Indeed. The attacker is usually either certifiably crazy or extremely angry. In both cases he's very likely to have both great strength and reduced sensation of pain. If you intervene you could very well become his first victim, without providing any help to his original victim at all. Sacrificing your life (or a long hospitalization and possibly a lifelong disability) for nothing. If you're not trained in handling such situations, or at least a strong, quick, tough kid with lots of fighting experience, leave it to the professionals.
And I doubt that any of those kids hang out on SciForums.
The odds are 3:1 that instead of stopping an intruder or a cougar/panther/mountain lion/whatever you call it where you live, your gun will be: A) Used by you in anger against someone who is in your house with your permission, very commonly your spouse; B) Discharged by you by mistake against someone who you're not expecting, don't recognize, came to the wrong house out of confusion, or came to your house to beg you to call 911; C) Taken from you by a strong, crazy intruder and used to kill somebody else. Every gun in private hands in America makes
every one of us a tiny bit less safe. Guns now kill more Americans than road accidents (if we count suicides, and guns make suicide so easy that we should definitely count them) and over the past 30 years they have killed nine times as many of us as terrorists. In fact, you are
five times as likely to use your gun to kill
yourself as an intruder or dangerous wildlife!
The only reason we don't all know that is that the news media report
every single death or injury caused by terrorists, but they only report
one out of eight gun deaths and only
one out of sixty injuries! The NRA has tremendous influence.
Have you ever talked to the "gun-packing people"? They are utterly irrational. They have no logic, no position to argue, guns are just a religion to them. If you think I'm wrong and they're really as sane as you and me, consider the fact that their current "justification" for having military-style weapons is that some day our own government will turn against us and we'll all be glad they have those weapons to fight off the government.
Really??? Have you seen
the weapons the government has? These wackos with their machine guns and body armor will last about eight seconds!
Besides, the next war, whether it's a civil war or a war between countries or a religious war, will be fought in
cyberspace. In fact it's already happening! We're really lucky that we owe so much money to China. They would never attack the USA, it would destroy their own economy. Their government hackers are probably working overtime to clandestinely
strengthen our pathetic computer security, so the Russians and Iranians don't break into it!