Not going to name names, but I saw possibly the most retarded thing ever in my Facebook feed today.
It was a discussion related to the issue of whether one thought carrying a weapon was a good idea, which devolved into a shitfit about what one would and would not do to defend one’s family.
I stayed out of it, but just watched.
Basically, person A thinks American gun culture is “insane” and that he would never want a gun and even when it comes to defending his family, he would use “peaceful means” and not violence to defend them because he wouldn’t want his daughter to ever think that her father was the sort of man who could kill another human being.
Person B asked him point blank if he would seriously maintain that stand if it came to defending the daughter’s life: ie, there is a psycho threatening the girl, are you saying you will not defend her in order to maintain this pacifist ideal?
Person A was outraged at being asked such a “disgusting” question.
Now, I know, and I suspect B knows as well, hence the question, that every day around the world and particularly in the United States, people do use firearms to defend themselves and their loved ones. Most of the time, not a single shot is even fired, you brandish the weapon and the criminal runs off to ruin an easier target’s day. I recall one acquaintance telling me of a creepy guy ringing the doorbell and trying to get his wife to open the door further, I forget what the pretense was, but when my acquaintance came to the door and positioned himself so the creep could see the holster on his hip, the creep got very nervous and quickly blurted out something along the line of “uh, sorry to bother you, have a nice day!” and quickly retreated. That sort of thing is far more common than anyone knows because it’s often, maybe usually, not reported to authorities to be counted in the statistics.
By the way, I want to pull something out of that Forbes article:
On the other hand, Newsweek has reported that law-abiding American citizens using guns in self-defense during 2003 shot and killed two and one-half times as many criminals as police did, and with fewer than one-fifth as many incidents as police where an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal (2% versus 11%).
First of all, boo hoo hoo. Fuck the criminals. [And no shit there’s fewer cases of mistakingly shooting an innocent person: if someone’s attacking you such that you need to shoot them, it’s obvious you’re shooting someone who is attacking you. Duh.]
Second of all, here’s a little note: it takes time for the cops to arrive. You have to phone them and deal with a 911 operator who may well be retarded: I was home during a burglary in 1998, when I called 911 to tell them there was a crazed-looking guy hammering my doorbell who wouldn’t go away, the cunt 911 operator tried to tell me to go answer the door and find out what he wanted. I had to argue with her, she finally said she’d send the cops, the guys broke in, I barricaded myself in my room, when they tried my door and it wouldn’t open, one guy said to the other “Oh shit, I think someone’s home, run!” I then called back, got the same 911 cunt, who was all bitchy that I’d been right, and then she did send the cops and they arrived a couple minutes later. I asked the cop about the dispatch, he said they’d only gotten the dispatch AFTER I called back AFTER the guys broke in. Now, the cop was royally pissed to hear what had happened, and I think he made a complaint to the 911 cunt’s supervisor, but the point is, even when 911 sends cops immediately, unless you live across the street from the station it takes a while for them to get there [and if you live across the street from them, I’m guessing the criminals avoid your block anyway].
So, no shit that armed citizens shoot more criminals than cops do, because by the time the cops get there the criminals have probably bolted. They tend to not want to stick around and get arrested, let alone shot.
Not to mention the halo effect you see in states with concealed carry laws, especially when they also have stand your ground laws: less violent crime. Why? Well, even if you’re a thug, if you know there’s a good chance your next victim might be your last, you tend to find other ways to make a living.
There’s also the matter than it’s been shown that psychopaths can recognize likely victims by the way they walk. If you have a .45 in your purse, just as when you have a black belt, or any other means of self defense, you don’t walk like a victim. LaVey I think once wrote that the guy with the .38 special who’s itching to try it out will probably never be given the opportunity because the signal he’s putting out to the world is a “don’t fuck with me, you’ll regret it!” In a nation as large as the United States, it’s certainly true that some of those guys with the .38 specials will get the opportunity to try them out, but it’s a lot rarer than what people like Person A thinks.
Also, a one-word answer to the assumptions: Switzerland. They’re all armed to the teeth and violent crime is virtually unheard of.
But Person A has his head so far up his own idealistic ass that he honestly believes that such things not only do not justify gun ownership, but it seems that he thinks they don’t happen. He also thinks that violent psychos can be reasoned with [his answer to the “disgusting” question of what he would do if faced with such a situation].
Now, a little background: I’m related to a few violent psychos, as well as a few other psychopaths who somehow managed to not have a criminal record, so I can speak to the delusion of reasoning with those sorts of people. A couple of them [one blood relative, one via marriage] were involved in a cop killing back east in the 70s in which my blood relative went to purchase shovels and they made the cops dig their own graves before shooting them. [Supposedly the “via marriage” relative is the one who did the shooting, but the blood relative ratted on his buddies so he would of course insist that here “merely” bought the shovels and watched, meh, they’re all lying scumbags so who knows?]
I’m gonna take a wild guess that probably the cops did at some point try reasoning with these assholes. They ended up in the ground anyway.
[Not sure why the cops didn’t shoot them first, I think it was a matter of small town cops maybe weren’t carrying or at least not ready to grab their sidearms, plus I believe they were captured in an ambush, I forget the details now.]
So… point is, in the hypothetical situation where psychos are going to rape or kill your daughter, trying to reason with them will not work. They’ll just make you watch while they do whatever the fuck they want and probably kill you both afterwards.
And if you survive, will your daughter really feel safer knowing that her father is not the sort of man who could kill another human being? Or will she feel betrayed that you didn’t protect her in order to stay true to some asinine lofty pretension?
Look throughout the natural world: dad’s primary job is to protect the cubs [assuming he’s around, obviously in some species like bears killing threats to the cubs is mom’s job because dad fucks and runs]. Lions will fuck your shit up if you get near their kids. Gorilla silverbacks protect the whole troop from intruders.
This may be possible through bluffing and just warding off interlopers, but violence is often required.
You see lots of joking around in the manosphere about beta males, but most beta males will fight to protect their families. A man who thinks ideals are more important than the security of his children is abdicating a big part of his responsibility. And he will lose far more respect in the eyes of his kids by doing so than he ever would by having a weapon around just in case. He becomes an omega loser, and the message that he sends to his kids is not that “violence is always wrong,” it’s that they aren’t worth protecting, that they should just roll over and die.
Which leads us to the second problem: the assumption that it is better if the daughter thinks her dad would never kill another human being.
Now, I think it’s certainly good for the daughter to know her dad would never harm her, but that’s a rather different thing.
Now, we’ve established I have killers in my bloodline. In fact I have a few under different circumstances:
– the above listed cop killers [first degree murder]
– one uncle got messed up on drugs and shot his girlfriend in a cocaine psychosis [accidental]
– my paternal grandfather was a non-commissioned officer in the Polish contingent of the Russian Army in WW2. One doesn’t get to have even a modest rank in war without shooting at least a few enemies [Krauts in this case]. [wartime]
To the best of my knowledge, I don’t have any relatives who have killed anyone in self-defense, but I would put that under the same umbrella as wartime killings.
So, how do I feel about my grandfather killing people? Doesn’t bother me at all. He was trying to protect his homeland from murderous invaders.
Never knew him personally, as he died on the push to Berlin in 1945, but I’ve heard many stories about him. Killing a bunch of German soldiers who would have killed him doesn’t make him a bad person.
And I’ve had friends and acquaintances over the years who were in the military, and I’m sure some of them also killed people. It’s part of the job. Even where a war isn’t considered as just as the war against the Nazis was, one can think a given war was pointless [such as the Iraq invasion post 9/11] without thinking the soldiers trying to do their duty within that war became monsters.
Side note: it’s often said that women like jerks. Yes, we do. Wanna know why? Because “jerk” is usually code for “guy who stands up for himself and doesn’t take any crap” and even when it means outright asshole, either way it’s a good indicator that he has inner strength, which is a good marker for “likely to protect us and any children we may someday have together.” Also why some chicks are into cops and military men. “Nice guys” may well stand up and protect their families, but on the other hand there’s “nice guys” who insist that violence is always wrong and that attempting to reason with psychopaths is the moral high ground…
We are privileged here in Canada to live in one of the safest places in the world, and we live in peacetime. This allows some of us to delude ourselves about how to deal with situations that we’ve never faced and make grand moral proclamations based on that.
In my lifetime I’d say I’ve only been in grave danger thrice: the above home invasion, another involved me almost drowning my sorry ass on that kayaking trip last summer, so that was an inanimate threat [although I think it was Caligula who did one time try to have his soldiers kill the sea god Neptune]. The other time was a few months back when that creep tried to get into the backseat of my car, and one presumes his intentions in trying to get into a lone female’s car at 2:30am weren’t all that honourable.
In the third case, yes, I was able to just floor it and peel out, because the door he was trying was locked so it bought me time. I have heard of similar cases over the years where the woman ended up dead.
Now, in Canada, we have no legal carrying of weapons [see above about peacetime hubris], so I would have been fucked in more ways than one, but in the USA, Hell yeah I would have waved a Glock in his face.
And I can look in the mirror ever night knowing that I probably could shoot a man, because I know that impulse was there that night as well as during the home invasion. I sleep just fine, and I don’t think any less of myself for it, just as I don’t think any less of my grandfather for the same.
I think Person A is conflating all forms of killing into one messy ball of wax.
Going back to the list, I have contempt for the cop killers. Granted, they were all-around scum [and the one who’s still alive still is], but that was the pinnacle of disgusting behaviour even for those assholes, particularly the means in which they did it. [‘Twould have been awful enough if they had simply shot the cops, but capturing them, beating the crap out of them, making them beg for their lives and making them dig their own graves, that’s all a form of psychological torture, taking the crime off the charts in the depraved department.]
The uncle who killed his girlfriend, well, he’s actually a nice guy who had a very fucked up early life [til he had a very long time to sort himself out behind bars]. What happened was a tragic mistake. That’s a far cry from what the cop killers did.
And we’ve covered the justifiable angle in wartime.
A man who shoots dead another man who was attacking the first man’s daughter is a hero. His daughter won’t feel threatened or full of contempt for him, she’ll feel protected and safe.
Now, there was another angle that came up… Person C interjected that you can never “remove context” from those cases where someone used a firearm to defend themselves or their families. You see, it always could have been avoided, and if it wasn’t avoided it was because they put themselves into a dangerous situation.
In essence, they deserved to be there, and they should not have been able to shoot someone else to defend themselves.
This is truly sick thinking.
Put it in another way: these anti-gun nuts are almost always leftists, which these days tends to mean feminist-inspired as well.
Why do I mention that?
Well, if I said to Person C anything along the lines of the argument he made about self-defense only I said it about a woman who was raped, do you think he’d agree? Or do you think he’d say I was a monster for daring to even consider the possibility that maybe that woman shouldn’t have been wherever she was with the sort of men she was with, or that she shouldn’t have been jogging alone in the park close to the bushes with headphones on, or whatever.
[I’m not saying that, by the way, though certainly women have a duty to themselves to look out for their safety just as men do in terms of not getting mugged, but when shit happens, shit happens and put the blame squarely on the aggressor who is a violent criminal, not on the person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.]
But that’s basically what he’s saying about anyone who finds themselves needing to brandish or, god forbid, use a firearm to defend themselves.
Which is all fine and good if you’re a privileged SWPL living in your ultra safe gated community, or in a nice tranquil exurb an hour’s drive out of Vancouver, which is in itself one of the safest cities in the world in one of the safest countries in the world.
Just one problem: bad apples are around even where you least expect them.
Those two cops were murdered in a small town in New Brunswick that probably also seemed pretty damn safe.
And we know that certain criminal types have been known to travel to rob and attack even in “safe” communities.
And you can never rule out the bad luck factor. I recall hearing a case of a woman realtor found bludgeoned to death in a house in a new safe subdivision somewhere in the States. She was setting up for an open house later that day [and found dead by colleagues when it was to have started], and eventually it was found that some psycho just happened to be driving by, saw her walking into the house and decided to rob her.
And while my home invasion didn’t result in physical violence, it certainly could have gone the other way too. I was in my own home in a more or less safe suburb at 11am on a summer Saturday morning. So… what would Person C say I had done to put myself in danger there?
So much for the smug and idiotic assertion that crime only happens to people who were asking for it by putting themselves in contact with criminals.
Now, I hope for Person A’s daughter’s sake that she is lucky and never has any run-ins with any psychopaths. She’s gonna need it, because she clearly has no one willing to protect her if the need comes up. And she’s being raised by someone who finds the intrusion of the real world into his idealistic fantasy world to be “disgusting.”