Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Should Good Men Do Nothing?


The previously mentioned and linked post over at Sabra’s place brought to mind an old discussion I had years ago with a friend of mine who was on the fence in the gun control debate.  My eye was drawn to the discussion in Sabra’s post about the woman who got robbed, and when she failed to produce whatever it was that the robber wanted (because she didn’t have it) the robber shot her baby in the face. 

It occurs to me that this woman did exactly what the progressives and liberals would have her do when confronted with such a situation: cooperate fully; don’t fight back;  give them what they ask for.  They are probably acting out of desperation, and they don’t mean you any harm. Besides, robbery isn’t worth killing someone, or getting yourself killed over. 

But what about when you can’t give them what they ask for because you don’t have it?  What happens when you are faced with sociopathic evil that doesn’t see you as a human?  How are you supposed to determine that the man using deadly force against you is just a desperate father trying to steal enough money to feed his family, as opposed to evil incarnate?  How can you tell whether this is one of those men who just wants to watch the world burn, and is taking steps to set it off, himself?  That thinks that since you’ve seen his face, you are nothing more than a liability that needs to be dealt with?  That sees shooting you or your loved ones as great sport – something to be laughed about later with his friends?  Or who sees himself as so entitled to your possessions that when you can’t give him what he wants from you, he will take something else from you just to get even? 

I read a story about a pizza delivery man who got robbed by a man with a gun the other day, and in the process, he pulled his own gun and shot the criminal dead.  The comments on the article were horrible – to a person, the commenters seemed to think that the delivery man was a murderer who had executed a person for the crime of stealing a couple of dollars.  I couldn’t help but chime in and point out that the delivery man wasn’t shooting him over the money, but was rather defending himself against a threat to his own life.  This is a fundamental part of being a living being on this planet – the right to defend yourself from harm by another.  Every single other animal on this planet will defend themselves against an aggressor, and yet the liberal left wants to paint that as murder when a pizza deliveryman does it. 

They default to assume that the robber would have never hurt the guy if he’d just cooperated, but they have no way to know that.  Tell that to this poor woman who’s baby is now dead because she did cooperate.  We have no way to know if the man with a gun who is approaching us and threatening our lives intends to do us harm or not, and so for our own sake, we have to assume the worst and act accordingly.  If the man doesn’t want to get shot, all he has to do is not threaten people’s lives.  We have no way of knowing rather that pizza deliveryman saved his own life that night with his actions, but since the act of waiting to find out would be irreversible if it didn’t turn out good for him, he had to act. 

And so it comes down to the fundamental difference between people who live in the real world and the progressive movement – They don’t blame the evil man for his actions, they blame his gun.  They think that if they just deny the evil man his gun, that his evil acts will stop and we will live in a more safe and sane world.  I would point out that evil has been with us since the concept was born in the minds of cave men advanced enough to have abstract thought, and that predates guns by millennia. 

I would also point out that throughout history, the only thing that has ever triumphed over evil has been righteous violence on the part of good people standing in opposition to that evil.

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