered trauma and were glued to their transistors 24/7 expecting the end of the world to happen at any second.

Living every day, with the fear that the person you accidentially cut off on the freeway could pull a long arm & blow you into oblivion, is not my idea of free, although it might make Aussies better drivers :laughing:

And dog food is how a relation of a friend describes gun shot victims, collision victims etc.
As he says, what you see on TV is nothing like reality.
What gets put on his slab looks more like a pile of dog food than a person.

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Fish said:

I live on the border of 3 counties, and calling for help is quite a crapshoot, 20-30 minutes minimum. We also have had almost 10 unsolved murders around here in the last 6 years.

About 5 miles from here, an old lady had a home invasion from some crackheads looking for money and drugs, when they didn't find much, they tortured and killed her cat in front of her, trying to get her to give them what they wanted.

Luckily, they let her live.

I have a hard time getting advice from folks that think that should think that I have no right to protect myself.

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bertsmobile1 said:

So should she have pulled a gun & hoped they ran away?
Should she have shot them ?
If she had a gun in her house would they have used it to shoot her or stolen it and used it to mug people in the street or car jack ?

The junkies were most likely local.
Good chance they knew her or knew of her.
They most likely 1/2 planned it by finding out she lived alone so was vunerable.

As for the 10 murders, how many used guns to kill the victim ?

If you hear a cat screaming in the night from the house next door would you ring them, go knock on the door unarmed , gather your weapon and go crash through the back door or just load up and watch through your window ?

And if every one has a firearm then the junkies would have had firearms as well.
What is more dangerous ?
A junkie
A junkie with a knife or syringe
A junkie with a firearm
You make your community safe by knowing them and watching out for each other, as if each & every one of your community is one of your own children.
You make yourself safe by doing the same.
If you are elderly & vunerable this is even more important.
Little things like not allowing yourself to get into a strict and thus predictable routine.

I live 60 mlles away for the city.
The day we bought our hose there we invited all of the neighbours, the entire street to a party to get to know them.
To our surprise some of the people who cam had lived there for decades but had never meet let alone spoken to people 2 doors away.
Now days once or twice a year the street holds street parties in the vacant cul-de Sac at the end of the street.
We all know each other, each others cars so when a car thief was trying to enter a neighbours car at the railway car park, another neighbour parked in front of it preventing the thieft.
Most of the people work a long way away so the neighbourhood is fairly well vacant during the working hours week days yet our neighbourhood has not suffered a single break & enter where as the houses across the other side of the gully have at least a weekly robbery.
In summer my wife travels to work by train & walks the 2 miles home, even if it is dark without fear as she knows every one she walks past and they know her.
Safety comes from what is on your shoulders, not what is hanging in your holster.
The way to protect yourself from the unknown stranger is to know the stranger not poke a fire arm in their face.

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