In a message dated 9/24/00 5:57:46 PM Pacific Daylight Time, hal@finney.org
writes: << There are some practical dangers in brandishing a weapon without
being prepared to use it, but I suspect that Tom is right, and most of the
time this would be an effective strategy. >>
As a young man I worked my way through engineering partially by carry a
.38 and investigating burgular alarms that were sounding off. There is
something I sense you are overlooking.
There are many criminals that will attempt to take your weapon if they do
not believe you will use it. The weapon is worth a fair amount of money on
the street and the macho value of having taken it from you is also rather
high.
There are also criminals that will attack you if you if you pull a gun
because they simply do not believe you will shoot them. For that reason I
also carried a nightstick because those same idiots always seemed to believe
I would brain them. In my view carrying the stick was a small price to pay
if it bought me peace while I was doing my job.
In summary what I am saying is that if you decide to carry a gun, as you
have a right to do, then think it all through ahead of time; otherwise you
could either get badly hurt or be pushed into doing something you would be
unwilling to do after reflection.
Ron H.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:38:50 MDT