> A catalytic converter can be replaced, a life cannot.
So don't go around stealing catalytic converters. Same deal with states with "stand your ground laws". It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
And on the "replacing" part- on whose dime? What if someone's only means of transportation is affected, and they lose wages or outright lose their job? Are you going to pay for it? Of course not.
No, a better reason to not allow shooting of common thieves is that you don't want ordinary people shooting randomly at each other. The government / police should be able to handle this, but they either don't care or are incompetent.
Which leaves the ordinary upstanding citizen stuck between a rock and a hard place. The Man extracts taxes from their earnings, and thieves who ruin lives get a slap on the wrist because "lives are oh precious".
I was referring to homes. This situation likely could've been avoided by not engaging in recklessly stupid behavior like road rage and escalating the situation (with one's family present, to boot).
Also, a news article of some random altercation doesn't change anything about what I said: It's simply impossible to be shot (or clubbed, or beaten up, or whatever) by someone in their home for invading, if you never invade people's homes in the first place. So don't do that. And don't steal catalytic converters either.
> It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
The clear, plain-English implication of what you're suggesting is: your risk of getting shot (in the US) is, to a large extent, directly correlated to your invasion of other people's homes.
Except that there's no evidence to support this. According to FBI data from 2015-2019, the ratio of criminal gun homicides to justifiable homicides (as in self-defense) was 34:1.
Over 10,000 innocent people are killed by guns every year in the US, including more than 1,000 young people. This excludes suicides, which itself is a number that you'd probably be wise to pay attention to.
Is the context of this discussion unclear to you? Do I need to place conversational guard clauses for you? Or are you just interested in nitpicking? Do I really need to clarify that there are other ways of dying or getting harmed, including other ways of being shot, that have nothing to do with this? Do I have to preface every comment with an obvious disclaimer?
Obvious disclaimer: It is completely obvious that freak incidents occur, that there are other ways to die, that there is no way to guarantee the future or that harm will never come to someone, and that there are exceptions to just about every statement.
But one CAN choose to avoid deliberately putting themselves in situations where harm can befall them, such as comitting crimes like breaking into someone's home, or stealing someone's property. It should be completely obvious that one stands better chances in general by not doing things that make other people obscenely angry.
> Over 10,000 innocent people are killed by guns every year in the US, including more than 1,000 young people. This excludes suicides, which itself is a number that you'd probably be wise to pay attention to.
Out of a population of 349,000,000 people. Sad, but most people can live their lives and be completely unaffected. Stop being sensationalist.
> Obvious disclaimer: It is completely obvious that freak incidents occur...
Are you really now characterizing incidents of gun violence and suicide as "freak incidents"? They just happen, like a random bolt of lightning in a clear sky that strikes a person out taking a walk?
> Out of a population of 349,000,000 people. Sad, but most people can live their lives and be completely unaffected. Stop being sensationalist.
The figure I cited was for gunshot deaths of innocent people. Every year, over 100,000 people are shot in the US. More Americans die every year due to guns than they do because of auto accidents.
You can dismiss this as miniscule compared to the size of the population, and refuse to compare the numbers in the US to other developed nations, which shows how absurdly more risky the US is versus the rest of the "civilized world".
But what you can't do is pretend that gun violence doesn't have an impact on people that isn't measured in deaths and gunshot victims. Because there is plenty of evidence that the threat of gun violence has a major impact on the lives of Americans. For example, more than a third of Americans have avoided going to certain public places or events out of fear. See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40205802/
Other statistics, with citations, that I'm sure you'd dismiss:
> Are you really now characterizing incidents of gun violence and suicide as "freak incidents"?
Yup, as they basically are. Bolts of lighting would fall under "random acts of god/nature". Talking about whether or not guns should legally be ownable by citizens is an entirely different discussion.
> Every year, over 100,000 people are shot in the US. More Americans die every year due to guns than they do because of auto accidents.
Again, over 349,000,000 people. You do the math. Tons of car accidents, yet the world moves on and literally every adult I know, who doesn't live in Chicago/NYC/[rare place that's walkable + can afford it], drives. Find someone or something to blame for the geography of the country. Are we debating infrastructure now for a country the size of the US?
In any case, it does seem that you are capable of understanding what I meant by the original statement. It seems like all you want is to quibble over slight semantics in phrasing, and lecture someone who actually has lived in the US about how dangerous it really is. Have a day.
> Yup, as they basically are. Bolts of lighting would fall under "random acts of god/nature".
And a person using a gun to kill someone else is a "random act of god/nature" how exactly?
For someone who seems very confident of his knowledge of statistics, here's one for you: ~20-30 people die from lightning strikes in the US every year. Based on the averages, 4-6x that number died due to a gun yesterday alone.
I'm an American. Born and raised in one of the largest cities. I know at least half a dozen people who have been robbed at gunpoint, dated a woman who had been terrorized by a gun-nut ex, and one of my closest friends lost his father to suicide.
With all due respect, there's nothing more callous than believing that something doesn't impact vast numbers of people (proven by empirical evidence) simply because you apparently haven't experienced it yourself.
It's good to be able to stand your ground if that becomes necessary, I think. When I took concealed carry classes, they taught me to aim towards the center of mass to maximize my chances of a hit that would disable the attacker and to keep shooting until they stop being a threat.
But I also think that it is often more-useful and much, much safer to know how to de-escalate when that's possible. When I took martial arts classes, they taught me that the first step towards winning a fight was to avoid fighting to begin with, and always calm things down one notch at a time. If, and only if, that becomes impossible, then: Kick the snot out of them until they stop being a threat.
And running away can be useful: An attacker's ability to do harm decreases with distance. When I took army basic training, we trained a lot on running. They taught me that being able to run reasonably-quickly for reasonably-long distances was a skill that most people lack. Just keep running and the attacker will probably get tired and give up long before you do, which generally resolves the threat. If the threat persists after running away, then: Use the element of surprise and just turn around and stab them until they stop being a threat.
---
This is not an exhaustive list of methods and it is possible for any of them to go wrong. It's also possible to do nothing at all as a response and still have a very bad time of things.
It's a complex world. We've got billions of other people with different backgrounds, different problems, and different ideas of how they're going to get a little further ahead today than they were yesterday.
If we all had all of the answers, then we wouldn't have the kinds of desperation that leads to these problems to begin with.
But we don't all have all of the answers.
[−]BoingBoomTschak · 2026-08-30 Sun 08:36 UTC ·
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Come on, these maniacs would have used knives or clubs in any case. Or you one of these "the blade itself" guys?
Or basic simple profit for sociopaths. Organized criminal rings have turned catalytic converter theft into a multi-million to billion dollar+ industry. Its basically steal from the POOR middle-class and make the sociopaths even more rich.
Nobody desperate will dare steal from the gangs since its not just death, but PAIN before death.
Laziness mostly. It takes at least a decade of sustained exhausting mental and physical work to become a doctor, becoming a thief is mostly opportunity.
People often do get defined in terms of their profession or things they habitually do.
[−]HarlequinHair · 2026-08-30 Sun 08:35 UTC ·
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I agree with the general concept, but it's not practical to use.
What about a bad medic?
Or a thief that helps homeless people in their free time?
If it was easy, we would have simpler laws and better justice systems...
[−]crossroadsguy · 2026-08-30 Sun 14:41 UTC ·
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Now let's talk about a doctor-thief, or a thief-doctor - your preference. Let's not get into the reasons/circumstances, because I'm pretty sure those won't be on the cards when a gun is drawn, or two.
[−]hackable_sand · 2026-08-30 Sun 15:11 UTC ·
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Yeah. There were times in my life I would have put my life on the line (and that of the thief) to defend my vehicle and the tools within it. Those fed myself and my family. I would have had no reasonable means to replace my tools, and barely reasonable means to replace the damage a catalytic converter theft would have caused me.
Today it's trivially easy for me to say "property can be replaced, a life cannot" since I am exceedingly privileged. I would not put my life, or anyone else's on the line to defend anything but my and my family's personal safety. But I remember what it was like to not be so ridiculously privileged. So I get it.
Only someone who has never lived a hard day in their life can spew such stuff at other folks. It's entirely circumstantial.
The laws should reflect the prior case, not the privileged one. At least if you want to disincentivize criminal behavior.
Or you could have a society with a welfare safety net or even viable forms of transportation other than a private car. It appears that places where that happen also tend to have much lower crime rates as an added benefit.
This is a very normal commercial insurance problem. Sure, you can supplement it by buying a gun and staying up all night defending your truck, but the family ain’t gonna be happy if you bought the gun in lieu of insurance, especially if you lose that gunfight.
I would like to agree, but that's not how insurance works, at least in the U.S.
You get your catalytic converter stolen, and you will pay for it three times. The first is you paid for the original one. Then you paid for insurance to cover its theft, and likely your payments over the years have already paid for the catalytic converter a second time. And then after it's stolen, your insurance rates will raise such that you are paying for a 3rd (maybe fourth) converter, just on a monthly plan now.
Now, of course, shooting the thief is only cheaper if you don't invest much in your weapons and training, and don't face any legal scrutiny afterwards and need to hire a lawyer.
[−]crossroadsguy · 2026-08-30 Sun 14:38 UTC ·
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> I would have had no reasonable means to replace my tools, and barely reasonable means to replace the damage a catalytic converter theft would have caused me.
But if you had died in the interaction, and let's say the thief at that point even left the goods and decided to leave, that would have totally been a win outcome, because the property with which you provided your livelihood was saved… wait…
> Only someone who has never lived a hard day
Yeah right…
I never understood why people forget this:
- Life is more valuable esp. if "you + property" combo is the livelihood. Okay, let's make this simpler. Probability of tools replacement ≠ 0; definitely >0. Possibility of you being replaced after death =0. Yup, it's not >0 yet, folks.
- When you are going for a life-losing/taking-possibility escalation level, maybe don't forget it's a two-way street..
[−]hackable_sand · 2026-08-30 Sun 15:13 UTC ·
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No, I believe a combination of the police, state governments, and federal government should be able to handle a) street-level policing and b) shutting down the illicit trade of catalytic converters, without using invasive measures like flock cameras. But that would require the police being competent to any degree, instead of using overtime to steal even more of our tax dollars.
The stolen goods have to be sold and bought somewhere. If they can't accomplish this with the vast resources available to them, (amongst other longstanding issues), then we should probably rethink the taxation process, the election process, or both.
Okay: It's astonishingly easy to not get shot from committing crimes specifically home burglary or stealing expensive things from people. Other things may still befall you, because life is random like that, but if you don't do those specific things, I guarantee you won't get harmed as a result of doing those specific things. I make no other guarantees.
Doesn't quite roll off the tongue, does it?
> If anything, it's astonishingly easy to get shot in the US of A.
No, not really. It's easier than other countries, but I'm afraid you've bought into media sensationalism. The country has a population of 349,000,000 people. There will be crazy incidents. And they won't happen to the vast majority of people, at least, people who aren't tempting fate by doing stupid things like home burglary. But the ones that do happen, can get televised around the world.
The way the news talks about life in the US is completely out of touch. I myself have pulled into random driveways perhaps dozens of times. It's not uncommon when navigating suburbia. The way the news discusses it, I should be dead probably a dozen times over.
The problem is they never discuss all the other times people do that and nothing happens, which is nearly all of the time.
> The country has a population of 349,000,000 people. There will be crazy incidents.
By that logic, any country with a similar (or larger) population should have similar (or larger) gun deaths per capita as the USA, right?
Take India - population 4.3x but 15x fewer gun deaths per capita. Or Japan - 0.35x the population and 1500x fewer gdpc.
(Admittedly Brazil scuppers my counter-argument slightly - population is 0.6x but gdpc are 1.3x. Poverty and availability of guns seems to be the key rather than "random chance".)
Brazil has entire areas within the largest cities dominated by para-statal organizations that often are in shooting wars within themselves, with the government, or just decide to go on a terrorism spree against the civilian population.
[−]crossroadsguy · 2026-08-30 Sun 14:24 UTC ·
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> don't invade someone's home
And what constitutes "invading" someone's home? You know what, don't answer that.
So don't go around stealing catalytic converters. Same deal with states with "stand your ground laws". It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
And on the "replacing" part- on whose dime? What if someone's only means of transportation is affected, and they lose wages or outright lose their job? Are you going to pay for it? Of course not.
No, a better reason to not allow shooting of common thieves is that you don't want ordinary people shooting randomly at each other. The government / police should be able to handle this, but they either don't care or are incompetent.
Which leaves the ordinary upstanding citizen stuck between a rock and a hard place. The Man extracts taxes from their earnings, and thieves who ruin lives get a slap on the wrist because "lives are oh precious".
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/florida-road-rage-incident-...
Also, a news article of some random altercation doesn't change anything about what I said: It's simply impossible to be shot (or clubbed, or beaten up, or whatever) by someone in their home for invading, if you never invade people's homes in the first place. So don't do that. And don't steal catalytic converters either.
> It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
The clear, plain-English implication of what you're suggesting is: your risk of getting shot (in the US) is, to a large extent, directly correlated to your invasion of other people's homes.
Except that there's no evidence to support this. According to FBI data from 2015-2019, the ratio of criminal gun homicides to justifiable homicides (as in self-defense) was 34:1.
Over 10,000 innocent people are killed by guns every year in the US, including more than 1,000 young people. This excludes suicides, which itself is a number that you'd probably be wise to pay attention to.
Obvious disclaimer: It is completely obvious that freak incidents occur, that there are other ways to die, that there is no way to guarantee the future or that harm will never come to someone, and that there are exceptions to just about every statement.
But one CAN choose to avoid deliberately putting themselves in situations where harm can befall them, such as comitting crimes like breaking into someone's home, or stealing someone's property. It should be completely obvious that one stands better chances in general by not doing things that make other people obscenely angry.
> Over 10,000 innocent people are killed by guns every year in the US, including more than 1,000 young people. This excludes suicides, which itself is a number that you'd probably be wise to pay attention to.
Out of a population of 349,000,000 people. Sad, but most people can live their lives and be completely unaffected. Stop being sensationalist.
Are you really now characterizing incidents of gun violence and suicide as "freak incidents"? They just happen, like a random bolt of lightning in a clear sky that strikes a person out taking a walk?
> Out of a population of 349,000,000 people. Sad, but most people can live their lives and be completely unaffected. Stop being sensationalist.
The figure I cited was for gunshot deaths of innocent people. Every year, over 100,000 people are shot in the US. More Americans die every year due to guns than they do because of auto accidents.
You can dismiss this as miniscule compared to the size of the population, and refuse to compare the numbers in the US to other developed nations, which shows how absurdly more risky the US is versus the rest of the "civilized world".
But what you can't do is pretend that gun violence doesn't have an impact on people that isn't measured in deaths and gunshot victims. Because there is plenty of evidence that the threat of gun violence has a major impact on the lives of Americans. For example, more than a third of Americans have avoided going to certain public places or events out of fear. See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40205802/
Other statistics, with citations, that I'm sure you'd dismiss:
https://giffords.org/lawcenter/resources/gun-violence-statis...
Yup, as they basically are. Bolts of lighting would fall under "random acts of god/nature". Talking about whether or not guns should legally be ownable by citizens is an entirely different discussion.
> Every year, over 100,000 people are shot in the US. More Americans die every year due to guns than they do because of auto accidents.
Again, over 349,000,000 people. You do the math. Tons of car accidents, yet the world moves on and literally every adult I know, who doesn't live in Chicago/NYC/[rare place that's walkable + can afford it], drives. Find someone or something to blame for the geography of the country. Are we debating infrastructure now for a country the size of the US?
In any case, it does seem that you are capable of understanding what I meant by the original statement. It seems like all you want is to quibble over slight semantics in phrasing, and lecture someone who actually has lived in the US about how dangerous it really is. Have a day.
And a person using a gun to kill someone else is a "random act of god/nature" how exactly?
For someone who seems very confident of his knowledge of statistics, here's one for you: ~20-30 people die from lightning strikes in the US every year. Based on the averages, 4-6x that number died due to a gun yesterday alone.
I'm an American. Born and raised in one of the largest cities. I know at least half a dozen people who have been robbed at gunpoint, dated a woman who had been terrorized by a gun-nut ex, and one of my closest friends lost his father to suicide.
With all due respect, there's nothing more callous than believing that something doesn't impact vast numbers of people (proven by empirical evidence) simply because you apparently haven't experienced it yourself.
> Have a day.
You sure are pleasant.
But I also think that it is often more-useful and much, much safer to know how to de-escalate when that's possible. When I took martial arts classes, they taught me that the first step towards winning a fight was to avoid fighting to begin with, and always calm things down one notch at a time. If, and only if, that becomes impossible, then: Kick the snot out of them until they stop being a threat.
And running away can be useful: An attacker's ability to do harm decreases with distance. When I took army basic training, we trained a lot on running. They taught me that being able to run reasonably-quickly for reasonably-long distances was a skill that most people lack. Just keep running and the attacker will probably get tired and give up long before you do, which generally resolves the threat. If the threat persists after running away, then: Use the element of surprise and just turn around and stab them until they stop being a threat.
---
This is not an exhaustive list of methods and it is possible for any of them to go wrong. It's also possible to do nothing at all as a response and still have a very bad time of things.
It's a complex world. We've got billions of other people with different backgrounds, different problems, and different ideas of how they're going to get a little further ahead today than they were yesterday.
If we all had all of the answers, then we wouldn't have the kinds of desperation that leads to these problems to begin with.
But we don't all have all of the answers.
I might suppose that it's usually more the former than the latter, but there's degrees to each characteristic.
They perceive that they need things, and they don't necessarily care who they harm to get the things that satisfy this need.
(When we dress it up all nice and back it with corporate layers and an army of lawyers, sometimes we get CEOs.)
Nobody desperate will dare steal from the gangs since its not just death, but PAIN before death.
What about a bad medic? Or a thief that helps homeless people in their free time?
If it was easy, we would have simpler laws and better justice systems...
Today it's trivially easy for me to say "property can be replaced, a life cannot" since I am exceedingly privileged. I would not put my life, or anyone else's on the line to defend anything but my and my family's personal safety. But I remember what it was like to not be so ridiculously privileged. So I get it.
Only someone who has never lived a hard day in their life can spew such stuff at other folks. It's entirely circumstantial.
The laws should reflect the prior case, not the privileged one. At least if you want to disincentivize criminal behavior.
This is a very normal commercial insurance problem. Sure, you can supplement it by buying a gun and staying up all night defending your truck, but the family ain’t gonna be happy if you bought the gun in lieu of insurance, especially if you lose that gunfight.
You get your catalytic converter stolen, and you will pay for it three times. The first is you paid for the original one. Then you paid for insurance to cover its theft, and likely your payments over the years have already paid for the catalytic converter a second time. And then after it's stolen, your insurance rates will raise such that you are paying for a 3rd (maybe fourth) converter, just on a monthly plan now.
Now, of course, shooting the thief is only cheaper if you don't invest much in your weapons and training, and don't face any legal scrutiny afterwards and need to hire a lawyer.
But if you had died in the interaction, and let's say the thief at that point even left the goods and decided to leave, that would have totally been a win outcome, because the property with which you provided your livelihood was saved… wait…
> Only someone who has never lived a hard day
Yeah right…
I never understood why people forget this:
- Life is more valuable esp. if "you + property" combo is the livelihood. Okay, let's make this simpler. Probability of tools replacement ≠ 0; definitely >0. Possibility of you being replaced after death =0. Yup, it's not >0 yet, folks.
- When you are going for a life-losing/taking-possibility escalation level, maybe don't forget it's a two-way street..
There's a classic saying: "When seconds count, the police are minutes away."
...and going back to the original topic, even the Flock cameras aren't going to stop criminals, if that's what you're implying.
The stolen goods have to be sold and bought somewhere. If they can't accomplish this with the vast resources available to them, (amongst other longstanding issues), then we should probably rethink the taxation process, the election process, or both.
> It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
Is pat to the point of naiveté.
People get shot turning into the wrong driveway[1], or knocking on the wrong door[2]. If anything, it's astonishingly easy to get shot in the US of A.
But, you probably meant something like that when you said
> you don't want ordinary people shooting randomly at each other. The government / police should be able to handle this [but don't.
And I agree with that on both points.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kaylin_Gillis [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Ralph_Yarl
Doesn't quite roll off the tongue, does it?
> If anything, it's astonishingly easy to get shot in the US of A.
No, not really. It's easier than other countries, but I'm afraid you've bought into media sensationalism. The country has a population of 349,000,000 people. There will be crazy incidents. And they won't happen to the vast majority of people, at least, people who aren't tempting fate by doing stupid things like home burglary. But the ones that do happen, can get televised around the world.
The way the news talks about life in the US is completely out of touch. I myself have pulled into random driveways perhaps dozens of times. It's not uncommon when navigating suburbia. The way the news discusses it, I should be dead probably a dozen times over. The problem is they never discuss all the other times people do that and nothing happens, which is nearly all of the time.
By that logic, any country with a similar (or larger) population should have similar (or larger) gun deaths per capita as the USA, right?
Take India - population 4.3x but 15x fewer gun deaths per capita. Or Japan - 0.35x the population and 1500x fewer gdpc.
(Admittedly Brazil scuppers my counter-argument slightly - population is 0.6x but gdpc are 1.3x. Poverty and availability of guns seems to be the key rather than "random chance".)
And what constitutes "invading" someone's home? You know what, don't answer that.