Me: Hey Maggie, How do you get from here to New York City?
Maggie: I obey the law.

Me: Hey Maggie, How do you get across a busy street?
Maggie: I obey the law.

Me: Hey Maggie, What are you going to have for lunch?
Maggie: I obey the law.

Me: Hey Maggie, What's your favorite song?
Maggie: I obey the law.

You see, saying she has decided to obey the law doesn't answer some questions.

Dunno. I wasn't about to go into that house and find out.

The situation was a classic "Hogan's Alley"...druggies in a drug den got all wired up and decided to plink at the sailors across the street for fun. Said sailors, having had this experience before (no injuries) retreived their legally owned weapons from their respective cars and returned fire. This after the police told us point blank that unless someone was shot, they weren't going to respond to every report of gunfire in THAT neighborhood. Serve and protect, indeed!

The aftermath was pretty tame...we waited for police to show up after the lead stopped flying. We gave up after an hour and went home. It seems that the police (our guard tells us) were not particularly interested in whodunit. They knew it was us but didn't care to do more than write a report on the scene and do nothing other than that. I heard ofr no bodies being carried out and there was no mention of the incident in the paper the next day.

To answer your question: I obey the law! Seriously, I do not think anyone was hit. We were more interested in deterrence than a body count. I aimed mostly at windows and walls. All I ever saw was a hand (with handgun) in an upper level window.

I know Maggie will take me to task for firing without a clear target but sometimes you have to do what is possible. Since there was never a repeat incident, no further shooting was ever necessary, and the innocent people living in that area were likely marginally safer for it. Although there continued to be shots fired by the locals (not us) no one shot at the sailors again.

Perhaps things would have been different for the defenders here had we actually hit anyone. No way to tell. All I know is that was one shooting incident too many for me and I hope that I never have to repeat the experience. But should it become necessary to protect me and mine, I will not hesitate to employ deadly force in accordance with my training (civilian and military) and neutralize the threat.

Gotta roll now, catch you later

I own guns, I would use them. The presence of a weapon has kept me from being robbed/assraped/killed twice, and ensured my safe transport once. I have fired once at a person, but knowing that he was too far away to be killed or seriously injured (shotgun). Don't come messin 'round my nana's house.

Plus, there's this rabbit that's tearing up all the landscaping around the house, and it's got a date with a .22 as soon as I can catch him in front of the barn. That way, any ricochet will hit the wall and not go flying into the sunset. Responsible gun owners think about where bullets go after the initial impact.

At least three threads and hundreds of posts, and not one pro-gunner willing to acknowledge that more people with guns in our country leads to more deaths. Wow.

Oh, I didn't read the original post, just the last page or 2.


Okay, more people with guns in our country leads to more deaths.


So? More people with cars leads to more deaths, too.

Thank you for your candor, mr-mo-fucking-hammed-noodle. :)

anytime :D

But seriously, we have this assumption that ANY unlawful use of firearms ALWAYS trumps the lawful possession and use of them. If 1 million people use guns without incident, but 2 people get killed either criminally or accidentally, we want to eliminate all guns. We don't apply that logic to any other aspect of society. Why? Because it's faulty logic.

OK, I'll acknowledge it. Here are several stories (updated pretty much daily) of people being killed by guns:

http://www.claytoncramer.com/gundefe...g/blogger.html

It's unfortunate, but sometimes shooting beats the alternative outcomes.

Absolutely. So how many times have had to shoot someone rather than suffer the alternative outcomes?

A man that lived near me was told by a potential bugler that he would be killed if he resisted... when the man informed him that he was armed the man then told him that he was armed and was going to kill him (he lied, he was not armed). The neighbors heard the exchange. The home owner shot the criminal, killing him.
He was released the next morning. No charges were ever brought.
Again, proper application of the castle doctrine.

Dr.s prescribing incorrect drugs or making mistakes kill so many more people than guns in the US it is crazy... should we outlaw them?

http://www.carthagepress.com/article...03%20rifle.txt

From MO: 7th grader knows home gun safe combo and gets access to (legal I'm guessing) home weaponry including assault rifle. Takes guns, ammo and bomb stuffs to school, threatens, but thankfully no one is killed.

Adding to the statistic that correlates multiple gun ownership with probability of involvement in gun crime.

Did they happen to mention how many children didn't gain access to gun safes :question:

Escalate it? Don't worry about that part. "Violence -- naked force -- has settled more issues in human history than anything else." "He's dead, I'm alive, and that's how I wanted it." Such a degree of escalation produces inevitable deescalation, and the life-and-death problem is solved. It still leaves the question of whether one acted lawfully. I'll list some reference works about it below.

Never bring yourself to use it? Well, I just couldn't bring myself to submit to being murdered the way you would. Or so you say you would now, anyway. Having a mind, you are at inalienable liberty to change it when a better idea comes along.

Intelligent discussion of the entire matter may be undertaken once these have been read and understood:

That Every Man Be Armed: the Evolution of a Constitutional Right by Stephen P. Halbrook, constitutional lawyer. He argued the Brady Law before the Supreme Court, and the Court ruled to void certain provisions of the Brady Law. Halbrook knows what he's talking about.

Lethal Laws: "Gun Control" Is The Gateway To Genocide by Simkin, Zelman, and Rice; sets forth the compelling moral reason for never refusing to own a weapon yourself, as making a genocide impractical is a highly moral thing to do by any standard. This argument has never been refuted in the dozen years it's been out.

The Truth About Self Defense by Massad Ayoob, self-defense scholar, firearms instructor, former police captain. Examines the combative, technical, and legal picture of armed defense of self or other in modern days.

Optional reading for fleshing out the big picture: More Guns, Less Crime by John Lott, professor of economics. The study this book is based on studied all three thousand-plus counties in the United States, covering a fifteen-year period.

Spexx, I've already told you where the flaw is in that idea. If you abandon that idea, you will then be on the road to wisdom, and good for you. Go, find and reread [edit: p.5 of If You Outlaw Guns Then Only...] what I told you, for it isn't sinking in. What you believe must reflect reality, not exclude it. Some deaths, say Adolf Hitler's, improve things, others, like Anne Frank's, do not. Seems about as obvious as a nearby mountain to me.

What ratio is acceptable?

"Statistic" isn't the plural of "anecdote".

Did you read the law yet?

I didn't think so.

Because it's not true.

And even if it were, not all deaths are bad. If I blow away someone who's trying to rape me (you really should read that law, you know), I'd consider that a good thing.

Maybe you wouldn't. Maybe you think the rapist is a victim of society, and should be given a chance to reform...or try again.

Please note that the second paragraph of this post is a hypothentical...I don't even agree that more guns implies more deaths. Millions of guns in this country--the vast majority of them--never killed anyone and never will.

Damn my colloquialism!

Do people shooting guns cause gun shot wounds? If not, what causes gun shot wounds?

People getting in the line of fire. :D

There is no acceptable or unacceptable ratio.
Parents being stupid is somehow an imperative for me to divest myself of guns? I don't think so.
Some parents have been being stupid forever, I don't see than changing.
Nor do I see that as a particular problem I can do anything about.
I'd be much more worried about the damage the stupid parents allow their whelps to do with automobiles.

Not always. Or there'd be hell to pay every third Saturday in Southampton PA.
However, gunshot wounds are always preceded by gunfire.

For some reason, this discussion always seems to have problems with logical fallacies (especially affirming the consequent and errors of composition and decomposition) and causation.

Since the gungrabbers here are so fond of hypotheticals, here's one for Spexxvet:

Consider a sealed room with two people in it. Obviously if the room contains no guns, no shootings will occur. If the room contains two guns, each in the posession of one of the people, I maintain that shootings are less likely to occur than if there was only one gun.

Of course, if most of what you know about firearms has been gleaned from watching television and movie drama, and you believe that guns are implicitly eeeevil, tend to go off at random on their own, and cause agressive insanity in people touching them, you won't accept that assertion.

On the other hand, if you've actually been around guns and noticed that none of those three propositions is true, you'll probablyfind the assertion more plausible.

But I say the idea that there's an implicit positive correlation between the mere number of weapons in existance and their criminal use is mistaken.

Interesting post at NRO:

My family are from the country, where guns are just another tool (IE, a mechanical device with no implicit psychological characteristics). These "urban" associations with guns don't jibe with their "rural" function. Ironically, the function of those guns might be altered dramatically if some fancy law-makin' city-slicker were trying to take them away.

The "taking-your-guns-away-boogeyman" is the ideological flip-side to the "replacing-the-Constitution-with-the-Bible-boogeyman" . . .

Utter foolishness. Unlike UG, I'll explain why.

Ok, not utter. If there were no gun at all, there would absolutely be no shooting.

If there was one gun, and you had it, then I would surrend, lay face down on the floor, do whatever you told me to do, and you would only shoot me if you were a nasty, heartless, sadistic bitch. So that's one shot, probably. If I got had the gun, I would only shoot if you didn't surrender, after trying less lethal solutions.

If there were two guns, I would shoot you right away, so that you couldn't shoot me, knowing that you would do the same. If I didn't kill you, or you got a shot off at the same time I shot, you would still get a shot off. That's two virtually guaranteed shots.

Ha!

Pistols or rifles/shotguns?

There is of course more here to think on.

It's not about bloodthirstiness and it's not about playing at cops-and-robbers. It is about resisting evil; somebody robbing and murdering you is breaking a couple of Commandments, no question. There is also the fundamental concept that humans may resist evil -- without even being duly constituted or paid by other humans to do so. Evil and resistance to evil is a thing of every human heart and every human mind. When the practitioners of evil, as they do, kill either righteous or unrighteous people in pursuit -- sometimes how trivial that pursuit! -- of their aims, there is absolutely no wrongness in resisting their endeavors and no genuine reason -- though some specious ones have been offered -- to stop short of lethal force if that's all that's going to succeed.

No pro-gunner with a lick of sense -- in my experience, about 99% of them -- fails to recognize that this comes at a considerable personal, and emotional cost; uneasy lies the head that shot the guy. This is inescapable to anyone mentally normal. Even the immediate prospect is jarring, as I know from personal experience: I had a roommate who was going quietly crazy, and once I thought I would have to pull a gun on him -- in my own bedroom. It felt terrible. It requires mental conditioning to function under such a stress: it starts with deciding beforehand if you're going to take on the responsibility for ending a man's life, or if you're going to submit to him wrongfully killing you.

Far too many antigunners demand -- though they will deny it, and demonstrate a passive murderousness in the denial -- that one do precisely that. Thus is these people's sense of the allegedly rightful satisfied. None of these bozos will consider that it could as easily happen to them, rather than to the gun people. This is the huge moral chasm between the righteous progunner and the murder-loving anti.

In reading John Lott (see p.5 this thread), you will discover a pretty well-founded estimate that the lawful and righteous use of such killing tools about two and a half million times annually prevents a loss to the American economy of upwards of three billion dollars each year, totting up property loss, worktime loss, medical costs, lawyer fees, and so forth. Even in a trillion-dollar economy, that's still a good shot in the arm preserving wealth.

Spexx, you are a man who is visibly reluctant to go around killing. That in itself is a recommendation that you should own three or four guns yourself, as you would not use them wrongly and take measures to guarantee no one else would use your arms wrongly either. You've also had the grace not to accuse progunners of lacking that reluctance, which is commendable. You've not yet taken an effectual antigenocide stance, which in my view (and that of most humans) is not commendable, but you show no signs of having educated yourself on that matter yet.

Approximately every second household in the United States has at least one firearm in it. Yet crime and bloodshed do not come to every second household. There are things guns do and things guns do not do -- the man educated on the subject knows well which these are.

What do we see in men who murder schoolgirls or shoot up the neighborhood in a suicide-by-cop? A great degree of aberrancy, a viciousness that lacks sanity. The anti-self-defense lobby prevents immediate and effectual response to these monsters through its hysterical fear of killing tools, and does all humanity a terrible injustice: it is so terrible that these people ought to be locked up for lengthy prison terms for mass and chronic incitement to murder.

Do not, Spexxvet, ask moral persons to stop resisting evil, even unto death.

The plural of "anecdote" may not be "statistics" but I've long held that an analysis of all those The Armed Citizen columns that have figured in NRA magazines for decades ought to help the statistical study somehow. At the least, it is a very considerable weight of testimony in support of the moral use of arms.

The assumption that if guns are present, they WILL be used to kill someone, is one of many failings all antis share. Why do you think that just because you're both armed, you have to try to kill or overpower each other? No wonder you guys don't like guns.

And why aren't you fighting the nasty, heartless, sadistic bitch? With or without a gun, you're just going to lay there and let her kill you?

What does the room look like? Is there food? How long are they in there? What is the room sealed with?

by the way I love venison. Hunt your game, just dont use an AK-47. Give 'em a chance and dont spoil the meat.

Mrnoodle, well said. But we must remember Spexx is unlikely to be completely rational on this -- he clearly rages against self defense, and that is his besetting sin.

He will pretend rationality, and keep up the pretense pretty well, but hoplophobia has got its claws well sunk in his id and his ego. The cure is difficult, and I do not greatly anticipate imminent success. A BBS is not quite the right medium.

I'm going to go see if the JPFO website still has its article on "Raging Against Self Defense."

Bingo. This is one of the best summaries I know of what the guns-and-freedom people are up against, and of why the antis won't be made to see reason: they do not have eyes to see.

Warch, there's no such thing as "an evil gun," which is the theory you're subscribing to. It's a gun-ignorant point of view, which ignorance redounds to the favor of the crime- and genocide-lovers. NOT a view I take, for sure.

A semiauto civilian AK chambered in 7.62x39mm is actually about as good a deer gun in close country as a .30-30, delivering about the same punch. Use an expanding, hunters' bullet. An AK-74 type semiauto, in 5.45x39mm, wouldn't be quite as good a bet -- and you'd probably be hunting deer in Siberia with that cartridge anyway.

I've read in one of these threads that you have to assume that an armed person is going to kill you - if you wait to analyze the situation, it's too late, you're dead. That was said by a pro-gun poster. BTW - what else is a handgun used for, besides killing someone? Big game hunting? Pu-leeze.

In that situation, what is your measurement of success? Getting out alive is mine. That means I will do what it takes to be successful, including laying face down. If you want to fight in that situation, go ahead, I'll send flowers to your widow and tell stories of you to your kids "yeah, he cooda been a contender, but his pride was more important than raising his kids".

Maybe that's the problem. If someone with a gun broke into my house, I would say "take my stuff". It's only stuff. Try to hurt me or my family, and I'll do my best to kill you - gun or no gun. But staying alive and unhurt is my primary goal.

Jay-zus, Spexx. You call yourself a modern, with-it man? Uh uh -- your thinking is so totally last century as to make you a complete square -- maybe a tesseract.

Handgun hunting even has its own particular season, Spexx. (Kid, if you're going to debate guns with gun people, you need to know all about guns!) Here is a short and not at all comprehensive list of hunting handguns, both single shot and repeaters:

Smith & Wesson Model 29, .44 magnum; Thompson-Center Contender and Encore, any caliber you want up to minor elephant gun cartridges like .375 H&H, single shot; Casull .454, a magnum that dwarfs the .44 mag, and a 5-shot revolver you can shoot bears with; .460, .475, and .480 Linebaugh -- mainly, like the Casull, put in conversions of large Ruger revolver frames. Lots of revolver makers make a .357, which was the first magnum cartridge Elmer Keith invented before he came up with the .44 mag -- specifically to hunt with.

With a hunting handgun, you're not keeping one hand involved with toting seven or eight pounds of rifle while you make your way through or across the rough country, but instead wearing three or four pounds of smaller more convenient pistol and pistol scope, often as not. (Elmer Keith did it with iron sights and shot moose three hundred yards off with his .357. Ate 'em, too. Then he did it better with a bigger cartridge.)

Handgun hunting seasons approximate the special muzzleloader seasons, and for about the same reason -- each has its particular demands (like no available follow-up shot) and imposes limits upon the gun-toting hunter.

Then arm yourself and become skilled not only at putting shots inside the ten-ring, but in what tactics you will use to defend your dwelling -- the best way, proven in study after study of which studies you know nothing, nothing at all, is to have greater force available to you than to the invader. Your chances of "doing my best to kill you" if you didn't bring a gun to the gunfight are laughably small: "...a grasshopper may fight a lawnmower; his courage is undoubtable, but not his judgement" or something like that. Heinlein again -- his thinking, along with Jeff Cooper's, informs a lot of my thinking on this and related subjects.

Another ignorance, that window dressing somehow makes one gun "worse" than another.
My hunting rifle shoots just as many rounds, more powerful rounds, with more penetration, just as quickly as an AK, it just does not look like a military weapon. It is more powerful than an AK... it is closer to (and sometimes uses as one by cops) a sniper rifle, but no hippie idiots want to ban it, because they have never seen it in movies. So, they have no flaky emotions tied to it.
Most crimes are committed with a revolver or shotgun, a STOLEN, revolver or shotgun, to clarify.
Anti-collector legislation aimed at military styled weapons makes NO sense and is just a waste of legislator's time and tax payers money.
BTW, I target shoot to relax and used to shoot skeet when I still could physically. It is no one's right to take that away from anyone who is not a felon.
Busybodies who feel they have it in them to remove other's rights need to go to a nation that is not based on freedom.
Freedom means you are exposed to other's freedoms as well, some of those are going to make you uncomfortable. If you can't deal, that means you are not cut-out for freedom. It is simple.

I have used my sidearm to protect my life from rattlesnakes more than once on my family ranch while crawling under fruit trees and once from a wild boar that was attacking. You have no idea what you are talking about.
They are also for protecting your life from others.
If you want to take mine away, fine, NO ONE else gets one under any circumstances, no cops, no military, first, then we will talk.

Thats exactly what I said I was for. Take 'em away from everyone.

To protect me from snakes and boar?
*has aneurysm*

Nope, from these sows:

http://free.gunchicks.com/rchicks/je...enn-olivia.jpg

How?

That bit aint my problem!

Typical two-toned lobster rhetoric!

My wife protects me from them just fine...damn it.
I know people who can shoot with a handgun at sharpshooter level and cannot hit a moving target better than some ten-year-olds in our family.
Had a long talk one day with a cop about this, he said it was a real problem on the force. The older cops can shoot just fine on the range but can't hit a live target, but young people raised on video games all shoot like they were born with guns in their hands (well... they were) and hit everything they aim at. I asked him to put them on first person shooters... he said they did and his people sucked so bad that the learning curve was so huge that it was almost a waste of time.
My next statement upset him... "promote younger men", he did not, or could not speak, but just nodded.
I shoot fine, and did not play games, but grew-up hunting. Makes sense though. Drs. are training for surgery on video games now. Just works.

Just because you've never been in the general locale of snakes and boar doesn't make em any less dangerous. A javelina tried to kill my dog one time. In our yard. He might have been sent by the armadillos.

I am saying that is what I used my side-arm for. You are making my point. Are you reading other's posts or just tail-posting?

Tail posting. I lack the attention span to keep up with 3 gun threads in their entirety. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Did it stab your dog in the foot? ;)

It bounced off the chainlink fence a couple times and got its head under. It had about 10 friends with it, they had been displaced by a flood and were terrorizing the countryside.

I didn't see it happen, I had to read the tracks (and fix the fence).

I think people should be allowed to keep guns but spreading them will do nothing to prevent crime.

If I bring a gun to protect myself, will it really protect me? If someone robs me at gunpoint it is most likely that they want the money and NOTHING ELSE. Sure there are some fucked up souls that do it to scare, hurt, and that shit but the majority just want the money and doesn't want anyone to get hurt. Now if someone robs me at gunpoint and I falsely assume that the person wants to kill me and I pull out my gun, most likely one if not both of us will end up dead or seriously injured. Are we any better off then when we started? Even if I do have a gun on me when I get robbed at gunpoint I would not pull it out unless I am sure that my life is in danger. I will sacrifice my $50 to not scare the criminal and possiblily getting me killed.

As I said before I am in favor of keeping guns but using them as self-defense is a death sentence.

Owning a gun isn't a cure-all. You have to have awareness of your surroundings, a level head, and training. The complete package is what will save your life, not simply a piece of hardware.

At first, your last sentence boggled my mind. But you're right. If you don't have some basic safety training to go with your gun, you're probably going to get hurt or hurt someone else accidentally. However, if you DO get proper education (which I think should be mandatory for ownership), suddenly the mystique and danger disappears.

So you are ok with state murder but not self-defense or the defense of family, children or others? Yeah, you make perfect sense.:rolleyes:

The way I look at it is that I don't know that a criminal is not going to kill me. My life and the life of my family is not worth that gamble under any circumstances. The criminal chooses to place themselves in the situation where I have to decide to trust that they are not going to kill my family or I... I don't trust that and would be a bad husband and father if I trusted them more than my instincts and logic.
Logic says if they are a threat you must eliminate it in the most efficient and final way possible so the threat does not return so my I and/or my family no longer has to deal with said threat. It is simple.

BTW, I am not ALLOWED shit... it is my right and no one has fuck-all to say about it. "allowed to keep....":biglaugha

Molon Labe

When the Greeks came to Sparta they told the Spartans to lay down their arms...the Spartans replied "Molon Labe"...
"Come and take them"

This is the first time I've heard any pro-gun person voluntarily express a desire to limit the owning of guns. Did you really mean to say this? Or did you simply mean that getting training is a good idea? I agree with you that all gun owners should be required to get proper training before they can own a gun.

What happens to your family if a jury determines you were in the wrong when you killed what you thought was a criminal? What effect will seeing his father kill someone have on your son? When is it worth taking another person's life?

It seems to me that in most serious life-threatening cases you won't have the opportunity to use a sidearm. Unless you have a gun in a holster at your belt there'd be no time to get it. There's a knock at your door. You answer it and the door is pushed in - three guys with pistols pointing at you. Can you draw and kill all three? Is it valiant to go down in a hail of bullets, leaving your family to fend for themselves? How does having a gun help you?

True story: My friend's brother picked up a girl in a bar. When he got her home, he found out it was a transvetite. They struggled. My friend's brother went to his bedroom to get his pistol. The transvestite wrestled the gun from my friend's brother and killed him.

With. His. Own. Gun.

Rk, how do you reconcile your distrust of the law with your trust that you'll be exonerated by the law after killing someone?

Your friend's brother's conduct was the problem, not the gun. :headshake
He was stupid to threaten the transvestite with a gun he had no intention of using. If he had, they wouldn't have been wrestling for it.
I'd bet dollars to donuts, he said he was going to get his gun, too.
The purpose of a gun in this case, is to preclude hand to hand combat, keep them at bay while calling the police, if they refuse to leave.

So you should HAVE a gun, but you shouldn't USE the gun? Is there a manual, or a flipchart, or flowchart, we could use in these situations to figure out the "right" thing to do?

Common sense, I would think. Personally I can see few situations where, even if I were willing to use a gun, I would be able to. Most of the cases where it would be useful you wont have time to get at it, and almost all the rest using or even having it will simply escalate the situation... But I can see that, in the small fraction of cases where you need it and can get to it, it can be a literal lifesaver... And a liftaker, too...

I agree with you in many ways, but how does common sense enter into a life or death situation? It's like saying Capital Punishment is a deterrent: most crimes are crimes of passion, anger flaring, uncontrolled emotions, robberies gone awry (is that redundant?) etc and so on.

Very simple. A gun is not the answer, it's an option. If you can't handle that, don't have one. :D

When I say mandatory, I don't mean the government should regulate and restrict your ownership. I mean that if you don't know how to use a gun safely, you have no business owning one. Same with a chainsaw, a ladder, or a salad shooter.

It should be common sense, but if the buyer lacks it, the pressure should come from the citizenry and from the gun shops, not the government or the manufacturers.

If I owned a gunshop, I would offer first-time buyers classes on general gun safety at no charge. Unless they demonstrated knowledge of the subject at the time of purchase (i.e., before I ran the background check), I wouldn't send them out the door with a weapon. If they don't have the knowledge, I'd explain the (posted) store policy, schedule a class with them, and happily transfer possession upon their successful completion of the course.

The government has no involvement in my scenario.

Spexx,

I'm not sure I take the right lesson of your morality tale.

Through the course of a few short sentences your friend's brother became a violent felon. The outcome of getting shot by his own gun is probably one of the best possible. At least he did not kill or seriously hurt anyone else, and society didn't have to work too hard or pay too much to clean up his mess.

In order for this tale to be anti-gun, we have to have more concern for this guy's life and safety than he did.

We have to notice that the innocent person being attacked was probably unarmed.

We have to notice that the attacker had time and room to choose any approach, including calling the cops if he felt there was a threat; and so, he would have been a violent homophobic killer with a knife, if that were the favored method of violent homophobic killers everywhere.

We have to not put his face on the statistics that say you might be shot by your own gun. Sure, if you are a violent homophobic felon bringing home TVs from bars, you might well get shot by your own gun. If you don't behave like that, your chances become miniscule.

Meanwhile, if I have to be around violent homophobic felons, I will want to have a gun.

It's harsh because you have some connection to this person, but this person was too stupid to live free, and was inches away from landing on death row no matter what the outcome of that night.

I don't think there is nearly enough information in this description of the incident to make assumptions such as:

[PART QUOTE PART SNIPS]1)We have to notice that the innocent person being attacked was probably unarmed
2)We have to notice that the attacker had time and room to choose any approach, including calling the cops if he felt there was a threat; and so, he would have been a violent homophobic killer with a knife, if that were the favored method of violent homophobic killers everywhere.
3)We have to not put his face on the statistics that say you might be shot by your own gun. Sure, if you are a violent homophobic felon bringing home TVs from bars, you might well get shot by your own gun. If you don't behave like that, your chances become miniscule.[/PART QUOTE PART SNIPS]

We weren't in that room. The friend's brother or the TV could have been the initial attacker. The friend's brother or the TV could have been the initial attackee. We just don't know.

I understand the point you're making but I don't think we have enough info to attribute those points to this particular story.

If he leaves the room there is not a continous struggle. If there is not a continuous struggle he is not threatened with deadly harm. If he is not threatened with deadly harm he should not threaten with deadly harm. If he does, he is a violent felon. That's my reasoning and I'm stickin to it.