The right to carry of millions of people will have a hell of an effect. Armies need recruits; many of whom would refuse to fight their own countrymen. Armies need money, ammunition, food, fuel, and spare parts all provided by vulnerable and widely dispersed (i.e. extremely difficult to protect) civilian infrastructure. Finally, tanks, planes, and helicopters need crewmembers can’t hold ground without infantry support, all of whom are quite vulnerable to small arms fire.

If you need a real world example, look at what a few thousand were able to do to our military in Iraq, without the ability to strike our civilian infrastructure and lightly defended rearward bases.

There’s no distinction between stopping power and killing power. Neither term has much concrete meaning, but what little exists indicates that they mean the same thing.

“If someone’s trying to kill me, I’d rather stop him before he does so than inflict a wound that will kill him after I’m already dead myself.”

While that’s a rational approach to the problem, you have no reliable way of picking one outcome over the other. The vast majority of gunshot deaths, even including those from rifle or shotgun wounds, do not cause instantaneous death. Even a bullet to the heart or brain can allow your attacker to continue to function for several seconds.

The stats are pretty simple- take the number of murders annually, subtract those involving acquaintances, then subtract those murders occurring in bad neighborhoods of major murder capitols (that I don’t frequent). The remaining number is fairly small and I determined not worth the risk of my accidentally killing an innocent in a situation. Anyone who thinks they can unholster and accurately fire their weapon in a stressful armed confrontation has never been in one. Training and simulation does not adequately prepare one (as evidenced by trained police shooting 10-15 rounds wildly with 2-3 hits). The only way to prepare for a lethal but controlled (3-5 well aimed rounds) performance is to repeatedly participate in firefights (join the Marines). Blackwater does offer fairly good simulations, though.

I will protect my home with extreme violence but do not feel comfortable using lethal force in less controlled environments. I fell out of my chair guffawing when reading the one comment from the couple that travels with 2 loaded weapons and 3 extra magazines. Get a freaking life and have some pity on bystanders.

For those of you (many, apparently) who have no respect for private property and carry an undisclosed weapon without the permission of the property owner (or especially in direct disregard of the owner’s instructions), you should get what you deserve- how would you treat such a person if encountered in your own home? The property owner should assume nefarious intent and act accordingly. I laugh at those who say they respect the law, the constitution and
private property who then disrespect the private property of others. An armed thug is an armed thug.

I also loved the comment from the person who got into a “low light firefight” over some stolen property. To me this isn’t too far off a gangbanger spraying the car of a rival who stole some of their drugs. Public firefights over stolen property are exactly the kind of armed encounters we don’t need. Too much risk of innocents killed, and over what- some silverware or a TV set? Sheesh

And how about the “sheepdog” comments! Based upon statistics, if you want to be a useful sheepdog you should be driving around reporting bad drivers and speeders or making citizens arrests of same.

I commend Mr. Owens on the sane, circumspect and methodical way he has approached his carry decision. I would feel safe on the streets with him and a few others. Too bad so many carriers appear to have Red Dawn/lone sherriff fantasies. Fortunately the odds of one of these looks actually having to use their metal appendage is miniscule.

I sometimes use a fanny pack with a Glock 27 (.40) on car trips, but it basically tells the world you’re carrying and it has the added disadvantage of being the height of fashion dorkiness. Like a number of others on this thread, I’ve settled on a Keltec .380 in a DeSantis pocket holster for daily carry. It won’t hit like my Glock, but it gives me seven medium power hollow points to defend myself with, and it’s comfortable enough that I carry it every day.

You quote the numbers 2 million self-defense uses of a firearm every year and 15,000 non-suicide deaths by firearm, and then say that the rest of the self-defense uses were simply “brandished to scare off an attacker”. But you forgot cases where the shooter would have shot at and *wounded* their attacker. It’s not reasonable to conclude that 99% of the time, merely brandishing the weapon is enough; your numbers simply don’t support that conclusion.

Now, does simply brandishing the weapon sometimes work? Yes indeed. It works rather often, in fact — many criminals aren’t expecting to be threatened by their would-be victims and will back off. But you shouldn’t EVER count on it. NEVER present a weapon unless you are prepared to use it, otherwise you’re simply begging to have it taken away and used against you.