Well I guess I need to carry in the winter too

[GunnyMack]

In the warmer months I walk the dogs with my Blackhawk 41 due to our exceedingly high bear population. Thankfully I know when a bear is in the area as the girls smell it and alert me.
However, I have never carried in the cold months.
Well tonight it's raining and I took them out and I see an opossum about a split second before Sage sees it. I tried calling her off but before I get LEAVE IT out of my mouth she has grabbed it by the back! She spit it out and went to grab it a second time, I raised my voice and LEAVE IT followed by a couple blue words and she got the point. As I'm trying to get all three headed for the house the 'road otter' decides to go the same way as us. Now Parker sees it running along the fence and goes after it. Again LEAVE IT and Parker decides it's not worth getting involved after hearing me, Sage had second thoughts as well. Claro was never intrested in animals, just birds on her mind , and food!
I get them inside and go back to the possum with a shovel. I cant find it! I didn't want to kill it, just try to flip it over the fence.
I look some more and it climbed the chain link and is sitting on the top rail. A half hearted baseball bat swing to send him on its way.
Last thing I need is an emergency vet visit on a weekend!
I hope the possum learned a lesson...

[4t5]

Those things have a face only a mother could love.

[JimT]

Carry all the time, please. You may never need it but if you do, you REALLY need it.

[Scott Tschirhart]

Possums aren’t really smart enough to learn lessons except when it comes to a successful attempt to find food.

[Paladin]

Carry all the time, please. You may never need it but if you do, you REALLY need it.

Correct. I walk the dogs with a rifle in the day and a shotgun at night. Primary threats to them here are Javalinia, lions, and badgers.

[Steve in MO]

Carry all the time, please. You may never need it but if you do, you REALLY need it.

Yep. All day, every day. If my pants are on, my gun is on.

[AJMD429]

Carry all the time, please. You may never need it but if you do, you REALLY need it.

Yep. All day, every day. If my pants are on, my gun is on.

Even if I go out in my pajamas or underpants to grab a couple pieces of firewood from the woodshed (we don’t have neighbors within visible distance), I will have a pistol in one hand.

I mentioned that to a friend who’s had a rather sheltered life and she said “that must be weird to live in such a state of fear all the time”. Somehow I don’t really feel like I have fear as my motivating factor, just practicality. I could go out and get firewood without shoes on and probably not step on anything sharp, but I at least slip on some sandals or something. The difference is that slipping on sandals isn’t something that’s always portrayed in the movies as sinister, whereas anytime there’s a gun in a modern movie that isn’t in the hands of law-enforcement, it’s pretty sure bet that later on in the movie there will be a gun accident or a murder committed by that person.

Of the approximately 18,000 days in my life that I have had a firearm on my person, at least 17,975 of them the firearm did nothing other than be a slight nuisance to carry.

I’d estimate there were about six instances over the years where having the firearm on my person enabled me to deal with a roadside wounded animal that needed euthanized, and another 10 where livestock with meningitis or a severe injury needed euthanized.
I can think of five instances where displaying the firearm prevented theft or vandalism of my property, one where it interrupted the vicious beating of a woman I didn’t know by someone else I didn’t know, and one that interrupted a car jacking of my wife, who was driving a couple hundred yards behind me in a remote area at night (the one and only time I ever aimed a gun directly at a person with my finger on the trigger, ready to fire). And two instances involving my children where their lives might’ve been saved because I was nearby and armed; one was when a rabid dog came into the yard and was chasing them, and I had a 357 Lever gun handy, and the other when my two and four year-old children were playing in an area visible from the road, but I was off to the side and not visible, when a sleazy looking guy drove by and slowed down and turned around and came back and opened the door and asked my two daughters if they ‘needed a ride’ (I was planting some tree seedlings just out of sight behind some bushes, but of course I felt that part of the necessary equipment to plant tree seedlings included, not only a shovel, but a Mini-14… ). Evidently the driver must have started hearing banjo music when he saw me step out of the weeds with a Mini-14 at the ready, because he decided to get the heck out of there. I have also been in two pharmacies during armed robberies, but in one case I was in the storage area and really wouldn’t have had any need to intervene (which is good since I was illegally carrying a Ruger Super Blackhawk in Ohio before they allowed concealed carry), as the wife of the pharmacist was standing behind a curtain overlooking the dispensing area with a 12 gauge shotgun at her shoulder during the entire robbery. The thief went away, unscathed, never knowing how thankful he should be that as she told me later,she just “didn’t want to clean up a mess and do paperwork, plus it might’ve damaged my husband‘s hearing and really startled him, and he does have a heart condition…”. And in the other, I had my hand on my 1911 while laying on the floor with the other pharmacist, as the robber kept stepping over us as he forced the cashier to grab narcotics off the shelves and put them into a bag, but I never used the firearm because he didn’t harm anyone and didn’t try to leave the store with a hostage, so technically I can’t count that as a defensive firearm use.

So in my real life experience, approximately 99.86% of the time, having a gun on my person was essentially worthless and silly, but in approximately 0.14% of the time, it was useful, with 0.02% (4 of 18,000 days) quite likely saving a human life. Never did I need to fire a shot in any of those four instances, so the anti-gun people would say those don’t count.

I know a lot of people who have had way more significant uses of firearms during their life, but I know even more who have never had anything happen where they needed a firearm, and in fact don’t even own firearms. Some of that latter group may somehow ‘stay out of trouble’ better than the rest of us, by simply living a lifestyle where they don’t work night shifts at a pharmacy or live on a farm with livestock, and theoretically, they may avoid crime-prone areas more diligently than those of us who carry a gun. I’m not necessarily convinced of the latter however, because most non-law enforcement individuals I know who carry a gun tend to steer clear of dangerous areas, just because we don’t particularly want to take the risk of an armed encounter, even if we have a higher chance of surviving. It’s quite possible that the statistics could be skewed because those unarmed people who get into a crime-prone area and are attacked, tend to either die, or if they survive, decide to start carrying a gun.

Anyway, I guess I mentioned those things because even though I’ve had about four instances where a firearm probably saved human life, and another 26 or so where it enabled compassionate euthanasia of livestock or protection of property, I don’t think I’ve gone out of my way to look for trouble. If there’s someone trespassing on our property, I don’t confront them - I call the sheriff, and other than when I was in college, living in ghetto apartments and working night shifts at pharmacies, I’ve pretty much never traveled to or through high crime areas.

We pay for homeowners insurance every day during a 30,000 day lifetime, that covers if our house gets hit by a tornado, with the odds of that even happening once during all that timeprobably being about one in 100,000. We carry a tire inflator or spare tire in our car every day yet maybe need it out on the road one out of every 2000 days or so.

So I guess if you’re a gambling person, it might make sense to just roll the dice and figure you have about 4,500:1 odds that you won’t need a firearm to protect human life on any given day (although as others have noted above, there are many other sound reasons of firearm may be needed aside from protecting human life).

But if you look at the cost benefit or risk analysis, the downside of having a firearm on your person at all times is at most a slight inconvenience or discomfort if you haven’t picked a good holster, whereas the downside of failing to have one on that one out of 4,500 days where it is needed to protect life, maybe the loss of life…!

Of course, the other downside that anti-gun skeptics always bring up is the potential that the gun might fall into the wrong hands and cause an accident because a child or incompetent individual gets a hold of the gun. I would counter that by saying that, unless you’re in the habit of becoming intoxicated or otherwise uncountable, laying there passed out with a visible holstered gun for someone to take away and misuse, the situation of having a gun on your person is probably far safer than most of the storage places people keep guns, other than truly secure gun safes.

There is also the possibility that by having a gun on your person, you will have a gun accident yourself, so I guess the question is whether you’re likelihood of having a gun accident on any given day is greater than 1:4,500 - if so, perhaps it’s not a good idea to carry a handgun.

As they say, “… your mileage may vary…”

I guess the only other thing I would add is that some people carry a gun when they are walking down the driveway to get the mail, or running errands in a low-crime area, or keep a semi auto rifle and 1000 rounds in their truck all the time, and say they do it “…just because I can…”. I think there is something to that, because there is sort of a momentum of sorts necessary to assure freedom is not eroded. It needs to remain normalized to have easy access to firearms, even ones that are not pleasant looking, for those are the very ones that threaten tyrants. It’s the same reasoning that we need to be sure we tolerate even the most hateful and obnoxious speech, and the reason that sometimes even a guilty criminal must be released if the government misbehaves in their arrest.

[marlinman93]

I love it when some snowflake refers to someone carrying all the time as the person being afraid. If it's said to me it's usually, "What are you afraid of"? My reply is always the same, "I'm not afraid, but I would be if I wasn't armed". I follow up by telling them if they're not prepared for the worst that could happen they can go their whole life oblivious to dangers out there. And their lives might be forever affected or shortened by not doing all they could to be prepared for the worst. It only takes one time.

[jeepnik]

Those things have a face only a mother could love.

Did I ever tell the story of my wife trying to kiss one. She really should wear her glasses all of the time.

[AJMD429]

I love it when some snowflake refers to someone carrying all the time as the person being afraid. If it's said to me it's usually, "What are you afraid of"?

Yeah - or I'll ask THEM "What are YOU so afraid of that makes you NOT want to be around a gun...??"

If they spout off about 'gun accidents' I cite statistics.

I also tell them that on average in most places in the US, they have about a1:400 chance of being a victim of a violent crime that could in fact be stopped if the victim were armed, and that somewhere around a million instances do happen where the victim uses a gun to survive such an assault. Those numbers are FAR higher than both the childhood gun-accident death rate (a few dozen per year in the entire US) and the adult gun-accident death rate (a couple hundred per year for the entire US). So since there is no logical reason to choose the more dangerous path (not going armed), the only reason to choose that path would be an irrational fear of some sort...