The gun lobby has gone out of its way to make it damn near impossible for the CDC to conduct studies on gun violence.
The good news, the evidence is overwhelming enough that an idiot like me can figure out how exquisitely unnecessary guns really are.
Try this the next time you're talking to one of your conservative friends.
So, I was thinking about ATM machines. In the context of people who think they need a gun to protect their home. Putting aside the fact that very often the presence of a gun in the house makes people objectively less safe by putting them at risk of being shot accidentally--putting all that aside, it's really not hard to see that buying a gun is, at least, a waste of money.
See, here's the thing. If stockpiles of weapons really were such a great way to defend your home, would we expect more lethal force at banks? Commercial institutions who, if they don't know how to do anything else, know how to take in lots of money and spend as little as they can? And yet, they don't make such use of force as you'd expect if lethal force were such an important tool.
Here are the key security features involved in safeguarding ATM's:
- They're filled at random intervals. The person who fills them may very well be armed, but typically it's nothing more than a small handgun. Certainly not a semiautomatic. And ATM's certainly aren't guarded 24/7 by armed guards.
- They're protected by (non-lethal) "man traps" in the sense that you need to use your card once to get in the kiosk, and then again to access your money.
- Security cameras
As for people who try to rob banks during hours, here's how it works. If you were to go into a bank and pass a note to the teller saying, "I have a gun, give me $1,000,000" you'd probably get the money. Now, what would also happen is that the money would have a special dye, or the bank would track the serial numbers on the bills, and probably after you left, they'd call the cops.
Versions of these types of security are easy enough to implement for one's home; many apartment buildings do have such systems.