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0 pointsIanDrake11y ago0 comments

Typically people who don't own a gun don't have any training with guns. These same people also think that people who do have guns don't have any training as well.

In fact, most people who own guns are well trained. I can also assure you that even under stress you can hit a human sized target from 15 feet very easily.

Most of the state laws about even brandishing a fire arm have to do with inescapable life threatening harm, meaning you can't just run away. In the blogger's case she couldn't run due to an injury, but based on her description she would have had time to properly use a gun in defense and it would have been legal for her to do so in my state of MA.

I was trained by a former police detective and told in a knife situation, if you couldn't escape, draw your weapon, yell stop or I will shoot, then shoot if they're within 15 feet and move toward you at all.

>Even if it worked, there would be the question of ethics

Ethics? Someone threatens to kill you, has a deadly weapon, and is coming at you and you think there's still an ethical issue? Sure, they're crazy and sure, you could choose to let them kill you because you pity them, but I doubt that makes you ethically superior.

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kagebe11y ago

> but based on her description she would have had time to properly use a gun in defense

I quote the article: "She pulled the knife out further and pushed it into my blue purse" Into the purse that would have contained the gun. I think she would have been stabbed before she could have reached inside.

No one intend on robbing you up close and personal is going to pull out his knife from 15 feet away or announce to you from that distance, especially in such a public situation, that he's going to rob you. He wants to threaten you with a knife, not with his voice.

And this is what I mean with "training": the reflexes to pull your gun instinctively when seeing a flash of a weapon in pretty much any situation, in this case: With your headphones on and watching some movement on your phone, as she was doing.

Maybe most gun owners are well trained enough to hit moving people at some distance, but I would argue, that nearly none of them are well trained enough to hit somebody who is moving within arms reach and will try to hit you with a knife/grab your arm/etc.. Most martial arts practitioners will say that they are not well trained enough to evade/fight somebody untrained but handling a knife.

> you think there's still an ethical issue?

I will argue ethics whenever the outcome is death, especially when there are bystanders and even more when the other option is to lose some possessions.

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