The Argument

The difference between conservatives and liberals is this: liberals care about everybody, conservatives care about anybody.  Economically, liberals want to make everybody’s life equally prosperous.  Conservatives recognize that in capitalism there will always be winners and losers, and thus it is impossible to make everybody a winner, but it is possible to make anybody the winner.  According to conservatives, somebody is going to be a loser in the capitalist system, but it doesn’t have to be you.  Any person can work harder or smarter than their competition and become the billionaire.  This opportunity for ANYBODY rather than opportunity for EVERYBODY mentality is based on the premise that the most intelligent and/or diligent persons will succeed.

Self-Defense.  What does any of that economic theorizing have to do with self-defense?  Well, it’s defense of the SELF, the individual, ME!  This is the same concept, but applied to personal protection instead of personal wealth.  Liberals want cops and soldiers and firefighters to protect everybody, so that they don’t have to do it individually.  Conservatives recognize limited resources and they realize that government probably can protect anybody it wanted to, but not everybody.  They do a fairly good job protecting the President (since 1963), but they can’t protect everybody the same way.  Liberalism extends from the universal healthcare and equality of outcome economics into the realm of personal protection with the same idea: government should protect EVERYBODY. 

They’re right, of course.  When I was in the military, I felt deeply ashamed for what happened on September 11^th, 2001; the national security apparatus of the United States failed to protect Every American as it was supposed to.  They’re right that the government should be able to protect everybody, but it can’t.  This means, mathematically, that some bodies are going to be left unprotected by the government some of the time—realistically most of the time.  Just as equality of outcomes is not possible for economics, it is also not possible for government protection.  This is a fact liberals do not want to admit.  They do not want to accept personal responsibility for their own safety, because they (not unreasonably) believe that the government SHOULD protect them.  They should not have to be responsible for their own protection, because protection is the basic function of government.  To them, it is an entitlement just like education or universal health care; it’s protection of the public from dangerous actors.

Despite what conservatives like me say about liberals, this position is not bleeding-heart or emotion-driven political rhetoric.  It is—in fact—very conservative from one perspective: what are we paying the cops and soldiers and firefighters for if they cannot protect us?  That’s a pretty logical libertarian argument, actually.  Classical libertarians would argue that the only legitimate purpose of the government was in fact protection.  So the belief is neither bleeding-heart emotionality, nor political unreasonableness.  The government’s fundamental job is indeed to protect its citizenry.

But, while logical, reasonable and rational, the belief that government should protect everybody equally, is nonetheless naïve, because it, like Marx, Engle and Bernie Sanders, are detached from reality.  Yes, the government should be able to protect EVERYBODY.  But, even if you believe it can (which is both legally and mathematically impossible), the fact is government doesn’t.  A wise psychologist once said: Don’t “should” all over yourself.  If the world worked the way it SHOULD, then no innocent people would ever be victimized by predators.  But every year about 1.2 million innocent Americans are the victims of violent crime perpetrated by predators the local, state and federal governments were unable to stop.  That is reality.

The difference between what the governments should do and what they actually do is about 16,000 murders, about 130,000 rapes, over 300,000 robberies, and over 800,000 aggravated assaults every year in America.  Between 1.1 and 1.3 million violent crimes occur in the United States every year, even though the government should protect us.  Now, that’s only about .38% of the population facing violent crime in any given year; so an argument could be made that the government is doing fairly well at protecting the other 99.6% of the Every Bodies.  Some other liberals make that argument.  But, again, as a conservative, I don’t look at everybody; I look at the ANYBODY.  I don’t even look at the 1.2 million victims.  I look at the one victim.  SELF­-Defense is about the one victim, who can be ANYONE protecting himself from becoming one of the 1.2 million.

"Why do you need a gun?"  Statistically, I probably don’t.  The probabilities are in my favor that I will never again have to pull the trigger on another human being: less than .4% of the population of the United States is a victim of violent crime every year.  So, the odds are with me, with you, with EVERYBODY that he or she will not be a victim.  Liberals look at the 325 million of everybody.  As a conservative, I look at the individuals; I look at the ANYbodies, whether that is in economics, education, health care policy OR personal protection.  Not everybody can be protected, which is okay, because not everybody is going to be a victim.  In fact, only a tiny percentage of everybody is going to be a victim of violent crime this year, so the odds are against any particular person being a victim.  This is the insanity of liberalism, Marxism and ends justifying the means slaughter of millions, by the way.  To hell with the individual being raped, murdered or assaulted; "statistically, the crime rate is really actually pretty low."  Some leftists don't care about the individuals that make up the society, they just care about the "society as a whole," aka the EVERYBODY.  The problem with that statistical thinking is that an individual SOMEBODY is going to be a victim.  In fact, 1.1-1.3 million SOMEBODIES are going to be victims of violent crime this year.  Each one is SOMEBODY else’s child, parent, sibling, spouse or loved-one.  For them, the violent crime rate is not .38 percent, it is 100 percent.

As a conservative, I am an individualist.  As an individualist, that is how I look at violent crime, from the perspective of the individual victim or potential victim.  The FBI says we have a violent crime rate of about 382.9 per 100,000 people.  But the 382.9 PEOPLE do not care about the rest of the 100,000.  To the victim of violent crime, the violent crime rate is 100% because violence is interpersonal, not statistical.  Liberals ask, “With a .38% violent crime rate, why do you need a gun?”  I carry a gun because that .38% represents 1.2 million INDIVIDUALS who are victimized by predators every year in this country, despite the best efforts of local, state and federal governments to protect each one of them.  I recognize Reality; the government is unable to protect everybody, and therefore ANYBODY can be the victim of violent crime—if they rely on the government to protect them.  I no longer expect the government to protect me.  I do it myself.  Even if statistically, and demographically, the odds of me having to defend myself from violent crime are incredibly remote, I still am prepared to protect myself because the government isn’t there, won’t be there and Constitutionally couldn’t prevent violent crime from happening even if they were there.

Thanks,

Soule

Easy6Training

PS: Besides which, I don’t have to explain why I need a gun.  Our second guaranteed freedom—immediately after the right to think, speak, write, pray, and express ourselves however the hell we want to—is the right to defend all the other freedoms if somebody tries to take them away.  Exercising this freedom requires no further justification than does attending a particular church, mosque or synagogue, protesting a politician, or writing this blog.  I do all of those however the hell I want to, because the Bill of Rights says I can, and that second freedom prevents anybody from stopping me;)

The Absence of Law and Order is Called WHAT?

This is, by any definition, the absence of order.  When the law enforcement community is castrated by political correctness and unable to prevent harassment and minor assaults on themselves, what hope do you have that they will help you?

What I think should happen: NYPD should go on strike until Mayor Bill de Blasio resigns or is recalled and a new administration and police commissioner are in place that will restore law and order in NYC.

What will actually happen:  good cops will continue to quit, because who would put up with this crap?  So instead of good cops, you have a hot head cop, who is going to shoot one of these morons.  That will start the first round of riots.  Pointing a super-soaker at a cop is not a good idea, you dumb asses, especially in times of limited visibility.  So, we're going to see dead kids with toy water guns in their hands, and people are going to scream, "Police Brutality!  They killed my poor little baby Thuggy McPunkerson, and he never did nuthin' to nobody!"  (Except point that toy gun at a cop about twilight).  Which is just another example of great parenting.  Oh, wait, I forgot where this is happening, what parenting?  The hot head cop will then be accused of using excessive force, he will be fired, but he probably won't be prosecuted because the D.A. knows he won't get a conviction if he's honest, or simply because he needs cops to be on his side in his job of prosecuting actual criminals, so the cop will go free but have to find another career.  This will start the second round of protests of people screaming "institutional racism" that protects cops who kill innocent kids with nothing but toy guns; those protests will rapidly devolve into total riots and the inevitable burning down of a neighborhood drug store for some reason.  The cops will get blamed for that too.  So more of them will quit.  Now response times have tripled or quadrupled in areas that are already under-policed.

Conclusion #1: If you're a cop, you should quit, because this is total crap.  This will escalate to beyond water to gasoline or other chemicals.  These water runs are just rehearsals.  And when you defend yourself from Thuggy McPunkerson with a bucket of gas, you will be the bad guy.  Quit.  Let these social justice warriors have exactly what they want.

Conclusion #2 If you are a law abiding citizen, expect even fewer cops to be around when you need one in the coming days, weeks, months and years.  You better learn to get dangerous, folks, because the boys in blue ain't coming!  Even if they were coming, they're not allowed or willing to do anything for you, because as soon as they shoot the bastard trying to stab you, some crying crackhead's mother will be on the news screaming "racism," costing the cops their livelihoods, careers and pensions.  Why would they risk that to stop somebody with a knife a whole 21 feet away?  If your sense of personal safety and security before the Obama years was based on the belief in law enforcement being there to protect you, that was probably pretty naive.  If your sense of personal safety and security is based on that belief today, you are simply batshit crazy delusional!

The absence of law and/or order is anarchy.  Mass migration away from the law enforcement profession by good officers is leading to anarchy.  Castrating law enforcement officers who stay on the force, by not allowing them to do their jobs and allowing blatant disorder to rule the streets, is also leading to anarchy.  Having seen actual anarchy a few times, I can tell ya, things get real sporty for the sheep when there ain't no sheepdogs anymore.  The only sheep that survive in those situations are the ones with horns.  "If you're gonna be a sheep, you better be a bighorn sheep!"  One scary fact to close with is this: the United States has about 23,000 fewer law enforcement officers today than it did in 2012.  It's like SGM Plumley said:  "Gentlemen, prepare to defend yourselves!"

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Cowards

My frustration with naïve idiots is at an all-time high.  Their desperate desire to wish away violence is understandable for children, but for adults who live in the imperfect world of mortal humans, such desire, laudable as it may be, is basically mental illness.  It is a delusion to believe that mortal beings, subject to the vicissitudes of life and death, can ever truly achieve a pacifist Utopia.  As long as we are mortal creatures, and are vulnerable to death, evil people can prey upon that mortality or the fear of that mortality for evil purposes.  If we were invulnerable immortal creatures, violence would be rather unproductive for predators.  But we are mortal, we are vulnerable, we can be killed, maimed and harmed, so living in a fantasy world where that is not the case is literally lunacy.  Such beliefs about the nature of the world would be considered schizophrenic if it wasn’t for the fact that such a HUGE number of young people all suffer from this shared psychosis.

I long for the days of dropped gauntlets.  Not just because I think many true indignities would be solved rather promptly—and many illusory indignities of mock victimhood would not seem quite so important to the affected snowflake—but also because it would be a way to demonstrate conclusively to every whining coward afraid of death just how the world really works.  See, every time I hear one of these lunatics on the news, inevitably supported by the majority of journalist cowards as the obvious opinion, I want desperately to slap them across the face with a glove and explain the simple truth of life.  “You are allowed to live in this shared delusion of a ‘safe space’ called a civilization because of the largess of men like me.  Violent men keep you safe, because violent men are constantly trying to do you harm.  You don’t see it, you don’t believe it, but I assure you it is true.  And all that would be necessary to shatter your shared delusion is for men like me to either, 1) stop, or (far worse for you), 2) switch sides.”  At this point I often wonder what they would do when I put a knife to their throats, purely for demonstration purposes.

Fundamentally, though it has become a trite way to sell t-shirts, there really are only three kinds of people in the world: prey, predators and protectors.  The prey cannot exist without the protectors.  The predators cannot exist without the prey.  The protectors could exist rather more comfortably without either.  And they often fail.  The victim of every violent crime is a victim because they relied on a protector to stop the predator instead of being self-reliant.  This week, in a move that the cops I work with find concerning, but I find an amazing statement of hope for a civilized society, a protector was charged with eleven crimes because, fundamentally, he was a coward.  He took a job, swore an oath and collected a paycheck to serve as a protector of children in Parkland, Florida.  He defrauded his community.  Thus, we can’t even rely on the protectors when they are right there.  The Virginia Beach Police Station was right across the street from the office building that nut job shot up last week; twelve victims-in-waiting died because they believed a protector was right across the street ready to save them.  The shared delusion of a ‘safe space’ in which you are invulnerable to violence is madness.  It will get you raped, maimed or killed.  You have to be your own protector.

The real world, outside your bubble of false-security, is indeed a scary place.  But, once you take responsibility for your own safety, and you confront that fear by popping the bubble, you start liberating yourself from the terrors that lurk in the shadows.  Once you learn how to defend yourself, protect yourself, fight for yourself, you accept the presence of the fear, and you learn the skills you need to overcome the danger, instead of running away from the fear.  If you’re gonna be a sheep, be a bighorn!

Soule
Easy 6
www.easy6training.com

Ode to "Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man"

Fear.  I’ve noticed an interesting paradox in America since 9/11: we are a society full of rampant fear, and the fervent belief that it shouldn’t exist.  There is a deeply held sense—not really a belief put into thoughts or words, but a feeling or an intuition—in today’s America that we are entitled to a life without fear.  Maybe we are; I don’t know, maybe that’s the right way to live.  I grew up at the end of the Cold War next to first a Strategic Bomber base, then next to an ICBM silo a quarter mile up the road, and then a Naval Air Station, now I live at the bottom of NORAD.  I’ve lived at Ground Zero my whole life.  Generation X was the last generation to grow-up in that situation.  The Baby Boomers stared down oblivion as kids during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The Greatest Generation and the Civil Generation before fought two world wars and in between suffered the worst economic disaster to occur in the Industrial Age, plus famine, a pandemic and the Dust Bowl.  Fear was a constant in their lives.  I believe every generation prior to the twentieth century had even greater fears to accompany them in daily life.  For some reason, in the twenty-first century, we believe we should be immune to a life of fear.

Where did we get this impression that it is unfair for us to be afraid?  It’s a belief that “danger shouldn’t exist.”  But when has that ever been the case?  I have a suspicion that after 9/11, two things happened: first, our political leaders told us “refuse to be terrified,” which did not make people brave, it made them, secondly, delusional.  They constructed the “bubble” I often write about, an illusionary safe space of denial about the nature of the world.  It is a willful refusal to accept the truth about the dangers in the world.  Further, it is an adamant belief that they are safe, because they are entitled to be safe.  We should be safe!

They’re right; we should be entitled to be safe.  But our prisons are full of evil people who did not adhere to our perceptions of how the world “should” operate.  Our emergency rooms and morgues are full of innocent people who were victimized by these evil people, because they were powerless to stop them.  They were powerless to stop them because they were unprepared.  They were unprepared because—often—they refused to admit the world is a dangerous place, they refused to admit their vulnerability, they refused to accept personal responsibility for their own safety, they foolishly expected somebody else to protect them, and they refused to pop their own bubble, so somebody else did, and blood spilled out of it.

The solution to fear is not the denial of danger or the delusional perception of constant safety.  The solution to terror is not ignoring it, its sources or its methods.  The solution to evil is not appeasement.  The solution to all of these problems is the same thing: courage.  You should be entitled to safety, but you aren’t.  Every victim of violent crime wonders how it could happen to them, or why it happened in a world where it shouldn’t.  There is an answer to those questions, but it’s irrelevant.  Because, it did happen, it does happen, it is happening somewhere in our society right now.  Pretending it isn’t true does not stop it.  Making new laws does not deter violent criminals, because they are criminals.  Words on a page do not stop an evil person from being evil towards an innocent victim.  So, maybe we should live in a world without fear.  Maybe that’s how the universe, or a higher power, intended for humans to live; but as long as we are mortal, there will be evil people willing to pray upon that mortality to extract power, wealth, privilege or twisted gratification from victims.  So, it doesn’t matter how the world should operate; it only matters how it does operate.  And in the real world, outside the illusionary bubble, evil people do evil things to innocent people.  The only things that effectively stop them are bullets.  Stop denying the fear; be afraid, and use the fear as motivation in your preparation to never be a victim.  Whether life should be fearless or not, it isn’t, so instead you have to be courageous!  Courage is not the absence of fear; it is doing what’s necessary despite the fear.  Maybe you win, maybe you lose, but you are NOT a helpless victim.

“It’s better to be dead and cool, than alive and uncool!” –Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man

Be Brave!
Soule
Easy 6 Training

Also, that First Amendment (Rated R for Language and Poetry)

An interesting thing happened this week: some snowflakes got offended by the fact that some people I know and I have been discussing various aspects of firearms in the bar we frequently occasion or occasionally frequent.  These people I know got very concerned about that.  We were referred to as “the gun guys in the back” by some of these snowflakes.  For some reason that really bothered the people I hang-out with at this bar.  I’m not sure, but I think it has to do with a privacy issue for them.  I suspect it is the same reason they will carry a handgun concealed, but never openly carry one.  I suppose that is a fair perspective, though different from mine.

Here’s the problem: I’m not giving up my First Amendment Rights any sooner than I’m giving up my Second Amendment Rights.  The snowflakes are offended by the very existence of firearms, and they abhor us brutish rednecks who own, shoot and—God forbid—talk about guns.  To which I respond: melt the snowflakes!  Nobody has a right to not be offended, and I have a God-given right to be offensive.  If my topic of conversation offends you…leave.  But, just like you can take my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands, you will shut me up when you put a bullet in my throat.  But, if you’re going to try, you better be better than me.  The only scumbags I hate worse than the gun grabbers trying to destroy the Second Amendment, are the Politically Correct Thought Police trying to destroy the First Amendment.  I will not be silenced, censored or shut-up for having opinions that pansy-ass snowflakes find too offensive to tolerate in their safe-space little bubbles.  For their bubbles I have just one solution: “Pop!”

The Left wants to shut us up.  The coastal snowflakes cannot handle dissent.  By worrying about whether or not you offend some weak-willed, half-developed, pansy-assed, safe-space dweller, you buy-in to their bullshit.  You buy-in to their concept that they have some right to not be offended by your words.  Here’s my words: fuck them; I have lots of guns, I like shooting them, I like learning about them, I like sharing knowledge about shooting them with other people who like shooting guns and learning about them…and I’m not going to stop exercising my Freedom of Speech about them…BECAUSE I have the Right to Bear Arms!  You want to shut me up?  You better not be a snowflake living in a safe-space, My Little Pony!  You want to shut me up, you better come prepared to do it by force.  And I know no snowflake with the capacity, capability, caliber, courage, commitment, spirit or stones to stand-up, step-up and shut me up by shooting—not shouting—me down.  But if I am mistaken, then I do humbly invite so valiant a courtier to, by pistols, try, at dawn, or rapiers by dusk, or gallantly adding to lore, as in days of yore, by moonlight past twilight with hammers of war!  Your choice, good sir!

            For defending the Freedom of Speech with a sword, the French Poet-cum-English Philosopher Voltaire was banished from France.  He famously founded the freedom of expression thusly: “Though I disagree with what you say, I will defend to the death your right to say it.”  Our First Amendment is based on Voltaire’s conviction that the free expression and free exchange of ideas, uncensored by the state or by popular opinion, is the cornerstone to a free society.  Our Second Amendment was designed to guarantee it.  As Wyatt said, “Which one of you brave men is gonna take it from me?”

With Humble Deference to Voltaire,

Sincerely,

Soule

www.easy6training.com

The Problem With Statistics

Anti-gun folks: “We have the highest rate of gun violence in the industrialized world.”  This isn’t actually true; we have the highest rate of gun violence (the definition of which includes suicides, justified homicides and gang-on-gang violence, as well as homicides) among European and North-American countries.  Some other industrialized countries have higher rates.  I’m sure the liberals weren’t implying that people who don’t live in Europe and North America are less somehow less important than ethnic European nations?  But that’s not the problem with statistics.

I digress; to continue:  Gun folks: “Places with easier access to firearms, concealed carry and/or constitutional carry, have successfully reduced their violent crime rates because the criminals are scared.”  I think that’s probably true, though how statistically significant, correlated or causal such a relationship is to guns may be debatable.  But that’s not the problem with statistics either.

The problem with statistics when it comes to gun violence is that the problem set is not what we think it is.  Both sides argue from good public policy approaches, which are typically based on statistics and utilitarian ethics of doing the most good for the most people.  It’s public policy based on the Greek idea of Logos (logic) and the Utilitarian Ethics of increasing greater good for the many, as evidenced by statistical data.  Politicians look at the nation as the data set for making public policy for crime rates and gun violence, and a whole host of everything else imaginable from nuclear missiles to how many trees to allow to be chopped down in any given forest.  And that is the problem with statistics.

Violence has a data set of one.  Life is a binary state, not a statistical proportion.  There is no such thing as a person who is 72.3% alive or 54.7% dead.  So in matters of life and death, statistics are irrelevant.  It matters not to the murder victim what is the homicide rate.  In a life or death encounter, one hundred percent of your life is on the line, not a proportion of it.  Therefore, any statistical representation of violence, while perhaps informative to social scientists, is not an accurate representation of the true nature of it.  When somebody is trying to kill you, it’s a zero-sum game, you 100% live or you 100% don’t.  It’s a binary state of 1’s and 0’s: 1, the switch is on, I’m alive; 0, the switch is off, I’m not.  There are no proportional statistics or extrapolations to larger populations to be gleaned from such a data set.  To put it more plainly, as Stanley Kubrick did, “The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive.”  Statistics of a sample size of one are not very productive.

Violence, especially criminal violence, is personal, not proportional.  Life is a binary state: you either are alive or not.  When somebody has a knife to your throat in an alley in the statistically “safest” neighborhood in America, that statistic is irrelevant and dangerously absurd.  It lures people into a false sense of confidence about their surroundings, for one thing, but for another, most violence in America is what Tim Larkin calls a “black swan event.”  It’s not that it is rare; it’s that it is a rare event in the life of any one single person.  Even in high crime areas like Detroit and Chicago, ordinary people—who are not making their livings off of violence (on either side of the law)—encounter personal violence pretty rarely.  While they probably encounter it more frequently than a guy living in the woods in Montana, it is still a “black swan event” in their lives.  If it wasn’t rare, people would not suffer from PTSD from violent crimes.  It would be a normal part of their lives, not a trauma.  We do not get traumatized by ordinary events. 

Which of course makes it all that much worse; I’m not trying to diminish the effect of interpersonal violence.  On the contrary, I’m trying to say it is far worse than statistics can reflect, especially homicide, because to the victim of a violent crime, the crime rate is 100%.  And that is what statistics cannot get right.  Statistical representations of gang members per hundred thousand people in Chicago, does not represent violence.  Homicides per hundred thousand people in Baltimore, does not represent violence.  Homicides per ONE PERSON laying on the street with multiple gunshot wounds in the chest, bleeding out…that is violence.  And no amount of math can prepare you for it or protect you from it.

Legislators who believe they can bring the statistics down totally miss the point of interpersonal violence.  I understand their intentions and do not fault them for it one either the Left or the Right; they are trying to make good public policy using numeric data and Logos.  But violence has NOTHING to do with Logos.  It is entirely about Pathos: rhetoric and policy designed to appeal to the emotions of the audience and elicit feelings that already reside within an audience.  Violence is not logical, and thus not statistical, it is deadly (zero-sum) and thus emotional.  People are afraid of violence, regardless of the statistics, and no data analysis will ever change that fear.  Second Amendment advocates often come off as illogical because they talk about freedom and tyranny, ignoring any statistical data presented to them, because freedom is emotional (Pathos)!  In statistical samples of one, any murder rate is unacceptable, and thus people want the ability to protect themselves, and you can “Molon Labe, get the heck right outta my country, or try to pry it from my cold, dead hands!!!”  Harumph!

The issue is not statistical.  It is not even about guns.  It’s about violence, fear of violence, fear of death, the ability to deal death with seeming impunity in some communities.  It is about FEELING terrorized in our own towns.  We are mortal, and as long as we are mortal, evil people can use our mortality to coerce us, or they can implement our mortality for their own evil purposes.  There is no statistical solution to that.  Logos and equations do not apply to a sample size of one with a knife against your throat.  Only another policy of Pathos can solve this problem: bravery.  The only thing that can defeat terror is courage.  You can’t legislate it, but you can EDUCATE it; you can’t sample it in a survey, you have to train it into hearts and minds and an ethos of a society.  The solution to predators is being impossible prey:

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Soule
www.easy6training.com

Truck Guns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a6YdNmK77k

Zombies aren’t real.  I say again, and I know this hurts some of you to hear, but it’s true: zombies aren’t real.  Why in the heck do you have an AK in your truck?  Let’s just assume for a moment you ever actually used that “sporting rifle” behind the seat of your Tacoma; what exactly are you going to tell the cops when they show up?

Look, if you are a SWAT or Military-trained sniper and you have the skill set to end a mass shooter from five hundred yards away with a “sporting rifle,” then by all means carry a truck gun.  If you aren’t that guy, when the cops show, what do you tell them?  “Well…I got out of the bank robbery, so I grabbed my AR and went back inside to put every bystander there in massive mortal damage, officer.  I thought my considerable skills honed through dozens of hours on a fifty yard range with my Bushmaster made me the perfect guy to go start rescuing hostages.  It’s a shame a dozen bystanders got killed in my firefight with the robbers.  But, it’s like the SEALs always say, `Sucks to be a hostage.’”

“Oh, were you a SEAL?”

“Um…well, not exactly, I mean, I graduated Air Force Basic and shot an M16 two whole days, so, yeah, I’m basically a SEAL.”

And, I’d be THRILLED if every idiot rolling around with an AK or AR in their truck was in fact a graduate of Air Force Basic, or a Police Academy, or even some tactical rifle course put on by veterans.  BUT, most of the people rolling around with them don’t have ANY tactical training, much less the precision skills necessary to successfully go BACK into a situation like the one described above or the ability to take out the Las Vegas Shooter from their truck beds.  I am a combat veteran of a combat Military Occupational Specialty with about a dozen firefights under my belt, and I don’t rescue hostages.  Bubba and Billy-Bob, with the AR’s in their Ford Redneck Rescue Raptor, go off guns-a-blazing in some sort of North Hollywood Shootout scenario, trying to “take out” badguys, will get innocent people killed.  And even if they miraculously DON’T get innocent people killed, is that REALLY self-defense?  Or, have they become vigilantes who make situations infinitely worse?

This is my problem with blurring the lines of what self-defense really is.  The NRA does it.  The shooting industry wants to sell you guns, so they do it, as do all of the weapons accessory companies.  The Tacticool Instructors do it.  But then when somebody shoots a guy trespassing in his field at six hundred yards away, and then claims he was “in imminent danger and fear for his life,” the prosecutors sometimes disagree with that industry definition of "self-defense."

Self-Defense is not a set of skills.  It is not a set of shooting skills.  It is not a set of fighting skills.  It is not a set of tactics for “clearing” houses or “securing” fixed positions or anything else.  Self-Defense is a LEGAL DETERMINATION—after an incident occurs—that the actions taken were justified in the eyes of the law.  Cops make that determination, prosecutors make the determination, judges make the determination, and—worst case scenario—sometimes juries make the determination that the actions a person took were justified self-defense.  When you start looking like a vigilante, it becomes exceedingly difficult to argue that the actions were in self-defense.  Willingly putting yourself BACK into a dangerous situation that you have already escaped from, isn’t self-defense.  Now, it may be “defense of others,” and there may be good reasons for such actions (going in to get your spouse out for example), but it’s not self-defense.

Don’t be George Zimmerman.  If you are one of the people who thinks George Zimmerman was an innocent victim, stop reading my blog.  George Zimmerman was a lunatic living out some Batman fantasy; he stalked and killed a kid for no other reason than he didn’t like his fashion choice.  Vigilantism is NOT self-defense.  Running back into a dangerous situation with a rifle can appear to be vigilantism if you don’t have a good reason (like a loved-one inside, or a tactical skill set capable of being effective inside).

Lastly, when the SWAT team does show up, I don’t want to be holding a rifle.  They have their own snipers.  Those snipers may not know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.  Don’t get shot because you were trying to do something you thought was good, just because the cops can’t tell which side you’re on.

In conclusion, we have enough people who hate the gun-owning public without shooting ourselves in the feet looking like the caricatures that the liberals paint of the NRA.  All the 5.11 gear, the fishing vests, the operator hats and rail accessories attached to your AR or AK are not helping the cause of getting everybody in America comfortable, confident and CARRYING a gun with them at all time.  What it’s doing is making people think we’re nutty George Zimmerman types out looking to play Batman.  Other than combat and Zombies, I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would need a rifle with a thirty-round magazine in my truck for anything that would be construed—AFTER THE INCIDENT—as justifiable self-defense in modern American daily life.  Now, I will caveat this by saying, yes, after a natural disaster, or during an on-going terrorist attack, or massive civil unrest, a sport rifle may well be desirable.  After Hurricane Katrina, when civil order disintegrated and a state of anarchy took hold of New Orleans for a brief time, I absolutely would want a rifle.  During the Paris Terrorist Attacks, which were geographically spread throughout the city and carried-out by chickenshit half-men armed with AK-47s, I would absolutely want a rifle to protect my home and family.  But, I believe the right answer in those situations is to secure your home and your loved ones, with an arsenal, at home.  Then, if you need to retreat to a safer place, that is when you get fully equipped and Move Out with the truck gun.  But, that scenario is A LOT closer to a combat zone than it is to a self-protection situation that you would have to justify before a judge as reasonable “self-defense.”  Don't make your defense any harder in a criminal proceeding by how you're equipped.  Zombies ain't real, folks!

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Soule

www.Easy6training.com