Former Community – We Moved
🆕 Coached community here, for posts & feedback public community here.
Castle Doctrine: should you own a gun home?
Castle Doctrine is the right to self-defense at home against an intruder, including "deadly force".
Personally, if owning a gun weren't so deadly complex, I'd own one and keep it in a combination-protected safe in the bedroom.
I've often thought about whether to add this on PU, but first I'd need to properly research the topic.
Because, as far as I'm aware right now, there are also important drawbacks, including:
- Gun owners are more likely to shoot themselves or family members by mistake, than an intruder. This is the most damning statistic against any catch-all advice of "own a gun". But I'd need to research it better
- The risks & needs for gun ownership in most Western countries are overblown.
- In many places, shooting puts you in a lot of trouble, even if you were right. Paradoxically, being robbed by a non-violent thief may save you money and time
- There are higher prios than gun ownership for safety: when I see chubby guys on YB lecturing others on how fundamental it is to "be prepared" for your own safety I always think they got their priorities wrong (in that case: nutrition).
Probably taking driving lessons does a lot more for your safety than gun ownership (but I'd need to research that to reach a better conclusion)
All these important points that I haven't well explored so far stopped me from having any advice on the topic.
If you guys have any thoughts on this, happy to read.
That's an interesting topic that I also need to do research on. That being said, I hope this topic will stay active over time so that we can update it.
Here are my current thoughts:
- Owning a gun seems to risky: What if somebody steals your gun and then uses it? You would be responsible for it, and could get into much trouble. There are many instances where similar problems could happen.
- Consequences of using a gun: I agree with Lucio that in many countries, the cost/benefit ratio would actually be not worth it.
- There appear to be less risky alternatives to protect yourself: You could for instance keep a Taser and some handcuffs in your bedroom, and have a camera paired with your Smartphone to check who enters your house/bedroom. This way, you can prepare yourself if someone enters your bedroom to shoot them with your Taser, and handcuff them while you're waiting for the police to take care of the rest. There are potential downsides and risks with this approach, and I'm not sure whether you could get into problems in some jurisdictions with doing that. Nevertheless, this seems to me to be a better approach (you're not too powerless in case of aggression, but don't take too many risks).
Regardless, I still believe that there are unique advantages of owning a fire weapon. In example, in case of a riot or economic collapse (not impossible considering the current situation), you can protect yourself far more effectively and be far more dissuasive. That's why I am considering joining a shooting stand or learning hunting to be able to own a fire weapon legally. But apart from these survival scenarios, I personally wouldn't consider using a gun.
I'd say that, unless you live in a place where the State is pretty much non existent (19th century wild west, state/economic collapse as Alex puts it, the walking dead scenarios) and violence happens daily in front of your eyes (and not on TV or in convoluted "if" scenarios), or if you have a very real enemy that is making very credible threats, it's safer not to own a gun.
As you put it, there are many more important priorities when it comes to safety. Just to elaborate on them:
- Developing healthy habits (eating, exercising, becoming strong)
- Learning first aid protocols (and having what's needed at hand)
- Having damn good driving skills
- Learning power dynamics
- Developing situation awareness and getting into the habit of observing safety exits, fire extinguishers placement etc
- Learning how to act in situations like fire, terrorist attacks (including terrorist attacks perpetrated by white bearded guys who happen to be gun enthusiasts)
- Learning how to avoid and get out of dangerous situations (not to go to those places that give you "creepy vibes", especially if you have trained instincts; bravely running away; crying for help; jumping over a fence, climbing a wall)
- Becoming actual strong (sometimes you have to carry someone who is hurt, be able to lift heavy objects who may have fallen onto someone...)
- Learning how to throw some punches here and there just in case
- Learning how to fall safely
Handling a gun properly comes after all of this and much more, and we don't know those skills nearly enough. They save more lives, mostly overlap (so they are a good use of one's time), are much more likely to happen, and don't come with drawbacks.
Having a gun with you can also, paradoxically, make more likely that you'll be shot by a robber:
- Scenario 1: violent robber wants your wallet, car or whatever and you have no gun. He'll take everything and get lost. Chances are that a gun would cost much more money than you lost here (assuming you got your car on insurance)
- Scenario 2: violent robber wants your wallet, car or whatever, you have a gun but didn't have enough time to draw it, and he notices it only after approaching. You are dead, because if he doesn't kill you he's dead.
Scenario 2 is much more likely to happen because the robber gets to choose his target and his angle of approach. Even if you've got your situation awareness in check, there will be many moments where you will be distracted. No one is 100% aware all the time.
If you are inside your house, you can have cameras installed and monitor people as they break in, and have escape routes preplanned from where you can leave safely and call the police.
Sure, learning how to use a gun and practicing often, as Alex puts it, is a good advice (after all of the above is taken care of). My former martial arts instructor used to say that "it's better to be a warrior in a garden than to be a gardener in a war" - and not really some distant unlikely scenario, as the Ukrainian among us know very well. We don't want to learn how to fire a gun when a war is already happening. But we can learn those skills and not own a gun.
So, these are my thoughts. Happy to hear different opinions too
Thank you so much for sharing Alex and Cavalier.
Awesome posts, and I agree with you both.
It's nowhere close to the top of the list when it comes to either personal safety, personal power, or "life optimization".
And yet, I'd still see some more benefits of owning firearm(s).
Philosophical Question
The question:
Can you really be a Kavalier/knight/eagle, or even just the fully legitimate owner of anything, if you preclude yourself from the recourse to deadly force (or, at least, an effective way of applying deadly force)?
It's a question I consider.
Unless you can reach that highest level of self-defense, then you'll always be dependent on someone else (police arriving on time, robbers being non-violent).
Psychic Benefits
For some people, a firearm can serve as a tool for higher confidence.
The dynamic is that of "having recourse to rarely needed extreme solutions, to be confident at the far more common intermediate ones (and without having to escalate to the extremes)".
It's like we say in PU many people gain confidence in everyday life situations if they can rid of physical fears -doesn't effect everyone at the same level, but some people's social anxiety stems from fear and, for some, it's an unconscious fear of physical confrontation-.
Gun ownership is very similar, but at some levels higher than (physical) altercations.
Of course, not everyone will need this (at the same level), and ideally you don't.
But to some, it's helpful, and there's no reason why one should preclude himself from all options.
Keeping Cool In The Presence of Danger Signals (Anxiety Insurance)
For some people, a gun serves to remain cooler and/or avoid anxiety around several different situations, including:
- Noises at night
- Alarms going off nearby
- Neighbors doing drugs (not really a big danger, but some people may fear that drugs may make one psychothic, which is a possibility)
And several more strange cases.
For example, I remember once in my life renting a place close to a hostel.
A big group of people had mistaken my place for the hostel and they were demanding entry. My parents were there and, also because of a lack of common language, they were getting scared.
Had one had a gun at home, they may have been a lot less scared.
Close yourself in, go to a room with just a door in, and call the police... And you can pretty much chill (good luck trying to force your way anywhere if there's only one door in, and the person inside is armed).
You don't even need to do that, but knowing that you can, gives you a lot more confidence.
Armageddon Scenario
Also agree with that:
It may be a relatively easy first step towards an unlikely but not impossible "social collapse".
Albeit, even there, there is plenty of equally or more important skills and resources (including harvesting and growing cattles, social skills and leadership, so you may even levergae other people's guns and farming abilities).
But still, firearm(s) can be an important package of that "just in case armageddon preparation".
Note: low-odds scenario
As a reminder, just by looking at history, a total collapse of civilization is not a high-likelihood scenario.
What I think those armageddon folks miss out on is that civilizations may not be as fragile as some people think: they re-blossomed against all major crashes and marauders' invasions. So just like a spider's web reforms after you remove it because that's what the spider naturally does, civilizations may simply be what humans naturally develop.Â
Beating The Statistics
Now back to making a more logically-driven choice, outside of social collapse.
The first step is to find all the available data, including the consequences of even shooting or not shooting (the percentage of violent break-ins VS just stealign stuff, and how much it costs to shoot, all included).
The second step would be to do some proper data mining.
Becuase the issue with the statistics is that they're aggregate.
So in the mix of people who shoot themselves and their family, you'll have drug addicts, anger issue folks, couples in toxic and violent relationships, and just generally sloppy folks.
I think both step 1 and 2 is what's missing today to provide any helpful guidance on this topic (or, if there's any, I haven't seen it).
Based on my research the most effective non-lethal self-defense tool is the pepper spray. Â Now it all depends where you live. Having a gun in Switzerland is like taking a bazooka to the beach. It makes no sense.
Now having a gun in the US is reasonable in many cases.
The gun is a differentiator to balance out physical power imbalance - woman to man (generally), smaller/weaker person to larger/stronger person etc. I personally would not feel comfortable owning a gun unless I have above average skills using firearms. But yes it is useful in many cases in the US - I've heard many stories of convenience store owners defending themselves, especially in a not so safe area. However, it might backfire - since the degree of self-defense can easily be overblown (i.e. beyond stopping "imminent danger") - then it becomes unnecessary hence assault or manslaughter. In this self-defense scenario, it's definitely not only guns, I've heard people getting indicted for defending themselves using martial arts, but it seems to me that guns are more accessible than say, being so good at martial arts that it can be disabling or deadly.
Worth it just for the Armageddon scenario. This drought continues and we get a nasty variant disrupting supply chains and the hunger wars start.
I have heard nothing but very compelling arguments from everyone!
Still, I tend to see with some preoccupation the spread of fire arms in the hands of the general population.
We can make the case for people who live far for urban centres, where people have to rely on themselves to provide their own defence.
The problem I see is that having guns on civil hands make the whole system more unstable and hazardous - that's why I think aggregate data are very relevant. It may provide the sensation of personal safety, but actually increase the odds the one could become a victim of firearms (so actually there is a decrease in our power over the situation). For example, if your neighbor legitimately reacts with gun shots to an actual menace, the chances you or someone in your family receiving fatal shots from a lost bullet increase. If people are having easy access to fire arms, that chance increases manyfold.
Law enforcement becomes harder and harder, because it depends on a group (we may call it the state) to have significant coercive power over the general population. That makes a low-odds "Armageddon-like" actually more likely (never dramatically as we see in the films, but we can think of local collapses of social order like Haiti's or Afghanistan's)
To further Lucio's argument about Armageddon scenarios: the historiographical consensus is that the collapse of civilizations never really happened. What we usually refer to the fall of civilizations were actually just dynastic changes (which almost never affected the life of ordinary subjects significantly) or the very slow disintegration of economic/technological/political/cultural centers, as power shifted to neighbouring regions. This happened in Rome, Persia, Yucatán, China and practically everywhere else.
We can make the case that we, in TPM, have what it takes to use weapons with responsability. Still, just by having them, we instigate an arms race. If I have one, my neighbour will want one for him too. If he gets one better than mine, I'll want one that's deadlier than his. A lot of these weapons will end up in the hands of less competent people, and an even greater lot of them will end up in the hands of very competent ill intentioned ones.
Thank you, guys. Even if we end up not agreeing, there's a very high level debate going on here.
Thank you for further inputs, guys, much appreciated!
As John says, catch-all advice also doesn't work as it's very location and context-dependent.
And to answer Kavalier:
Quote from Kavalier on August 27, 2022, 5:23 amI have heard nothing but very compelling arguments from everyone!
Still, I tend to see with some preoccupation the spread of fire arms in the hands of the general population.
We can make the case for people who live far for urban centres, where people have to rely on themselves to provide their own defence.
The problem I see is that having guns on civil hands make the whole system more unstable and hazardous - that's why I think aggregate data are very relevant. It may provide the sensation of personal safety, but actually increase the odds the one could become a victim of firearms (so actually there is a decrease in our power over the situation). For example, if your neighbor legitimately reacts with gun shots to an actual menace, the chances you or someone in your family receiving fatal shots from a lost bullet increase. If people are having easy access to fire arms, that chance increases manyfold.
Law enforcement becomes harder and harder, because it depends on a group (we may call it the state) to have significant coercive power over the general population. That makes a low-odds "Armageddon-like" actually more likely (never dramatically as we see in the films, but we can think of local collapses of social order like Haiti's or Afghanistan's)
To further Lucio's argument about Armageddon scenarios: the historiographical consensus is that the collapse of civilizations never really happened. What we usually refer to the fall of civilizations were actually just dynastic changes (which almost never affected the life of ordinary subjects significantly) or the very slow disintegration of economic/technological/political/cultural centers, as power shifted to neighbouring regions. This happened in Rome, Persia, Yucatán, China and practically everywhere else.
We can make the case that we, in TPM, have what it takes to use weapons with responsability. Still, just by having them, we instigate an arms race. If I have one, my neighbour will want one for him too. If he gets one better than mine, I'll want one that's deadlier than his. A lot of these weapons will end up in the hands of less competent people, and an even greater lot of them will end up in the hands of very competent ill intentioned ones.
Thank you, guys. Even if we end up not agreeing, there's a very high level debate going on here.
Great post man, and I totally agree with you.
Yes, you're right, overall statistics do matter, and they matter the most when it comes to making policy decisions.
Let's say that I was more looking at the individual choice, and whether one could come up with some better-informed guidelines, while you seemed to have focused more on the social level.
At that social level, I fully agree with you.
As a further thought on one how the two levels relate to each other, one might still go for an individual-level choice of ownership, and avoid that his choice will negatively influence society by keeping his ownership to himself -and the chances he'll ever have to use that gun are very low so most likely nobody will ever know anyway-.
Overall, great thread.
And while when I started my mindset was more on the "better having it", now I'm back into the middle and neutral position of "not really sure".
Yeah I think it’s a tough call. Even if I was living in a dangerous area with lots of mugging and theft it would be a difficult choice.
Even if I’m being mugged I don’t want to have the death of a person on my conscience.
If I would have a family in a dangerous area it would be different.
