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Well, Greg, I think you and I are in ALMOST complete agreement here. The only significant difference is the assumption that those who choose to have guns for home protection will lead sad lives.

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Garette, I don't think he really meant that all people with guns will lead sad lives, but that those who feel they _need_ them for protection will. Perpetual worry is a sad thing. I may have misinterpreted you both, however

I admit I do not trust the populace in general enough to leave my doors unlocked at night (at least when I move, I wont. Right now my car sits in the yard with the key in the ignition. Rural life is funny that way.) but I don't think a gun is going to keep me any safer than a locked door will. Anyone who's going to break into my house is likely going to have a quicker trigger finger than me anyhow. *shrug*

Good judgement comes from experience: experience comes from bad judgement.

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It is well-settled American law that the police have no legal duty to protect any individual citizen from crime, even if the citizen has received death threats and the police have negligently failed to provide protection.

In New York, for example, the rule was explicated by the Court of Appeals in the case Riss v. New York: the government is not liable even for a grossly negligent failure to protect a crime victim.

In the Riss case, a young woman telephoned the police and begged for help because her ex-boyfriend had repeatedly threatened, "If I can't have you, no one else will have you, and when I get through with you, no-one else will want you."

The day after she had pleaded for police protection, the ex-boyfriend threw lye in her face, blinding her in one eye, severely damaging the other, and permanently scarring her features. "What makes the City's position particularly difficult to understand," wrote a dissenting opinion, "is that, in conformity to the dictates of the law, Linda did not carry any weapon for self-defense. Thus, by a rather bitter irony she was required to rely for protection on the City of New York which now denies all responsibility to her."

In the case of Warren v. District of Columbia, two women were upstairs when they heard their roommate being attacked by men who had broken in downstairs. They immediately telephoned the police for assistance.

Half an hour having passed and their roommate's screams having ceased, they assumed the police must have arrived and taken care of the situation. Actually, their call for help for a violent felony in progress had somehow been lost in the shuffle while the roommate was being beaten into silence.

When the two roommates went downstairs, as the court's opinion graphically describes: "For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands" of their attackers.

The roommates later sued the District of Columbia for ignoring their phone call for help. Having set out the facts of the case facts, the District of Columbia's highest court exonerated the District and its police, because it is:

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a fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.

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Given the doctrine of police immunity, it is difficult to contend that trained citizens should not be allowed to carry firearms to protect themselves.

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That's how I interpreted him. Greg, are we right? In any case, it's how I intended to phrase my response; apologies if I wasn't clear; but I still think it's an unwarranted generalization.

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