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 halfNearly half ofsuicidesmurders 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.
Careful. my wife’s from Flint . . . and so is Michael Moore *laughing*
I guess the reality is, my wife moved away from Flint . . . the first chance she got. And when she found herself back there after a few years, barely hesitated when the opportunity to leave presented itself again. She likes St. Paul, but would prefer something a little further south . . and I’m not talking St. Peter, or Rochester for that matter*smile*
Flash
PS: You are at your best, Mitch, on this issue. You can sanely fisk a screed and remains civil and respectful. It is easy to do when the facts are on your side. Which is why you give yourself away so easily when you rant. It is almost like a white flag with you!
““I could have had an Uzi, and it wouldn’t have done any good,” he says. “I was pounced on.””
A gun is the last thing you need.
Lighting, alarms, locks, solid doors and windows, all of that comes first.
With proper lighting, alarms, locks, solid doors and windows – you’ll deter many criminals, and be far less likely to need a gun. And if you do need one, you’ll be more likely to be in a position for it to be of some use.
If you don’t know the bastard is in your house until he’s standing over your bed, no gun in the world will help.
It’s easy to be an armchair security consultant, but – this guy had a perfect storm of misfortune here which was aggravated by laxity. Carelessly leaving a window open whilst working on Chopin seems like something you oughta be able to do, right? But security-minded people realize things like, “my mind is going to be on Chopin for a while here, in another room. I’d better lock this window while I tackle the Polonaise in A-flat”.
It’s a worldview where you actively think about things like that as a matter of course, or you don’t feel right. I bet this dude will think that way from now on. Poor devil. Lock yer g*ddamned windows.
Living out in the boonies isn’t so bad, guys. Our “neighborhood” is pretty tight knit and strangers are noted and questioned by just about everybody. The single guy down the road usually feels it important to tell the us when he gets a new live-in girlfriend just to make it easier on her.
Mitch, we should have a thread on this. The Star-Tribune has a short fluff piece on a domestic terrorist. I live this line….
“Initially formed to protect local communities from police brutality and racism, the Black Panthers had chapters in several major cities and ran medical clinics and provided free food to schoolchildren.”
http://www.startribune.com/local/16022412.html
I can tell you right now it’s easier said than done to keep your house locked shut if you have an older city house. For one thing–a lot of people don’t have central air in my neck of the woods so summertime is a great opportunity for criminals. This guy was trying to let heat out of his kitchen. Even second story windows aren’t safe. My next door neighbor’s house was burglarized by someone climbing on to the roof of his back porch and getting in through a window.
One thing about Quimby’s graph–it looks like nearly half of all murders are unsolved (unknown assailant). I would venture to guess that it’s because they were caused by someone with no known connection to the victim. Yes, a few might have been done by someone they knew who was just able to cover their tracks well enough but most murders are not the mystery novel sort.
A dog is an alarm you can never turn off (dammit!)
As Mitch knew, I wrote this expecting (provoking?) him to respond from a different perspective, and he did in a good way.
I thought the original incident provided an entry to a number of different issues related to gun ownership, about which I hold fairly nuanced views. One nuance that I still think is being missed here — more than half of gun deaths are suicides or accidental discharges (how police used to report most suicides in the old days).
My point about guns killing acquaintances and family members was only to add more deaths in confirmation of the fact that a gun in the home is more likely to kill someone in the home than to defend the home, and so this needs to be part of the home vigilance equation (and for responsible gun owners, it is). Mitch is correct about murder stats for acquaintances being loose, and I didn’t really try to break them down, because self-murder is a bigger issue in my mind than drug dealer murder.
This is important to me because I’ve had a neighbor, a friend/former boss, and a father all die from guns they owned.
Mitch, if you’re interested in continuing this, maybe we can do something that will enlighten our respective readers.
I’m open, as always, to ideas.
I think it’s horrible when almost anybody kills themself. (I could list a few exceptions — and not just people I think would best grace this life by leaving it, like Arafat did. Somebody in intractable, incurable pain? Not my call, but …)
That said, I think the Canadian example shows, very clearly, that when guns aren’t available to men (gun suicide is almost entirely a guy thing) the rate doesn’t change, but the method.
My cousin, Josh Smotkin, used to spend some nights in my home, because he and I had an understanding that, as troubled as he was — and he was a very sweet, very troubled young man — he wouldn’t hurt himself here.
Then there was the night that he decided to kill himself, in his apartment in St. Paul, and not having a gun available, (I don’t know if he would have used it; he certainly didn’t have access in my home) he hanged himself.
(I tried to get him better help than he was getting, and failed miserably, just by the way. I stay up late at night, from time to time, wondering what I could have done that might have worked.)
As to guns defending the home less often than they are used to kill people who live there, that’s utter horseshit. The Kellerman study, which is usually pointed at, doesn’t count gun defense where no shot is fired — like mine — in the plus column. It doesn’t count gun defenses where a shot is fired, and misses the intruder, in the plus column. It doesn’t count gun defenses where a shot is fired and wounds but does not kill the intruder, in the plus column.
Read Kleck’s studies — plural — or, if you’d prefer something from antigun academics, Ludwig and Cook. (L&C set out to prove that Kleck got it wrong, and found a higher incidence of DGUs than he found, then spent the rest of their paper arguing with their own results.)
Joel, you should probably read Clayton Cramers comments on the issue of mental illness and deinstitutionalization. Coming from a family where both my parents have half my uncles were involved in mental health I tend to agree that deinstitutionalization has been a disaster for those with moderate to severe mental health issues. It’s only the truly incapacitated cases that can get confined these days for even short periods, while many folks would be helped with confinement, training, and treatment while they learn to control their illness.
That said, your trouble in getting Josh help isn’t terribly surprising. It’s a hard thing to get the right help since the system makes help very difficult to get even with inside channels.
My sympathies. It’s a tough issue, and one where I think we spend far too little as a society. But you don’t see lefties rushing to make committing folks easier, no matter how much it’d help them, and the libertarian right is loath to interfere with someone going to hell in their own way.
BTW, the L&C study is actually pretty hilarious in the convolutions they go through to try and keep their preconceived notions. I’m shocked it made it through peer review (well, I would be if I viewed the peers as anything other than typical agenda driven social science types).
Thanks, nerdbert — I read Clayton regularly, but I think I missed that one.
As to my cousin, shit, I tried, honest: at one point, I got in touch with a noted psychopharmacologist and while ethics prevented him from doing a diagnosis under such circumstances, he did go as far as he could; I called up Josh’s father (we’re, err, not exactly close) and urged him to do something useful, and all he did was thank me for letting Josh stay at my place when he asked (shit; I’d have done that for folks I liked a lot less than my cousin).
I know I should have done something more useful, but to this day, I don’t know what that something should have been.
And yeah, it’s gotten worse. My father was a fairly prominent psychiatrist (which is how Francis Braceland ended up writing the first fan letter I ever got — honest), and it was tough, even in the old days, to get somebody institutionalized if they needed it but didn’t want it. It’s gotten worse since; much worse.
Undigressing for a moment, yeah, I love the L&C study, and give them credit for publishing it, rather than just burying the numbers that show that Kleck was right and they were wrong. That they tried to argue otherwise is fair enough; but it is a pretty weak argument.
Joel,
You might take a look at Clayton’s blog. There are at least 6 posts on his front page relating to this issue. http://www.claytoncramer.com/weblog/blogger.html.
He’s been on the topic recently a lot, and he’s got a history of having to deal with the issue with relatives and family, so it’s an interesting topic to see where a strongly conservative person stands on the issue. And it shows how widespread this is.
Joel, you have my sympathy for your cousin’s suicide. I saved one cousin from a suicide attempt, and he passed on the favor by getting another cousin to the hospital after an overdose. I was fortunate enough to be in the right place to save a neighbor’s daughter from a suicide attempt, and I’m pleased to say that, after years of therapy at Menninger’s Clinic, she has had two decades of stability and happiness, including marriage and a lovely daughter. Contrary to the theme song from MASH, suicide is never painless, especially for those left behind, second-guessing themselves. I get a better understanding of your reaction to my story of my great-aunt’s supposed suicide out in New York that I left on your website.