No. of Recommendations: 5
I don't view fellow citizens as a threat at all. However I do view criminals as a threat. One way to tell the difference is that a law abiding citizen will not be breaking into my home or attempting to harm a me or a family member or an innocent civilian.
But like all humans, you're not going to be infallible in assessing whether people are breaking into your home, or attempting to harm you or another person. In fact, in situations where you might actually be tempted to reach for your gun - unusual circumstances where you're experiencing fear and anxiety - you might not be very good at it at all. We've seen numerous tragic examples of that in the recent news. Gun owners who viewed their fellow citizens as a threat even when they weren't doing anything criminal.
Going to the wrong porch, going to the wrong car, going down the wrong driveway, playing hide and seek in the wrong back yard. Someone's system gets flooded with fear and adrenaline, and a mix of imperfect information and firearms results in the tragic destruction of the lives of both the shooter and the target.
And boy - every time you bring up those 2 million DGU's, it just reminds me that those surveys are basically a catalog of countless fellow citizens being mistaken for criminal - and terrorized because of it. Again, the main criticism of the high-number DGU's is that if they were correct, it would mean that the sampled population was experiencing a rate of crime that was an order of magnitude or more higher than other people in their community. Since that's extremely unlikely, the more likely explanation is that people are reporting DGU's when no crime was actually happening. Some are going to be misremembering timing (telescoping older events into the more recent year), some will be misremembering a scenario that didn't really involve a threat or a gun....but the really tragic bundle of false DGU's are the ones where the gun owner flashed or threatened with their gun and there was no crime about to happen. Just innocent people looking or acting a way that scared them.
If fact, I am safer to the extent there are more citizens who will to come to the aid of another citizen under attack....
Unless, of course, those citizens aren't being entirely accurate in their threat assessment. And unless, of course, you yourself are happening to look or act in a way that scares them. It's easy to talk about being safer if there are more armed citizens out there fighting crime....unless you're a black man jogging in a white neighborhood, and those citizens are 'coming to the aid' of their fellow citizens by shooting you. Or you're a black man who ends up on the wrong porch by mistake, and the occupant erroneously decides you're a threat.
People whose appearance or actions are such that other people are quick to put them in the "criminal" or "thug" basket don't have that luxury. They generally don't feel safer when you increase the number of amateurs and vigilantes that start dishing out "aid" to their fellow citizens with deadly force.
You're imagining only the scenarios in which things go right. When people who (generally) have no training in law enforcement or threat assessment manage to correctly determine whether the person whose appearance or actions are scaring them are actually doing anything criminal that should be legitimately responded to with deadly force or the threat of deadly force. Sadly, there's a million or two self-reported DGU's - and some tragic headlines - that show that those aren't the only scenarios.
