In an e-mail conversation with the reader who sent me the Fox video:
Anyway anyway, I am torn between tactical wisdom, crossing the street, and emboldening the knuckleheads by doing so. I mean, sure, you and I and other SD minded folks can do it, but if everyone does we’ve just ceded the ground. I fear it could start edging into “enough good men doing nothing” territory.
I don’t generally view crossing the street as emboldening the group. In my mind, making myself an easy target would accomplish that to a greater degree. My main purpose for avoidance is to a) not run the risk of getting beaten or surprise attacked, and b) not to get myself into a situation where the only way I can get out of it is to shoot a group of kids. I don’t have any loftier social goals than my own well being. Taking care to avoid also forces the group to reveal its cards earlier, and thus helps take away the element of surprise. If the group pursues you, you know it’s trouble, and can can step up avoidance, or prepare to defend yourself.
If I were the principal of that school, I would take fairly drastic action, including collective punishment of the entire school until the weasels are ratted out. There are students in that school who know who did this, but who won’t talk. It is a grave shame that modern political correctness, where no one is responsible for their own actions, would preclude any mention to the students of the approximately 30,000 people in Philadelphia, with another 60,000 or so people in suburbs, who are licensed to carry a firearms in the City, and make sure they think long and hard about the consequences of picking random people off the street and beating them up.
From my really long follow-up email…
“…
If you and I and the other capable individuals always act tactically and individually, then we abandon those who cannot. If we stop at tactical thinking we become, to pull a another movie analogy, a bunch of “Monk” McGinn’s from “Gangs of New York”. We have our clubs and are strong and capable enough to act autonomously while abandoning the rest of our neighbors to victimhood, but are we morally right to do so? In the end we can and probably will be taken down individually as well. Even barring that end due to our superior “tactical thinking and preparation”, we still contribute to the creation of a situation where eventually we will have to stand on our rooftops to face down a crowd emboldened in part by our previous inaction and with whom we now have no recourse but the ultima ratio.
I’m not saying we do something individually noble but foolish (and fatal), like Harry Brown’s friend, but we should at least look at pushing back against the constraints we have allowed into the social compact that impinge on our ability to work as a group of individuals united in purpose to, if you’ll allow me one last quote, “nip it, in the bud.”
Our first obligation is to ourselves and our families, but if we don’t want to move to a compound somewhere that obligation includes assisting in the maintenance of a society worth living with that family therein. “
I’ll be more concerned about my obligation to society when society would’t even think of putting me on trial for killing one of it’s children for trying to attack me. Put another way, it has to get worse, so people get sick enough of this kind of thing they acquit those who defend themselves. As it is now, I’d be risking going to jail for someone else. I’m just not that nice.
I don’t disagree with you, ideally, but there’s too many people out there who think it’s wrong to shoot children, no matter what horrible, violent things those children are trying to do to others, or, in the case where the child was a difference race, will turn it into a racial thing. Since that’s the society we live in, if you get attacked, you’re on your own.
Can’t disagree with that either.
I guess I’m thinking in terms of “not letting a crisis go to waste” and having the public discussion about what “appropriate force” is now, when it is less academic in the minds of the people who don’t really care and who will slip back to apathy if/when the immediacy dies down.
“If I were the principle of that school, I would take fairly drastic action, including collective punishment of the entire school until the weasels are ratted out.”
This is a stones throw from the rationale behind gun control. Punish the innocent because the guilty cause problems. I know you didn’t mean it that way, but it is.
Also, on crossing the street. If one does that in the wrong way, they show weakness that little dirt bags like these punks will see and exploit. If one crosses the street, they should make it look natural and disclose why the crossing of the street occurred.
I’m not talking much in the way of punishment. Hold the kids after school a bit until either someone rats out the perpetrators, or the students quietly dole out a collective reprisal to the miscreants. I’m OK with either outcome.
I’m willing to go extreme here because it’s very important those kids get caught and end up in jail. The problem is, they are learning that there are no consequences to their behavior, and for the most part they are right.
Is school even open right now in Philly? These might be former students, in the sense that they haven’t begun school yet this year.
This is similar to what happened to me at Boston Commons. I was jumped by a team of three at Tremont and Boylston at 6:00AM on a Saturday.
I counter-jumped and then ran through traffic like TJ Hooker, running down an alley to Chinatown where I knew they would not follow.
If I was back home I could have shot them down like squirrels in a tree. Crossing the street gives you more time to react.
Nothing wrong with crossing the street with your hand on your weapon and looking right at them. Feral humans know exactly what that means even if they have never been shot at.
The uptick in so-called “flash mobs” (I know this wasn’t one) seems to be reaching the “mania” stage, where people who would normally obey the law and conventions of common decency are jumping on the jump-on pedestrian bandwagon. This gets to the heart of group psychology and completely backs up the “broken window” theory of law enforcement. In short, if people see enough other people doing something and getting away with it they will be compelled to join them.
It reminds of living in DC during the first crack “epidemic” in the late 80s. Law and order effectively collapsed, and not just the drug selling and murder rates–people of all walks of life simply stopped following the law whether it involved shoplifting, mugging or stop signs. It took many years to regain “control” of the city, by which I mean it took many years to instill a sense of self-control back into the residents of the city. Fostering your own sense of belonging within the city’s community meant joining the larger group in ignoring the established laws and mores.
The “flash mob” phenomenon has been building for many years; and its behavior is practically the norm in some–primarily black–communities. The political system has not directed the police to treat it as a major problem because the media is just starting to report it as a trend. But check the isolated reports here & there from the past five years and you find its happening nationwide. The broken window has gone unfixed and encouraged the mania to spread because neither the mainstream media or ethnic small press is generally willing to look at trends in crime among ethnic communities and report them honestly, or even report them at all. Such denial helps no one, least of all the people living in communities held in fear by out of control children.
When are they gonna outlaw “hoodies”?
This is a very interesting speech about this type of thing by someone who isn’t a favorite of gun-owners, Philly Mayor Nutter. He says some very brutally honest things here.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/274393/read-speech-rich-lowry
In thinking about carrying a gun for self defense, I’ve had to think hard about how, if some mugger discovers you are armed and run away, he’s likely going to try to look for another victim. How can I “push” my victimhood onto another person–or even family–like that?
The answer is that, unfortunately, I don’t have any control over what a mugger chooses to do. At most, I can only carry a gun, and use it if I have to–and if I don’t have to, I can be relieved that I didn’t have to take someone’s life to defend my own. If that mugger chooses to find someone who will not–or even cannot–defend himself, then it is his choice to do so. I have no power to change that.
This same reasoning applies to mobs, or even natural disasters. Ultimately, we need to do what it takes to preserve our own lives, and the lives of our families. If we can go in with reasonable safety to defend the lives of strangers, we do it. For that matter, if a building is structurally unsound after an earthquake, we probably shouldn’t go in there, even if we hear screaming–although if you risk your life to do so, and even lose it, I would consider you a hero–but it’s not immoral to choose not to go into such a building.
Having said all this, if flash mobs are a problem, there’s also nothing wrong with gathering a posse of rifle-totin’ responsible folk to confront a mob and require them to disperse! (Indeed, Walter Williams once suggested that responsible blacks in their high-crime neighborhoods should be patrolling the streets with rifles, to reduce crime–and that it was *their* responsibility to do so, because government has shirked this responsibility.)