An Update on Boyds Car-wash encounter.
I spoke with the police, and let them know about the event. I provided as detailed a description of all the actors as best as I was able, and they have filed it as something for which to be alert. No incident report, nothing else exciting.
First up, unless you want to call Boyd a Liar, this means that the Cops found his use of a gun acceptable, therefore making it a legitimate Defensive Gun Use in the eyes of the police, but given that there was no damage, nobody harmed, and the altercation ended as quickly as it started, they didn’t feel the need to add more paperwork to their day. (I used to work for the government…I totally sympathize with that!)
But this means that besides Boyd’s blog, there is no record of this DGU happening. No news reports, no police report, no death certificates, no court documents. If one were to attempt to compile a list of defensive gun uses, unless Boyd was personally interviewed and felt like sharing his story it may never be logged.
This is why there’s such a massive and nebulous swing in reports on Defensive Gun Use, and why when the antis say that DGUs rarely happen I must call “Bullshit”, and while it might be fair to say that some false positives show up in surveys about defensive gun uses, studies that use police reports and other hard data GREATLY under-report the number of times guns save lives.
Of course the numbers for violent crime are NOT greatly under-reported, so carry your guns people, because a statistic is NOT something you want to be, and with a little luck you’ll be like Boyd and make it out of the woods free-and-clear, without your daughter even noticing how scary things got for a moment, or how wonderful it is to have a Dad that will stop at nothing to keep his daughter safe.
One phrase they used:
“No crime was successfully committed.”
That sums up exactly what you just said. Defensive use is under-reported by several orders of magnitude, and for good reason. I would personally hate to have to report every time I’ve used a firearm defensively (from a signing statements, filling out paperwork, etc. Did that once. Don’t want to again.), and I’d hate for the LEOs to have to do the processing for every use. It would bog down the system, and there would be more of the negative incidents as a result.
Just one more reason to ca….Oh, I’ll let Weer’d finish the sentiment.