Both one's attitudes and one's responses are conditioned by one's previous experiences and by what else happens to be going on in the neighborhood. Essentially, that is what forms your alert status. There is no reason to be on high alert, so to speak, if nothing has ever happened to you or any of your neighbors in the twenty years you've lived in the same house. If suddenly you start carrying around your gun when nothing has ever happened to your or anyone near, I don't know what to say, other than you have been sold a bill of goods. Something outside of your own experience has made you that afraid.
What can happen is sometimes is that "the neighborhood goes downhill," or words to that effect. Fortunately nothing like that has happened to me where I live. So realistically, I cannot justify doing very many of the things I read about here. I don't have a big dog (don't like dogs), don't hide guns in every room (that increases the chance one will be found and, besides, I don't have that many), I don't even have a shotgun.
Furthermore, home invasions are an invention of the news media, although it has a great sound. The legal term is burglarly. I do read the crime reports in the paper every week and sometimes it is interesting reading, though nothing very exciting happens very often. They seem to go out of their way to report the slightest thing, too. Someone pushes someone and runs away and even that gets reported. And this is in a county with 1,300,000 people, too, many of whom are from somewhere else (which, technically, includes me).
I do worry, though, about what the TV reporter would say if they knew what was in my basement.
What can happen is sometimes is that "the neighborhood goes downhill," or words to that effect. Fortunately nothing like that has happened to me where I live. So realistically, I cannot justify doing very many of the things I read about here. I don't have a big dog (don't like dogs), don't hide guns in every room (that increases the chance one will be found and, besides, I don't have that many), I don't even have a shotgun.
Furthermore, home invasions are an invention of the news media, although it has a great sound. The legal term is burglarly. I do read the crime reports in the paper every week and sometimes it is interesting reading, though nothing very exciting happens very often. They seem to go out of their way to report the slightest thing, too. Someone pushes someone and runs away and even that gets reported. And this is in a county with 1,300,000 people, too, many of whom are from somewhere else (which, technically, includes me).
I do worry, though, about what the TV reporter would say if they knew what was in my basement.