Just look at what has happened in Great Britain. You cannot even protect yourself or your family or your home. You are right most of us who own and legally carry with thank God never ever have to pull them or use them. I try to avoid any confrontation or areas that may be questionable. But as they say bad things happen to good people in nice places. I like to be prepared. Just in case Sierra Hotel.

Second attempt was two months later. Broke out the grill slats, no blood and no wire. Filed a second report. Response time, one hour and ten minutes. Ordered a shamboks online as it is the weapon that causes the most amount of pain with the lowest risk of killing or crippling. Camped out on the futon in the front room just five feet away from the cars. First with my sword, then with my shamboks which arrived two days later.

The next day I hear glass breaking and peek through the blinds and see a dude set a gar two cars over from mine on fire. I keep my lights off and call 911 to report an arson. Leave the lights off and watch car burn, for a few minutes. I get a call from an arson detective seven minutes later. I tell him what I saw and advise him that I will not talk to any police who show up on scene, but that I will gladly talk to him in person. I did not want to be seen talking to the police anymore than anyone else was. As the fire burned the car’s lights and horn came on. About a minute later a tire blew out. I felt it was safe to turn the lights on in my apartment at that point.

One patrol car, response time 11 minutes, and two fire trucks, response time 12 min, showed up. Arson team showed up 17 minutes from my call and videotaped the fire being put out. The arson team and one of the regular cops knocked on my door. I said: “You can write in your report that I called 911 when I heard the horn honking and woke up to see the fire. That’s a lie, but you can talk to detective M at Arson to get the truth. I do not want it to seem like I know more than anyone else, so please leave me alone.” They scribbled in their notepads and left. Nothing ever came of the investigation. Arsonist skipped town.

Still if it had been my car being broken into, it woul;d have been shamboks first and 911 later. You do have to say the response time was very good.

Interestingly, there are more regulations on knives and other edged weapons than there are on guns. There’s no way I could get away with openly carrying a sword of a shamboks in Texas, but I could get a permit to pack a Glock if I wanted to. Seems kind of weird. Guns OK, but a Bowie knife outside your home is a misdemeanor. Don’t we remember the Alamo?

Get your police funded.
Get it re-organized
Relax
Reading all the comments about “I need to protect my loved ones”, I doubt that unless you live in a very bad part of town, it really is that bad.
I’m a part-time single mum, meaning that I spend 5 out of 7 nights alone at home with my children. Most of the time, I don’t even lock my door and I’m not living in the best part of town.
I’m not afraid. I’m not taking risks with the lives of my children. I know that driving them to their grandma is indeed riskier than leaving the door unlocked.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/xblog/2012/01/07/report-suspicious-behavior/

where an incident that you’d think would be a priority call takes wa-aay too long to get attended to. Hmmm ..

Central to this meme is the idea that the police a) won’t arrive at your home for a very long time after you’ve called them and b) the police are not even required to go to your home if you call them. (I’ll deal with the first, but not second of these here.)

To the second of those : What the .. !

Is that *really* the case? Because it isn’t what I’d have thought for sure. I’d have expected that if you call them asking for police help to prevent or report a crime then the police were pretty much legally as well as ethically obliged to come to your aid as their job description.

Is that not so?

(Okay if they have other higher priorities it may take a while but at some stage, surely?)

I hope you do go on to address that issue later in aanother post soon. Please?

I’d like to refuse to vote for anyone who promises not to ever raise taxes. Unfortunately, I don’t think that leaves me too many choices.

Start with the total number of cases where the homeowner must confront an intruder. Subtract the instances where the ordinary-person homeowner gets the “drop” on the intruder, who is likely more experienced at violence than the homeowner. Compare the remaining number to cases where homeowners harm themselves or a loved one is harmed by the gun for whatever reason. The difference between those two figures would be a better basis of discussion.

We are not in disagreement about how busy police may be on a given force. But I am saying that this is something that can be adjusted. I have not yet drunk the Kool-Aid that nothing can change when it comes to essential services because no-tax policies have become permanent and fundamental to our way of life.

We pay for our public education via referenda, we pay too little for police protection and have mayhem in certain places and times. In some cases, the fire departments have been underfunded and homes have burned down.

I agree that it is state and local tax shortfalls that are the main problem.

Keep in mind my comment regarding crying “Wolf”. A police officer sitting at a speed trap isn’t going to jump at every call…hence the judgement call aspect of their response. I’ve been in a police car when calls have come in and the officer stayed on his patrol because the call that came in (it wasn’t directed at a specific officer / car) didn’t seem to any more important than potentially snagging a reckless driver. And I would call your example a bit of a strawman argument (of course a police officer is going to dump a minor traffic ticket in favor of something serious).

With the various cuts across state and local forces (since raising taxes to pay for such things is a strict no-no), police departments get hit too. Being short a few fire fighters rarely has any impact to their response times, but being short a few police officers that are always out and about definitely has an impact on response time…and has already (and will continue to) increased the odds that you are asking the police officers to drop one emergency situation in favor of a different emergency situation.

Ultimately, I do think the cuts of local and state government funds is the largest culprit in the described problem. That is the unfortunate problem with your (correct) solution of adding police officers.

Plus, if cops are often doing nothing then how would a political leader justify adding police? “Folks, I know crime is down nationwide, but I need more of your money to make sure that what happens in Oklahoma, which might be an outlier when it comes to response times, doesn’t happen here.”