Why do some authors refuse to embrace firearms and their use in self defense? This is insane! When a bad guy is trying to kill you you need to do whatever it takes to stop him and if you have a firearm you should use it to kill him first. This isn't evil. It's common sense.
Owning/having access to firearms is an American thing.
It is usually much harder in other countries to get permits to even have a firearm. So they might not be as easy to have for self defense.
I find with American authors, having their MCs blow the heads off of bad guys is more common than authors from other countries where they use different methods.
authors from other countries where they use different methods.
Luc Besson doesn't have a problem blowing bad guys' heads off. I guess he could use his native guillotine. Or maybe he just writes for an American audience.
To me, the difference would be a 'fairly average' MC and Luc Besson's not-at-all-average MCs. Leon not using a gun would be absurd. But the average French homeowner might, or might not, have a gun at hand for self-defense purposes. Someone writing a story set in France and involving a home invasion would need to account for that.
...if you have a firearm you should use it to kill him first.
I'm trying to remember the last story I read where (a) a person has a gun, (b) they are attacked and (c) they don't use the gun (or at least attempt to do so.) Not coming up with any off the top of my head. I occasionally see one where the gun owner attempts to deescalate, but those are in confrontations, not attacks.
I'm trying to remember the last story I read where (a) a person has a gun, (b) they are attacked and (c) they don't use the gun (or at least attempt to do so.)
A couple of times in my series A Well-Lived Life, but the MC is a 6th Dan ShΕtΕkan instructor.
That sounds amusingly like a 'Chekhov's Gun' situation. If there is a gun, one must fire it, no? Certainly, if there is a gun, and a situation where the use of a gun is reasonable, it 'must' be used.
If all you have is a hammer, all of your problems look like nails.
Sometimes authors go to extreme lengths, oyster50 had a scene where his female MC (Cindy) was at home with her husband when a baddie with a grudge, backup and automatic rifles came calling. Given that "home" was a trailer, that was not a good situation. Her husband also had automatic weapons and a firefight ensued where the bad guys died and at least one of the good guys suffered a minor wound. WTF? The bad guys even knew where the good guys were but did not take them down through the walls.
RLFJ's Grim Reaper has a more realistic take on that. MC engages the bad guys from a blind outside his house and still gets injured. The house is badly damaged and requires a partial rebuild.
Thinking about this, I think I've had two 'bad guy trying to kill you' situations (one 'off-page', but the reader knows what happened, and one only partly 'on-page'). In both cases, there was no chance of self-defense. One bad guy later died by firearm. The other did not and is, as best as we know, not dead, and his intended victim would not have wished him dead.
To me, it depends entirely on the characters (who, in turn, depend on the author, obviously). If the character is a strict pacifist, they wouldn't use a firearm even if one was present. Or, if the character was skilled at non-lethal self-defense, they would likely resolve the situation without anyone dying. I suspect most people would find that preferable. Some characters could gun down an assailant and be fine with it. Others would be tortured with guilt for life, even if it was entirely and obviously an 'either them or me' situation.
That doesn't necessarily say anything about the author. If I chose to write a pacifist, and had them pass up lethal self-defense, that wouldn't make me a pacifist (and I am not, in fact, a pacifist). It just means the use of force is incompatible with the story. If I do have any pacifists, though, it's news to me - no one has declared it.
It just feels like a fairly broad question, and one where there are a lot of nuanced answers. Characters should behave consistently with who they are, but there are a wide variety of opinions about lethal self-defense amongst average folks. Why would it be different in fiction?
Why do some authors refuse to embrace firearms and their use in self defense? This is insane! When a bad guy is trying to kill you, you need to do whatever it takes to stop him and if you have a firearm, you should use it to kill him first.
Because theory and reality don't often exist on the same...errr...page.
There is a reason firing squads are made up of many people, because studies have found that some were inclined to deliberately miss. Making them part of a collective helps lessen the guilt and makes it more likely for the shooter to aim properly.
Even trained soldiers struggle to kill when required, and it's one of the reasons why bayonet training is the way it is, because it's designed to break down innate mental barriers.
Of course, some people have no issue with killing, but for the majority of individuals (thankfully), when faced with the option of killing someone else, they hesitate, or fire warning shots, or aim to miss.
It should be pointed out, that out of those who actually do kill another human being, many have severe trauma issues after the fact. A fucked up version of 'survivor's guilt'. This, unsurprisingly, very rarely makes it into fiction, so those who glorify the act of taking a life (gang members for instance) are often taken by surprise by their emotions months after the deed.
Again, there is the caveat that some individuals are immune to the innate and societal restrictions to taking another life.
It should also be noted that American films have a history of romanticising gun violence, so you could argue that Hollywood is responsible for a certain level of indoctrination amongst certain demographics. "I'm gonna bust a cap in yo' ass.."
Under the pseudonym Adam Hall, Elleston Trevor wrote a series of books about a British secret agent, Quiller, who always refused to use a gun. I think one or two even made it onto celluloid.
AJ
Even trained soldiers struggle to kill when required, and it's one of the reasons why bayonet training is the way it is, because it's designed to break down innate mental barriers.
It should be pointed out, that out of those who actually do kill another human being, many have severe trauma issues after the fact.
Yep. I have a cousin who was very G.I. Joe, rah, rah army, etc... He ended up as a sniper in, I believe, Iraq. He gets very quiet and shakes when he talks about 'taking the shot'. The army trained him to kill, and he did it, but it wasn't easy then and he's still paying for it.
I did some research on this for a character, and most people who kill in immediate self-defense are traumatized by it afterward, some for the rest of their lives.
I had a HS classmate who was in Vietnam, spending a lot of his time there as a sniper. Last I talked with him, he still would not talk about that part of his service. He talked about being on patrols where his unit came under fire and they returned fire, and general life as a soldier in Nam, but not about the reasons he received his medals.
Why do some authors refuse to embrace firearms and their use in self defense? This is insane! When a bad guy is trying to kill you you need to do whatever it takes to stop him and if you have a firearm you should use it to kill him first. This isn't evil. It's common sense.
Do you have examples of authors going out of theri way in contrived ways to have their character use a gun? Because all the cases of 'stories with 'self defense without a gun' wre ones where it made perfect sense that the defender did not have access to a gun.
Also, not having a gun makes it a lot easier to justify "the hero beat the bad guy but he comes back the next day with help"
in most of the world, self defense has been OUTLAWED by governments, and actually defending yourself against a criminal normally results in a prison sentence longer then the criminal you stopped from raping you or your child for instance.
https://www.petersweden.org/p/sweden-pepperspray-illegal
in most of the world, self defense has been OUTLAWED by governments, and actually defending yourself against a criminal normally results in a prison sentence longer then the criminal you stopped from raping you or your child for instance.
LOL!
Might want to read your own cite, which even with all its bias and misused statistics fails to support your claim.
It was not only illegal, but a felony, to carry pepper spray on campus when I was in graduate school. It had been a felony everywhere in the state a while back. When that was repealed, they failed to remove the sections applying to state property, with the notion that they didn't want to be legal to bring pepper spray into to state capital. Only later did they realize it also left college campuses unprotected.
We carried it anyway. The odds of it being found were low, and (as far as I know, anyway) no one was ever prosecuted.
No one I know was ever threatened or needed to defend themselves, but it does mean I knowingly and intentionally committed a felony on a daily basis for several years.
Note that the penalties for carrying pepper spray, while potentially serious, are not longer than the sentence would be for rape, and the woman in the referenced article received a fine, not prison time. Per some very quick research, prison time is applied only if the pepper spray is used to commit another crime.
Plus, there are other defense sprays which can be carried legally there and which Swedish police encourage people to use. That's hardly a case of outlawing self defense. There were no legal sprays on campus when I was in school.
I wouldn't carry classic 'pepper spray' now, either. It was the right choice at the time, but there were limited alternatives and we didn't have the options we have now. Pepper spray turns out to be a fairly lousy self-defense option compared to others. I have no idea if the other options Sweden does allow are better, though.
Pepper spray was part of the plot in a Wes Boyd story (Bird in the Hand, not currently on this site). The kid had a restraining order out on a much larger kid and carried bear spray, assuming that big boy was going to ignore that restraining order.
In real life, there was an incident on a school bus (or a classroom) in my area around a week ago. Someone used pepper spray in an enclosed area and put a bunch of kids in hospital. He was arrested, no idea if there was anything more to it than someone doing stupid things.