Have you ever taken a defensive driving course and practiced defensive driving techniques on a calm day at the skidpad?
Yes, I have. (But it's irrelevant; see DNS' reply above.)
"Firearms-related homicides" is
not the relevant statistic here. Personally, I'd rather be shot than beaten to death -- and would rather be beaten to death than to be kidnapped, raped, and slowly tortured to death over a period of four days as Meredith Emerson once was.
So instead of artificially lowering the number to make your point, be more realistic. Include everything inside the larger and much more relevant column titled plain old "homicides," period. And then add in aggravated assault, which is when someone tried to kill someone else and almost succeeded, often resulting in serious lifelong medical problems for the victim. Add forcible rapes, kidnapping, and violent sexual assaults.
The numbers are still low, aren't they? The crime rate has been falling, dramatically, for several decades now. Murder hardly ever happens.
That's probably no real consolation to the family of
this woman or any of the other ~40 people murdered the day she died. So it's not really about the odds. It's about the stakes.
So set all the numbers aside, and think this through.
Every single victim of violent crime did not expect violence to happen to them that day, at that time, in that place. If they had, they would not have been there. Just as no one involved in a car accident ever expected to get into a car accident that day, nobody involved in a violent crime expected to face a violent criminal that day.
If we all had magic crystal balls, we could all just pay for one-day car insurance and wear our seat belts only on days when we felt traffic was going to be particularly dangerous. We could get training to deal with the
exact situation we knew we were going to face (
three seconds, three yards, three shots...?) and never worry our pretty little heads about any of the other possibilities (
a 15 yard shot, in the dark, with a small handgun, on a moving target violently attacking, at close quarters, the person we love best in the world...). But we can't and don't know what's out there. So we buy car insurance and wear our seat belts. And some of us carry guns and learn how to use them effectively.
Not only this, but ...
If today you walked into work, and you suddenly saw a violently enraged, armed man kill your co-workers and then he began coming after you, would you want to be able to
do something about it? Or would you prefer to
hope that he would decide to stop on his own, perhaps with just the help of a visual aid?
Personally, I'd rather know what to do and how to do it if needed. That's why I'm a fan of training. Of course I know that lots of people out there prefer to remain ignorant in this area. That's another possible choice, just not my preferred style. If I'm going to go to all the hassle of carrying a gun around with me as often as I do, with all that entails, I think that would be an absolute waste of effort if I didn't also at least learn how to carry it safely and use it effectively.
To me, carrying a gun without a decent level of training makes about as much sense as keeping a first aid kit without knowing how to use that strappy-gadget with the twirly thing on it.
pax