Last night, a "suspected" armed robber, only 16 years old, was shot and killed by the staff working a fireworks stand when the youth attempted to rob the stand. The robber had earlier in the evening knocked over a stand about 2 miles away.

Does this serve to bolster the case of the gun rights folks, or the gun controllers?

Not enough information. Was he weilding a gun? Was he attempting to kill the owners of the stand? Do you have a link or something more to the story?

I do not believe, and I do not think it is morally defensible to trade a life for the sake of property. If he was threatening them, and in defense of their lives they shot him, fine. Anything less than that and the owners of the stand should perhaps face charges.

This example doesn't really give either side of the debate anything new or different: pro-gun people will say that if guns were outlawed, only the criminal would have had a gun, etc. Anti-gun folks will say that if guns were outlawed, no one would have died that night, etc.

As I see it the problem is not one of gun legislation, but of violence. We must break the cycle of violence ourselves, in our own lives, or else it matters not whether we have nuclear weapons or sticks - we will continue to kill one another.

But as for this case? As I said, not nearly enough information.

Despite my being pro-gun, I'd have to say that this case went in the favor of the anti-gun folks. You said that the 16-year old was only "suspected" to be armed. This probably means that the fireworks stand staff saw him holding a bulky object of some sort, or assumed that he would be in possession of a firearm, because i would make sense to have one while robbing several people at once. So, they shot the kid. They shot him with an extreme lack of evidence, which just worsens their case. One should only shoot a person in the defense of one's self, or in defense of one's surrounding people.

The question in my mind arises: what was the distance between the shooter and the kid? If it was more than several feet, then the shooter didn't really have any right to fire. How well can you really see what a person is holding when it's nighttime and the person you're observing is six feet away? You can't see very well. If they were fairly close however, the person could probably see the kid better, and make a better judgement call as to what he was holding.

My next question is: Where was the kid shot, and what was he shot with? If the kid was shot in the head or upper torso area, then you pretty much know that the shooter wanted o make sure he was dead. If he was shot in the areas mentioned with a hollow-point round, then there's almost no defense for the shooter, because the shooter had to have known that hollow points are designed to spread out on impact and rip through a greater area, otherwise, they would've just bought regular solid-tipped bullets for their firearm. Knowing this, the shooter would've purposely aimed for higher areas, because a hollow-point is gonna do a lot more damage taking out a large portion of the kid's lungsa, heart, neck, or head. If the kid was shot in the lower torso area or down, then chances are good that the shooter didn't want to kill the kid, because the biggest risk shootingdown low on a person is that you'll hit a major vein or artery, and the person will bleed to death.

Based on these questions, which shouldn't be too hard to answer by the people in charge of the investigation, one can tell what the shooter was trying to accomplish, and whether or not it was justified.

IMO, this incident really does not lend itself readily as fodder for the gun control discussion.

It seems that the fireworks stand was being run for the benefit of, and staffed by local police officers and the perpetrator was in fact shot by an off duty K-9 cop.

The above story lists the identity of the perpetrator as a John Doe and gives no age. A Las Vegas Sun article, dated July 03, 2003, gives his particulars as "16-year-old Efraim Cuenca Dimas of Las Vegas."

IF that's the way it went down, then it is Justifiable homicide.

I agree, Bikerdad. I still don't see how this applies to the general debate over gun control. Given the fact that the man who did the shooting was an off-duty police officer, one might imagine that he would have had a gun regardless of the gun laws.

Even if he were not an officer, stricter gun control laws would not have excluded the proprieter's owning a firearm.

It's too anecdotal to matter. For every story like this, I could point out ten when children shot themselves or friends with a gun they found in their home. If you could suggest a trend, it might mean something, but just pointing out one case where a gun may have saved someone's life is not proof one way or the other.

AGiantBean said:



Full metal jackets have no place in defensive handgun use. Hollow points or other rapid but controlled expander is the only responsible round to carry.

Fewer shots are needed to achieve the intended effect (incapacitation of an attacker) and they offer minimized possibility of over penetration and injury to unintendeds downrange.

Rattlesnake said:



The real statistics don't bear that out. Justifiable homicide and legal intervention accounted for 270 firearm deaths in 2000; accidental discharge deaths for people 19 and under amounted to 193 deaths. ( 19 deaths < 5 y.o., 18 deaths for 5 -9 y.o., 49 deaths for 10 - 14 y.o., 107 deaths for 15 to 19 y.o.)

The Centers for Disease Control

Interest link, the CDC one. In short, there were 57,056 deaths caused by firearms (legally or otherwise) in the USA in 2000 - out of a population of 280(ish) million.

Compare that to the UK here and here (The first link is in an excel spreadsheet, so you'll need to be able to access it)

It isn't really a gun control point, as the rates were pretty low when handguns were legal, and shotguns, hunting rifles and air weapons are still largely legal here anyway.

However, these figures do not include suicide, but these do (I've pasted the international comparisons table):

Gun deaths per 100,000 population (for the year indicated):
Homicide Suicide Unintentional
USA 4.08 (1999) 6.08 (1999) 0.42 (1999)
Canada 0.54 (1999) 2.65 (1997) 0.15 (1997)
Switzerland 0.50 (1999) 5.78 (1998) -
Scotland 0.12 (1999) 0.27 (1999) -
England/Wales 0.12 (1999/00) 0.22 (1999) 0.01 (1999)
Japan 0.04* (1998) 0.04 (1995) <0.01 (1997)
* Homicide & attempted homicide by handgun

Translating these back to your oddes of being shot & killed, an American stands a 1 in 9,500 chance; in Canadian (where guns are widely available) it is 1 in 30,000; Switzerland (also has widespread gun ownership) - 1 in 16,000; Scot (restricted) - 1 in 250,000; English/Welsh (also restricted) 1 in 290,000; Japan (where it is legally impossible to own a gun) 1 in 1.1 million.

Clearly, gun control is important, but not as important a contributing factor as national origin. So I think the gun control question is something of a chimera that is distracting you from your real problem, which is why you seem to like killing yourselves and one another so much with or without guns.

[FONT=Geneva]EDITED TO ADD: Sorry about the table format here - I couldn't work out how to do it tidily.[/FONT]

Julian, could it be because it is an alternative to 'reality' TV programming?

Snappy comeback. When you're done making snide comments about irrelevant subjects, maybe you could address the thread topic?

Julian said:



No, you seem to be adding every causation and the total together. The total deaths due to firearm discharge in 2000 was 28,663. (notice the death codes after each category; W32-W34 are the codes for accidental discharge)

Julian said:



What struck me is the alarming increase in gun deaths and specifically handgun deaths in the years after the Dunblane handgun ban in '97. It seems that the total deaths have doubled and handgun deaths alone have reached what the total deaths were just a few years ago. It seems to be a 100% increase. Is that a gun control success story? I shudder to think what a similar law's outcome would be in the states. You can keep your solution, I rather like the firearm murder rate declining 20% as it has here over the same time period.

Julian said:



There is the first consideration to accept. Americans are more violent than most other cultures / societies. We kill more with our feet and hands than most nations total homicides by all means. No amount of "gun" control will change that.

The question of "gun control" is no chimera, each new proposal is a real threat to my freedom. Gun control as a crime fighting tool is a pitiful failure wherever it is tried. Those nations you mention with strict controls and low crime have those strict controls in place for political, not crime fighting purposes. England has forbade firearms for centuries to the unlanded, the Catholic the "outsiders."

The UK's recent attempts at crime control through weapons restrictions have been an undeniable failure. It has proven what pro-gun people have said for years; those who will violate the most serious of society's rules will not be intimidated or influenced by gun bans or other restrictive policies. The UK is a prime example that the very last people disarmed, if they ever could be, are those people most likely to commit crime.

The final realization is that in Britain and the USA, your chances of being murdered is low unless you are a black male, 16-32 dealing or using drugs. The Yardies will have their weapons and taking mine away will not change it.

Your post is not on topic, nor is it relevant to the debate of this thread.

Please stick to the question of debate which is:



--cheers

They have plenty of place in defensive handgun use. It all depends on what type of handgun you have. If you're using lighter stuff like 9mm's, then a hollow-point is without a doubt the round to choose. If you're using something like a .44 or S&W's new .50, then you don't really need a hollow point cartridge. And also, you don't really know what distance you're shooting from. A handgun is already the least accurate of all firearms, and hollow-point cartridges have been proven to be less accurate and just generally more erratic cartridges than the standard cartridge.

In both cases I would prefer an expanding bullet. In the lighter calibers you would want every lb of kinetic energy to be delivered to your target and in the heavier calibers, you really want to minimize over penetration. Upon reflection, the only scenario where a FMJ might be advantageous would be during winter when an assaulter might be wearing multiple layers or heavy clothing and early expansion and insufficient penetration might be problematic. In that situation knockdown would still occur but incapacitation will not because no actual tissue trauma was inflicted. A FMJ might overcome that.

I just looked at the handloading data for the 500; 275 grain bullet at 1923 fps? The old trusty fps * fps * grains / 450240 = 2258 ft lbs of muzzle energy! That's more suitable for Elk than armed self defense. Just the bullet's pressure wave would incapacitate an attacker!

Hit a human sized target with that energy stored in a FMJ and it ain't stopping in him, the wall behind him, or the car door outside.



I wouldn't think of carrying a defensive firearm without knowing it and how specific ammo flies from it. I know that Cor-Bons must come out of the barrel sideways . . . Black Talons though? just like my match grade ammo.

DP, if I may, I would say that my post was both relevant AND on topic, for the reasons that Mike has made clear - gun control is NOT a relevant factor, so the question at the start of the debate

has an excluded middle.

Something like "it will make no difference, because gun control does not have much influence over a national proclivity towards violence with (or without) guns". No insult is intended here - the facts speak for themselves.

Also, I'm big enough to accept that my posts are not so fabulously constructed that I cannot ever be misunderstood, so I'll take my telling off with good grace. I would take it without feeling the need to justify myself had you not completely ignored spearmonkey's ad hominem post. (You may have flagged it privately, but justice needs to be seen to be done )

Mike, my post was not really there to say "we've got it right and you've got it wrong", but to illustrate that countries with tight gun control or without much gun control at all vary widely in their gun death rates, as you eloquently pointed out (and I deliberately included accidents and suicide as with no guns, guns accidents cannot happen).

So while I suspect we're coming at it from opposite ends of the gun control argument, we're probably more or less in agreement that stronger or weaker gun control laws will not make much of a difference to the USA's crime figures, but a great deal of difference to the perceived freedom to own guns.

That's how it sounded to me too.....

And you're right, spearmonkey's comment was also inappropriate to this thread. I posted that message BEFORE I read the whole thread (including his), or I would have included him too. (I'm a new mod, gimme a second chance )

While we're on the subject, Bean, Raffone: Are discussions of caliber and fps relevant to the topic at hand, or should you take it to PM?

--cheers

PS:



I agree 120%

How can someone argue that a suspect apparently having someone at gunpoint in an attempted robbery doesn't deserve to be shot as a matter of self defense? This is all the more reason for our right to possess firearms. In my opinion, this is one for the pro-gun NRA folks. If anyone had one of my family members at gun point, I reserve the right to shoot them dead... no question.

Yes, a .50 cal bullet is overdoing it a bit. But face it, most people don't really stop and think about the bullet's caliber, velocity, etc. They think "Well, that's a big bullet, I want it." And you might be surprised, but most people don't even know what hollow-point rounds are. So, a person carrying a handgun for defensive purposes could use FMJ's just as well as HP's. They need to interrogate the shooter and see why he had a handgun in the first place. Caliber of the weapon and bullet type change for every reason. If you have one because you live in a bad neighborhood, then something like a .38 snubnose in HP rounds would be perfect. If you don't worry as much about concealment, and are afraid of attack by a more proffesional organization, then by all means, the person would naturally go for something like a .44 fmj. After all, these people might have reason to believe that their assailant could be wearing some sort of protective gear (not necessarily kevlar or anything, but it's a possibility ). A .50 probably would be overdoing it, as they can pierce tank armor. But, if you see what type a of gun and ammo the shooter was using, you can tell whether or not he knew what he was doing when he shot the kid.

A few quick observations:

Julian, your point about there being a "violence" problem would carry much more weight if it didn't appear as though you are cherry picking your test cases. There are a fair number of countries that have much more restrictive gun control laws than the United States, and also have HIGHER murder rates. Russia is one of the prime examples, and on the other side is the 2nd Amendment Sisters favorite, Switzerland, where "gun control" means the gov't REQUIRES you to have one! Very low murder rate.

Mike_Raffone, The contention that Americans are more violent than most other cultures/societies is false. We are more overtly violent than most Western European cultures/societies, but not most other societies in the world.


This is a juicy one. From the perspective of the "gun control" side, how can anybody square permitting the off-duty cop to have a weapon, but not the Little League coach in the fireworks booth across the street? Equal protection and all that? They are both (as the earlier robbery demonstrates) at risk. If he's going to have a gun regardless of the gun laws, is that the sort of chap we want as a Law Enforcment Officer? Finally, stricter gun control law's WOULD have exluded the proprietor from owning a firearm, IF the proprietor is going to obey the laws. Since only non-profit groups are permitted to operate fireworks stands in Las Vegas, the likelihood that the proprietor is going to be law abiding is high.

There are additional dimensions to the subject of cops and guns in Las Vegas, especially considering that the dimwits who go in for armed robbery have had a poor track record in picking their targets. Several years ago, some knuckleheads attempted to rob a sports bar. The name of the house band was 'The Pigs', and yes, they were all LEOs. Robbing one of the perferred watering holes of off-duty cops is an easy way to get your ticket punched, which is what happened. A few years before that, two off-duty cops got really, really stupid and shot up a street in the "naked city"... Both are in jail now, for a longgggg time.

I think the Las Vegas experience applies in one sense because it challenges the oft-applied distinction between cops and citizens. The good and bad instances that have happened in Sin City are instructive.