True North

Nick Coleman wrote a column about a scary - and fairly atypical - home invasion in crime-sodden Minneapolis:

Someone called 911 on Nov. 3 to report three men walking on the street in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis…a police squad was sent to investigate. It was too late.By that time, the three men were burglarizing a nearby home, climbing on patio furniture to get in through a small window that had been opened to air out the kitchen after dinner. Grabbing butcher knives off a counter, the masked robbers burst into a nearby room, surprising the homeowner, who was playing the piano.

It’s gotta be one of everyone’s worst nightmares; one or more complete strangers, descending on you like a bolt from the blue, with mayhem in mind.

It’s both relatively rare and all too common; in the US, about one in eight burglaries is “hot” - it occurs when someone is home. They’re incredibly dangerous situations. In countries like the UK, with stiff gun controls, the ratio is one in two. But I digress.

The homeowner had some guns - but they were hunting guns and a relic, locked in a case downstairs. They weren’t for self-defense; in this situation, they were for bargaining:

“I could have had an Uzi, and it wouldn’t have done any good,” he says. “I was pounced on.”

I’d be the last one to second-guess people in that situation - although I was in a not-completely-different one twenty years ago this coming summer. More later.

Although the robbers involved sound like the kind of people the world’d be better off if they did get shot:

Mike was knocked on the floor by the robbers, who put knives to his throat, threatened to kill him and started filling paper bags with valuables: Jewelry (including rings that belonged to Jane’s parents), a laptop computer, a BlackBerry, house keys. They rolled up a Persian rug and took that, too…But the robbers wanted more than they could find. They were becoming threatening, so Mike tried to calm them by revealing that he had guns they could add to their haul.

The robbers led Mike at knifepoint to the basement and made him open the cabinet where he kept a shotgun, a rifle and an old pistol. Then they loaded the guns with ammunition, tied Mike up, and pointed his guns at his head…Thankfully, the robbers did not shoot Mike that night, telling him he “could stay [alive] with your family.”

And while some justice may yet be served, “Mike” may have gotten lucky after all:

Five days after the home invasion, three suspects were arrested in Michigan City, Ind., after one pulled a gun from a car trunk and wounded another person…The suspects are from Gary, Ind., and are 18, 21 and 23. They are expected to be extradited to Minnesota to face charges of first-degree burglary and aggravated robbery.

One can hope they get a long, ugly sentence. Given that it’s Hennepin County, I won’t hold my breath.

There are plenty of lessons one can draw from this incident.

• For all its recent improvements, Minneapolis remains a high-crime city.
• Prudence rules. It pays not to make your house an easy mark, either passively (by leaving your house an easy mark) or actively (by ones’ ability, or lack thereof, to deter or resist crime).
• Sometimes events, or capricious, remorseless fate, trumps prudence. Prudence, in short, helps, but it is no guarantee of safety.
• “Mike” is a lucky guy.

For my part? Well, I try; I do the usual prudent, passive stuff. And if you’ve read my blog, you know I advocate more active measures as well - within the bounds of the law, of course.

Charlie Quimby draws a different lesson:

The castle defender fantasy, of course, is an armed and prepared homeowner defeating such an invasion with extreme prejudice — as family lore said my granny once did.

But in reality, we are not so eternally vigilant. Like Mike, we play piano or crank up the tunes. We hunker over blog posts. We take care with trigger locks. We come home with our arms full of groceries. We sleep.

We live our lives.

Since it’s Charlie Quimby, I’ll assume he didn’t mean a gross insult with the “Castle Defender Fantasy” quip. The fact is, most of us who choose to exercise our Second Amendment right to defend ourselves and our homes with firearms are pretty normal folks; when we talk about defending our castle, we’re not like the guy in “Pride of the Marines”, his machine gun blazing away into the teeth of a Banzai charge.

But the other fact is, choosing active self-defense does involve some changes in the way you perceive things around you. Not adopting a bunker mentality, as the “Castle” quip implies, but certainly in being more than a passive spectator to events around one.

I’m not here to pass judgment on peoples’ choices on defending their homes, selves and families. Active, passive, submissive, it matters not so much.

But Quimby - normally a fairly rational sort - passes on a few myths about the issue that, while they’ve been ransacked like “Mike’s” house in the marketplace of ideas in the past fifteen years, still seem to be making the rounds.

The reality is that about 60 percent of gun deaths are suicides or accidents. At least half Nearly half of suicides murders involve non-strangers, and guns were involved in more than half the deaths of those who knew their killer.

Quimby posts this graphic to support his statement:

What is - by a factor of 600% - the biggest category among “non-strangers?”

“Acquaintances”. It might mean a hunting buddy. It could mean someone in the neighborhood that the victim knows by name. And it could - indeed, in the vast majority of cases does - mean “someone’s drug dealer, or customer, fellow or opposing gang member, or partner/opponent in some criminal venture”. It doesn’t matter - as long as the two have met, in any context, it’s a “Non-stranger”.

This was the big clinker behind the infamous 1993 New England Journal of Medicine study that - according to the gun controllers who spun the results - showed that a gun in the home was 43 times as likely to kill the owner of someone the owner knows than a criminal. Of course, in the raw data (shootings from a period of time in King County Washington, including Seattle), the vast majority of the “43″ were suicides; most of the rest were shootings involving people who “knew” each other; abusive spouses, drug dealers and customers, casual acquaintances, and so on.

But back in the day, someone - and the name is unfortunately lost to pre-Google history - went through the raw data, and noted that if you control for households where the gun owner has a drug or alcohol-abuse record, a violent mental illness or a criminal record, and assume that killing criminals isn’t the goal (and it’s not; deterring them is), it broke down more like this:

• If someone in the house has a problem with drugs, booze, mental illness or a crime record, a gun is about equally-likely to kill the owner or an acquaintance
• If nobody in the house has any of those problems, a gun is 400 times as likely to deter a crime as to harm anyone (and that’s using the FBI’s deterrence stats, which are about an order of magnitude lower than the number criminologist Gary Kleck uses).

Quimby:

In other words, if you die by gun shot, it’s not likely to happen at the hands of three young men from Flint.

True. With all due respect to Mike and his wife, it’s most likely to happen at the hands of three young men from Flint that you met at a bar and bought crack from.

But the point is still correct. You are more likely to die from a gun that belongs to you or someone you know than to die at the hands of a stranger.

It’s “correct”, and still completely out of context!

Quimby concludes:

That does not mean people are wrong to have guns for self-defense. I’m simply stating that owning guns doesn’t necessarily make you safer from gun violence.

And having a sprinkler system doesn’t mean you’ll never die in a fire - but it helps.

Especially if the sprinker is turned on - or in your pocket, loaded, and ready to use in legal self-defense, as the case may be.
Which, for better or worse, “Mike’s” were not.

Cross-posted at Shot in the Dark. Comments welcome.