Thursday, January 24, 2013

Biden on self-defense: Get yourself a shotgun

Biden on self-defense: Get yourself a shotgun


By | The Ticket – 3 hrs ago
Vice President Joe Biden arrives during the second presidential inauguration of Barack Obama at the U.S. Capitol …Are you looking into buying an assault weapon for protection after a devastating natural disaster (or the coming Zombie Apocalypse) plunges society into deadly anarchy? You’ve got it all wrong, Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday: Get yourself a shotgun.
Biden, doing a Google+ “hangout” to promote President Barack Obama’s proposals for battling gun violence, had been asked whether a new assault weapons ban might infringe on the Second Amendment rights of those who want one “as a last line of defense” to fend off looters after “some terrible natural disaster.”
“Guess what? A shotgun will keep you a lot safer, a double-barreled shotgun, than the assault weapon in somebody’s hands [who] doesn’t know how to use it, even one who does know how to use it,” the outspoken vice president, a shotgun owner himself, replied. “It’s harder to use an assault weapon to hit something than it is a shotgun. You want to keep people away in an earthquake? Buy some shotgun shells.”
With the fate of Obama’s gun violence proposals unclear in the face of stiff opposition from most Republicans and some Democrats, Biden urged supporters of ideas like imposing a new assault weapons ban, limiting ammunition clips to 10 rounds and toughening background checks to pressure their elected representatives. “This town listens when people rise up and speak,” Biden said.

Like Obama before him, the vice president emphasized that he's a firm believer in the Second Amendment—but compared proposed new curbs on assault weapons to keeping fully-equipped F-15 fighter jets off the market.
“You have an individual right to own a weapon both for recreation, for hunting and also for your self-protection,” he said. "But just as you don’t have an individual right to go out and buy an F-15—if you’re a billionaire—with ordnance on it, just like you don’t have the right to buy an M-1 tank, just like you don’t have a right to buy an automatic weapon" you should not be able to get other weapons for which there is "no reasonable societal justification, or constitutional justification."
Biden noted that "it's not about keeping bad guns out of the hands of good people, it's about keeping all guns out of the hands of bad people. There should be rational limits."
One of Biden's questioners asked why, if they're rational, there's the lack of political will to enact them.
Biden paused, then said he would have to watch his words. “Both left and right sometimes take absolutist positions," he said.
The vice president emphasized that the administration was not calling for armed guards in schools, a proposal recently floated by the National Rifle Association. Instead, schools would have the flexibility to hire a uniformed guard, armed or not, if they so desired.
But Biden warned it would be a "terrible mistake" to arm school staff. "The last thing we need to do is be arming schoolteachers and administrators" who may not have firearm training, he said.

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Biden never ceases to amaze me, especially in regard to candor. In some ways he is right. If someone broke into your house and you wanted to kill them for sure, a 10 gauge or 12 gauge shotgun with pellets would more likely kill them than an assault weapon for most people. Because a full pellet blast to the chest or head would kill most people at short range of under 20 feet. However, it is also true that most assault rifle rounds that hit someone in their head or chest would kill them also, because most assault rifles use dum dums which flatten out and are hollow point so they take out about a four inch diameter piece of the person as the bullet comes through the other side with great force. So, it is debatable which type of weapon would be easier to survive a bullet or shot from unless it was in an arm or leg. Then I would have to say generally that an assault weapon would be easier to generally survive if hit in an arm or leg than a shotgun with pellet shot for a variety of reasons as long as we are talking about a 10 or 12 gauge shotgun.

So, I think it is really funny that Biden is talking about everyone getting a shotgun for protection for all these reasons. But, since much of the nation lives in a gun culture likely this will make a whole lot of people feel safer in their homes which likely is the whole point of what he's saying and why he's saying it.

Also, the kick of a shotgun is really something and so is the sound. So if you don't have enough strength or weight it will knock you down when you shoot it. If you shoot a shotgun or most assault weapons inside your home at an intruder expect to be generally deaf a couple of days unless you are wearing some kind of hearing protection. So, for lighter less strong people maybe a smaller gauge pistol, shot with two hands might be a better choice for home defense.

Also, generally speaking Shotguns and pistols are usually louder than rifles. But generally anything you shoot in a house without some kind of silencer is going to make you temporarily deaf as in hours or days.

Note: if you are wondering how I know all this my Grandfather was an avid hunter and taught my Dad to shoot by age 6 and gave him a Remington pump .22 by age 8. I was given this same rifle by my grandmother at age 8 and kept it until my Dad asked to keep it for me when I was about 16 or 18. Also, my Grandad at times in the 1920s and 1930s had up to 20 hound dogs for hunting deer, Elk and Bear in Seattle and Canada and the north western states over to about Idaho. He later had a couple thousand acre mining claim  in Idaho up until the laws changed sometime in the 1960s and passed away about 1970. I was raised as a kid growing up in the 1950s when most boys I knew had .22 rifles that I knew in grade school. At that time we kept our rifles in our bedrooms and had our bullets there too. It was just the way things were done the last 400 to 600 years or more. So, this is a part of our history that created the United States of America. Without our gun culture we might now be  a dictatorship since 1776 instead of a democracy. It is what helped create our democracy here in the U.S.

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