The Top 40

Why not a sign that says, "Rob me first."

If that house had a sign that said instead "proudly defended by M4", how many bad guys are going to push their luck and find out if it's true? No, they'll go to the house like the one in the picture every time. I once saw a sign at a store in rural Arizona: "these premises defended by shotgun three days per week. You guess which three". The owner said he'd had the sign up for years, and nobody had taken him up on his offer.

Gun deaths are not senseless just because we do not like the killer's sensibilities. It makes perfect sense to him. What is senseless is to disarm his prey.

On a related note, this from Solzhenitsyn:

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security I operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Santa Ana kicked off the Texas Revolution when he demanded that the folks in Gonzales give up their cannon (a 7 pounder!) and all their firearms (they refused). Texans still nurse a strong distaste for dictators, and anyone else who threatens to take their firearms.

I've asked the attorney that runs my state's firearms association about gun-related yard signs. He strongly advises against any indication that your home has a gun because a gun is the most valuable item to be stolen IF nobody is home.

I really really wanted to post a "trespassers will be shot, survivors will be shot again" or a "beware of guard dog, he is armed and won't take his medicine."

best sign in our neighborhood:

"Beware of Dog (the cat can't be trusted either)"

It is my wish that every home in America that doesn't have a gun put up a sign like that. It will make my home less likely to be broken in to.

One retired man I know well has this sign posted at his home: "Premises owned by former U.S. Marine. Robbing me will be the last thing you do today. Or ever."

Putting up any sign is a tip off. Much better to let them guess. What they don't know can kill them.

Peccable, so true, uncertainty helps your odds, not theirs. Someone close to me was an armed robber in his youth. By his count, he robbed over a hundred homes with people in them. He'd get the drop on them, make the entire family get under a rug, and proceed to clean the place out. He has great remorse for it all now. I lived in that community, and never heard a peep about it while it was going on.

Maybe the newspapers should post lists (with accompanying maps) of the "gun-free home" activists, as a community service. I'm certain that it would rapidly become apparent that "gun-free homes" cause higher neighborhood crime rates. Following along the same train of thought, maybe our eager-to-pass-more-laws legislators should ban these signs (and levy huge fines) in the interest of public safety and lower crime rates.