and I probably open it more than I should in this neighborhood.

I'm still not going to get a gun. I'd be a menace with a firearm with my lousy eyesight.

We sold it a few years ago. When we were out for weekends we we constantly had people knocking from the highway that was near by all of the time. Never answered the door with a firearm ever...

I'd move if I had to.

I may live in Upstate New York, but it is still New York. I just have my house properly lit and know which windows to use to check my entrances.

then they ALL lock their doors

I lived in a suburban neighborhood where everyone would cut straight through other people's property to get to your friend's house and nobody seemed to mind. Then we'd play all day not even worrying too much whose property we had wandered onto during our excursions. As long as you didn't look like you were up to no good, nobody said a word. For years it was like this. It was the most natural thing. Then they built a new section of houses in the woods behind our house. The first time my friend and I cut across the property of a couple from the mid-west that had recently moved in, the husband opens the window and threatens to shoot us if we don't get off his lawn.

Before that, if a neighborhood kid was acting up, being a delinquent, even vandalizing or breaking in houses, there was never anything near a shooting. No one drew a gun. It was almost treated like it was a family problem. Occasionally the cops would be called but more often, if it was a case of stolen property, the parent would take a walk and have a talk with the parent of the offending kid to find out what was going on. We once had some kid drive right up on our front lawn at 3 in the morning, engine loud as anything. Left tire tracks on the lawn. Woke everyone up. We just assumed it was one of the neighborhood kid's that we knew (later on we found out it was). Nobody panicked. Nobody called the police. Hell, we weren't too shaken up about our lawn. It grew back.

But today, someone walks on your porch and you shoot them? What planet are you from?

It turned out to be a rape victim.

My mind doesn't even GO all "Clockwork Orange".

Here in Texas, when someone knocks, we have a radical procedure: We flip on the light, and look out the window. Funny, that.

(BTW, had the same think happen tonight: Activist for environmental conservation. I signed the petition, and he was safely in his way.)

I've had a bunch of people come banging on my door because their car broke down (Or more frequently because they hit a deer) on the nearby highway-through-the-middle-of-fucking-nowhere-Alabama at all hours of the night, and to the best of my recollection, I never shot any of them. Faulty as my memory can be sometimes, I'm pretty sure I'd remember it.

Now I do know some people that might take a potshot at someone for strolling up to their house, but anyone from anywhere nearby knows not to go there, and for people from other places...let's just say their houses aren't the most inviting places to be going up to to knock, even in broad daylight. (We're talking House of 1000 Corpses looking houses.) I'm pretty sure y'all have some fucked up people there, too.