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It comes down to a lot of "intangibles."

Training, mindset, awareness, planning and willingness to use violence in response or even right off the bat.

That's a realistic answer and for some people they will just get the gun taken from them and raped/killed. Some other people will win and avoid the violence that someone tried to inflict on them.

Few guarantees in this life but you can affect your chances...

Edit: Just saw the story. My wife would have likely reached in her purse for the money and shot the guy through the bag.

and then threw the stroller at them. You going to kill my baby, then you will have to shoot ME too. Why????? ARMED CITIZENS will solve EVERTHING!!!!!

One article said she was shot at four times. She has at least one bullet wound, I gather minor.

Awful, awful story. Shouldn't blame the mother for what seems to have been a teen sociopath.

These is one of these horrible things that honestly does send normal people off to get concealed carry permits. No rhyme, no reason, A 17 YEAR-OLD?

That's really kind of a nice area. It's not like you would think that you were taking a risk of being robbed, much less that you exposing your baby to being murdered.

She did what she could. Was she to blame for not carrying a GUN? No, but the NRA, and gun nuts, would probably say so. That is their solution to the problem of too many guns; MORE guns.

and tried to use it"

For one thing, it is highly unlikely that most of the US population wants to or is able to both carry a gun and use it effectively.

The next point is that guns do not deter crimes such as this one. For your average risk/reward criminal, shifting the perceived risk up probably is a deterrent. Even conceding a 17 year-old with no moral sense whatsoever, the kid could not possibly have rationally believed that shooting the kid was a winner.

Nothing defends against this sort of thing. Sure, if the woman had happened to have a gun and had happened to be good at using it, perhaps it might have worked out better. But how likely is that?

I doubt gun control laws would work either. An awful lot of reckless crimes seem to happen in populations that can't legally have guns in the US. Stuff that no one can legally have in the US is quite common.

I truly understand the concealed carry folks, to be honest. It's not something I would ever do, but when you read stories like this the impossibility of defending against them in any other way stuns you.

Identifying people like this might help, but it doesn't seem that we have the ability to do that either.

The reason you don't hear about it is because it's so common. Shit like the story in the OP is news because it's extremely rare.

5% of children in homes with guns should have already been killed.

1000s of mothers already do have weapons and the vast vast vast majority of their kids are fine.

skyrockets. Suicide rate skyrockets, the chance your children will be killed by that handgun skyrockets.
Like the father who shot his son thinking he was an intruder. The man who shot his pregnant wife in their bedroom thinking she was an intruder. Tell these victims they are just "Fine"

last week with HER gun. Her relatives called the cops because they feared she would so this. Paranoid old woman who slept with HER GUN under her pillow. She was always calling the cops about "intruders". Nope, she didn't protect her 68 year old self with her gun. She shot her 72 year old husband to death.

This is far more common than some rapist or amed intruder.

85% of all the children killed by guns IN THE ENTIRE WORLD are in the U.S.

If you think having more guns out there is the answer, then you're part of the problem.

I can only control my actions and the sooner everyone else realizes that the happier they will be. The need to enforce beliefs on others is disturbing.

How could it possibly have been any worse for the woman in the news story? Her baby is dead.

Maybe the child still would have died but maybe not. As it stands now she was totally unable to defend herself and her child. Terrible tragic story...

mental problems. Control is needed there but can't just let it go and take the chance that family members might be harmed.

get rid your guns. It is more likely you will be killed by THEM than an armed intruder. Think Nancy Lanza there.

That young mother and her infant had their choice to be able to walk around in public without being threatened with murder taken away from them. They were not allowed to control their own lives. That control was taken away from them by people like you who refuse to support national gun control and reform of America's insane balkanized gun laws, or any laws at all which would have made it even a little more difficult for these delinquent murderers to get their guns.

A position such as yours is irresponsible, and quite frankly very, very stupid, and it causes situations which allow children to murder children to occur.



His name was Antonio Santiago. You go and hug your gun this evening.

Many should be. Isn't that the point of law? To try to limit unwanted acions or activities? That's the whole point of a society. Great you are so laissez faire about others, but we should all want to control such actions...especially if those actions would include murdering a baby, a bunch of people, etc.. When you can not control the evil actions of people with certainty, you try to control the means they have to perform those deadly actions. Hence the name 'gun control'.


It couldn't be worse, but it certainly could have been much better- if the attackers didn't have the means to shoot her baby.

when we married. My kids grew up in that household. Only ONCE in their entire childhood was there an attempted break in and my husband didn't have TIME to get and load his gun. I threw a window fan out on the burglar. Count the YEARS on that.

They are adults now and do not own guns themselves because they are not in FEAR. I still live in a gun household and since they have grown up, moved out, NEVER has there been any occasion for SELF DEFENSE. Almost 40 years in 2 different states. Wow, I must be living on borrowed time with that!

Last Friday, a woman down the street from me did use HER gun. She shot her INVALID HUSBAND, not some armed intruder. Last year in our same area, a man shot his WIFE in her hospital bed. Self Defense? Armed intruders? I hear far more about these DOMESTIC VIOLENCE murders, than armed criminals.

I would, and do, fear being shot from somebody I know (read between the lines) than I do from some "boogie man" with a gun.

these gun owners think guns solve everything and everyone needs to be armed. I don't think so.

Do I have that right?

And my cat just turned off the fucking UPS again. He seems to live for that. DAMN it pisses me off. I was in the middle of a good song. Now the server's going to take 15 minutes to check 15 TB of disks. Fuckidy fuck fuck fuck. It's a good thing I love him.