Le Bonheur:90% of guns will be used to shoot someone in home

[Pat McGarrity]

Not to pick on FOX 13; I saw the Le Bonheur spokesperson on CBS Channel 3 saying that they don't feel guns should be in homes, but if they are, should basically should be rendered useless. Typical Soviet style one size fits all, myopic rhetoric. To be sure, it's tragic when a child suffers because of the irresponsible adults in a home, but I cannot accept having the tools to protect my family denied me because of the negligent actions of someone that I had nothing to do with.

From Memphis Police Department Detective, Sergeant Jim Williams (Ret.):

During the 5pm news broadcast on Fox 13 today, they covered a story
wherein it appears a boy, 7, shot another boy, 5, with a gun they found
stuck in a couch.

A female employee of LeBonheur Hospital was headlined as saying that
"9 out of 10 guns will be used to shoot somebody in the home." If there
are 100,000 gun homes in Shelby County, this means that will be
90,000 shootings in Memphis area homes. I will bet she found this
statistical finding on a chair where she had been sitting, because
surely this is where this opinion came from.....

During her interview, they summarized her "gun safety" rules,
if you just have to have a gun (knowing everyone in your family
will soon be killed), with a graphic that stated that ALL of the
following provisions have to be COMBINED together in use:

(1) Keep the gun in a gun safe; AND,
(2) Keep the gun unloaded; AND,
(3) Also put a trigger lock on the gun. AND,
(4) Keep the ammo locked up somewhere ELSE.

With careful practice, you should be able to access the gun in an
emergency within 10-15 minutes. Criminals are usually patient
enough to give you at least that long, or so she obviously feels.

My professional experience with acquiring a gun in a burglary
or home invasion occurring is simple: If you cannot do so within
60 seconds or less reliably, ask the criminal to retrieve it for you when
you speak to him inside your house.

One of my favorite cases was the Preppie Rapist, who sexually
attacked almost twenty women in Memphis in the 1980's, until his final victim heard him break her kitchen window. Then she listened as
he walked across her kitchen floor tile, then her carpeted den floor
and down her hallway toward her bedroom. In the meantime, she
had locked her bedroom door, phoned 911, and got down on the far side of her bed with her handgun. He rattled her locked bedroom doorknob, at
which point she warned him she had a gun and the police enroute.
Undeterred, he kicked open her bedroom door and caused himself to be
silhouetted due to the nightlight in her hallway outlet. She fired, striking
him a grazing wound across the side of his head. The searing
pain of his torn flesh and gushing blood left him running out,
leaving a trail of blood to his car parked at the end of the block.
The police dispatchers phoned all the hospitals with his general
description, a white male in his 30's with a head wound. Within
30 minutes, he showed up at one of the private hospitals, claiming
he had been cleaning his gun at midnight when he accidentally
shot himself. He was rightly afraid of dying in his sleep if he went
to bed with an untreated bullet wound. The nurse whispered to the
911 dispatcher when she alerted police that he was there now.
Police arrested him in the ER without incident. His career of
fear had ended because of one woman with a handgun in her hand.

Jim