image of S. Spokane Street near Post Falls, Idaho

In a region where 56.9% of residents own guns, if you force entry into a home and get shot, you deserve your Darwin Award. The odds just aren’t in your favor.

The region in this case is the beautiful state of Idaho, which takes the Bronze among all U.S. states in terms of gun ownership. Only two states (Arkansas and Alaska) can boast a more heavily armed population:

image via Business Insider

Nevertheless, since there is apparently no limit to stupidity, a 24-year-old man decided to take his chances and break into a Post Falls home at 1:30 a.m. Monday morning. In short order, he made enough noise to awaken the man and woman who were sleeping there.

The home invader caused significant damage to interior property and aggressively ignored several commands to leave before the homeowner shot him several times with a handgun.

The Sheriff’s office, as interviewed by KHQ, reported:

“Preliminary, the investigation indicates a male and female were sleeping inside the residence and were awaken by loud crashing noises coming from inside their home. The male resident discovered an intruder had forced his way into the home through a door and was continuing to damage property inside. The resident confronted the intruder verbally telling him to leave. After being told several times to leave, the intruder, who also appears to have been armed during the incident, began aggressing both residents. The male resident fired several rounds from a handgun, which ultimately stopped the intruder’s attack.”

PSA to those considering a career in burglary in Idaho: You’ll get better odds in Vegas.

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64 COMMENTS

  2. One less bad guy who wants to take other people’s stuff and do harm to those he’s taking from. Good news.

    • No kidding.
      I thought the number of mobsters and street gang members was way over 25%.
      And then there’s all the rich people and their private security workers…

    • Well, people in certain districts probably all carry illegally… and people in the others are all federal agents or have armed protection…

    • Probably the same way they came up with the number for any state which doesn’t have any sort of registration scheme: anal extraction.

  4. Wyoming is 5th I think, but we have less than 700,000 people. So that is a lot of houses with guns, and trucks, cars, babystrollers, purses and…. did I say constitutional carry? Open carry?

  5. I know this may be silly, but I wish it was standard practice to give the ammo brand, caliber, and bullet weight info with every newsworthy shooting report…

    • Any person familiar with handguns can infer, from the facts given, which cartridge was used with reasonable accuracy.
      Clearly, as ‘several’ rounds were fired, which ‘ultimately’ stopped the intruder’s attack, we can safely conclude that the gun fired some useless, underpowered, antiquated cartridge smaller than .40 S&W, such as a 9mm.
      [giggle, snort]

      • Dunno. I recommended a Kel-Tec CMR-30 to a friend who’s RA makes it hard for her to use most handguns. A handful of .22 magnums to the center mass can do a lot of damage and still leave plenty of rounds available for a follow up if necessary. Having a gun is better than no gun.

        • Absolutely. The best carry gun is the one you carry EVERY day.

          And it is true – Idaho (Constitutional carry) is NOT a good state for home invasions. Or any kind of terrorist attack outside of Gun-Free Zones (we do have a few of those, mostly connected to universities and hospitals and other locales run by libs.)

    • I’m trying to find a way to donate my body to Speer/Hornady/Federal in the event of an untimely demise, so they may have actual adult male body to test ammo on. I’m 6’1, 185, so I should be a fairly good test subject.

      • No real call for that sort of thing. Goats do just fine as ‘test subjects,’ and they can be obtained still very much alive to get actual lethality results, unlike what one gets from shooting a corpse. Once someone is a corpse, pretty much anything will do to ‘kill’ them as they won’t get any more ‘dead’ no matter what they’re shot with.
        I mean, you can even shoot a corpse with a 9mm and still get a one-shot ‘kill.’
        Now, if you want to donate your body before you’re quite done with it, that’s another thing altogether.

    • They seem to get all the little details when it’s a mass shooting, but in a clean self defence shoot the story goes “owner uses gun”.

    • The ammo brand was Taurus, or possibly Smith & Wesson, the caliber was high, and the bullet weight was very dense.

      What? You expected more information than that? From a “journalist”?

  6. Is it actually possible that Nebraskans are out gunned by Massachusetts, Maryland and DC? And Hawaii at 45%?

    • Nah. Nebraskans and Ohioans are simply a lot less trusting of government than the people of Hawaii, Maryland, Massachussetts, and D.C. — which means Nebraskans and Ohioans are much more inclined to answer “no” to surveys asking if they own firearms.

    • 45% because of mandatory registration, alot of gun owners here just crappy laws. Authorities know what you have and where they are for the most part, SUCKS i know. I was surprised at missouri with 27.1 but unregistered makes sence now

      • Funny…I’m from Kane’ohe and was the only one I knew that owned guns. I’m in Texas, now, and almost everyone I know owns firearms. Guess my local friends kept their mouths shut in public, for fear of becoming outcasts. If someone polled me in Texas for gun ownership, I’d say “no”, too.

        If Hawai’i is at 45% with mandatory reporting, Texas must actually be at 90%!

        • From what i’ve heard and read it wouldn’t surprise me, i’m from hilo and the gun community has been growing over the years. 45% seems right, about half the people i know own at least one.

    • Well, Omaha and Lincoln are where most of the population is and I’m betting that most of the gangbangers and thugs aren’t answering “yes” to the poll question…

  7. Outside the Boise metro area (which this was), odds are really not in his favor. Being on the border, I know lots of Idahoans, and can’t think of one that doesn’t have at least one gun in their home.

    • Post Falls is not near Boise. It is actually nearly 400 miles from Boise. If 400 miles is the Boise metropolitan area then I guess I live in it too in Lewiston! Post Falls is basically a suburb of Spokane.

      • Should have phrased that differently. I was trying to say that it was outside the Boise area. I live in Clarkston. Hi neighbor!

        • Clarkston of course is the same as Lewiston however, it has Washington’s gun laws. I like this side of the Snake River better! I do go to the Costco in Clarkston though. Of course you don’t need a permit to carry in Idaho but you do in the cities of Washington, albeit not outside the cities. However, Asotin Sheriff’s department will issue Lewiston residents permits without problem. There is no difference in the people on either side of the river. I doubt Asotin County will enforce 1639 if it passes.

          Vote no on 1639! And vote for Cathy McMorris Rodgers. Cathy is honest which is unusual for a politician but of course she’s not a lawyer. She was a guest for three days on a yacht I was running in Alaska. She refused to take the company jet and flew commercial to Alaska. She wanted to pay for the fishing license! I told her no guests pay for their fishing license and I didn’t have a way to take in money in my accounting system which wasn’t true. She reluctantly took it. Other politicians took everything they could get. She’s different. My crew didn’t like her saying she’s not like the rest of the politicians. I thought that was a good thing.

        • Did my part on voting yesterday. Crossing my fingers now and just trying to influence anyone I can. I’d move to ID in a heartbeat if it wasn’t for that damned income tax.

  8. I suspect the ownership percentage in a lot of states in the midsection are under reported. Most of the people I know will not respond to a stranger asking questions. OPSEC.

  10. I would like to know where they get these percentages from, because even with Atlanta being what it is 31 percent is way too low for Georgia.

    • The media wants to continue that ‘gun ownership is dying out’ lie. I’d bet a months retirement that if you could get an honest number that 75% of American homes own at least one gun.

      • JWM,

        Now there is an interesting question: how many households in the United States have at least one functional firearm?

        I would put it around 50% and I would be really surprised if it was as high as 65%.

        • I know lots of folks right here in the bay area that own a gun. Some of these guns are generational. They were handed down thru families without any paperwork done. I know one old lady that has a Colt .38 that was bought 60+ years ago and it has hid in her dresser drawer since.

      • I think you’d likely be correct or close to it. These kind of stats are nothing more than WAG’s with a dash of deceit thrown in. Keeps everyone off balance and bickering about irrelevant details. That’s like that 75% of all guns are owned by 10% of the population that I read some place recently. Bucket of horse manure fit only to fertilize a veggie garden.

  11. Would love to know where the get their stats. I know I’ve never answered any firearms questions. Is it from the 4473. I know my state doesn’t transmit them anywhere. They simply stay in the retailer’s shop.

  12. I suspect that the gun-ownership is near the meth-lab number in ideho,about the same in washington,only way more meth-ers. except in seattle-tacoma there the dopers out-number the fly’s and mosquitos.

    • Close, considering the humor factor.
      I live in Phoenix, and most of my friends have guns, as do most of my neighbors.

      As for where the figures come from, there are a lot of sources; some are more factual than others.
      Phone polls are notoriously inaccurate.
      States with mandatory registration are probably low estimates because of smuggled guns.
      Search warrants give a somewhat skewed estimate (because most homes are never searched, and those that are belong to or are somehow connected to criminals), but can be augmented by arrest searches of persons and vehicles, as well as observable and anecdotal evidence of sales.
      Gun sellers, importers and manufacturers don’t give out numbers, so no one can go by such data, because it just isn’t available.
      Guns, being relatively small, can travel fairly easily. I can, for example ,gift any of the guns I own at will (despite buying them legally, I am still allowed to give/sell them as long as I believe the receiver is not a PP or resides in a state where the gun would be illegal; I just need to wait a believable length of time before deciding to do so).
      Given all this and more, any estimates of gun ownership per geographic area is only and estimate, and can carry no weight as for being factual.
      Even the actual number of guns in the US (outside of governmental ownership) can be nothing more than a wild estimate. Some put the number as low as under 300 million, others as high as 600 million. Personally, I believe it’s somewhere between 450 million and 600 million, with the number closer to 500 million than 450 million. But, as with all these numbers, that just an estimate.

      • Most estimates are the result of estimating a “life span” of firearms, which is stupid. How many have been manufactured in America since 1900, how many have been imported, add a+b, that is how many guns there are. I have guns which might as well be new in box which are nearly 50 years old, they do not wear out. My guess is near a billion.

        • Well, as I said, we don’t know how many have been manufactured, because that information isn’t released.

  15. Most estimate that there are roughly 10 million firearm owners in California, a bit higher than the figure shown, but it doesn’t really matter since so many of them are FUDDs who won’t vote to protect their gun rights or are totally oblivious to the changes taking place. They voted for the “ammo registration” law because they didn’t read the proposition, or didn’t think it would affect their purchase of shotgun shells, and I’d bet there are a half a million unregistered AR “assault weapons” floating around out there because they were oblivious to the new law–maybe still are. IF these people would vote as a bloc, we could change the law in California. but it just ain’t gonna happen until it is too late.

  17. Do any of these polls take into the consideration, the number of firearms owned prior to record keeping? There may be millions of old rifles, pistols and shotguns never entered into any modern records. I’ve had fun shooting my great-grand pa’s Civil War carbine for example. No record of that I’m sure.

    • Adam, I live in suburban western MO and believe the percentage much higher than the 2015 numbers shown on this map. It sure has seemed to me that the concealed carry classes have been heavily attended for years and didn’t really stall even after the change in the law in 2017 allowing concealed carry without being licensed. I guess there’s really no way to really know the real numbers which all things considered is fine with me since it really isn’t anybody’s business!

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