Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

In spite of the critical role effective personal self defense has played in the suppression of violence, the popular media works very hard at portraying the tools of effective self defense as being primarily useful to the criminal. Every occurrence of an unarmed citizen being attacked by an armed criminal is splashed across the front page.

Massive misinformation efforts saturate the media with propaganda aimed at portraying firearms used by criminals as the root cause of crime. In the mainstream media, crime is never the direct result of the exercise of free will by the offender. Instead, we are told that guns cause crimes, cars cause accidents, pornography causes rapes, and willfully consuming alcohol grants automatic mitigation for any wrongs committed under the influence because the alcohol was at least partly to blame.

Somehow, the media never seems to notice when a citizen successfully defends his personal dignity, rights, and property. That is unless the would-be criminal is injured or killed by his intended victim. The "justice system" and the media will then expend far more effort to punish the "perpetrator" of a successful self defense than they would ever have spent seeking "justice" if the crime had been successful and it was the innocent citizen hurt or dead. And yet, every time a simple homeowner successfully defends his home and family, he's doing more than just protecting a pile of sticks and one or more independently mobile protoplasms that share some of his genetic material. He is also reaffirming the role of the empowered individual as the primary bulwark against civilization's slide back down into the abyss.

Studies indicate that intended victims employ personal firearms to successfully defend their life and property over 2 million times per year in the USA. In the majority of incidents, it is not even necessary to discharge the firearm. However, contrary to the popular misconception that a firearm is a negative factor in self defense, intended victims survive violent attacks by killing their attackers with self defense firearms thousands of times per year - killing twice as many criminals as are killed each year by the police.

Killing another human should never be an easy thing to do - regardless of the circumstances. Just by forcing the victim to commit a violent act, even in self defense, the criminal has already imposed a heavy emotional cost upon the innocent victim. Society should be supportive and understanding of the victim's trauma - not compound it by attempting to vilify the victim's right and proper actions.

Of paramount importance is the fact that the criminal is exercising his free will in attempting the crime. The victim is being forced by the criminal to respond - at the time and place, and under the terms set by the criminal. Any effects - intentional or otherwise - of the intended victim's rightful exercise of self defense are by definition the responsibility of the attacker. When acting in self defense, there should be no limits on the means of defense the victim feels compelled to employ, and the victim should be wholly blameless for any harm that the attacker brings on himself as a result of his willful decision to violate the rights of the victim. Somehow, this basic tenet of civilized life has become blurred - or even reversed in modern "justice".

One of the primary requirements for intentional crime is the real or imagined expectation of surviving the act. Crime is all about power and property, and neither are of any value to the dead. Crime is never about a straight forward confrontation with an equally capable and prepared adversary. Success - or at least survival in order to try again another time - is everything in crime.

In the fictional old west of the dime novels and Hollywood movies, it was the marshal who brought law and order to the wild frontier. While there were of course some exceptions, many of these early lawmen were far from heros. Then as now, it was often hard to tell the cops from the crooks. In reality, it was the quick and resolute determination of the individual citizen defending his life and property that effectively discouraged crime in the old west.

Most of the popular grossly distorted pseudo-histories in circulation today seek to make respectable folk heros out of sociopathic killers. But unlike modern criminals, few outlaws avoided suffering the same fate as they had inflicted on their own victims for long. In fact, while our current "justice system" appears to be structured primarily as a job training program for long term career criminals, few of the outlaws of old survived in their profession of choice long enough to actually consider it a career. On the other hand, a number of them did successfully make the transition into politics where their unsavory characters and low morals became prized assets.

The few gangs of slow learners who tried to live a life of crime were decimated for the most part not by the highly publicized "lawmen", but by their intended victims. The movies would have us believe the average citizen in the old west was either a dull-witted sod buster, a roughneck cowboy, or a simple minded small town hick. Of course, in reality the inhabitants of the old west were biologically identical to their modern day detractors. I think it's a fair assumption that these people were every bit as adaptable to their environment as we are to ours. And these people lived a nitty gritty life that was a lot closer to the hard edges of reality than most of us choose to experience today.

When a gang of outlaws held up the bank, it was the citizens' of the town's money that was being stolen. Making their getaway, the outlaws had to run a gauntlet of armed and angry citizens intent not only on stopping as many bags of money from leaving town as possible, but also in making sure it didn't happen again. The gang would nearly always leave one or more of its members lying dead or wounded in the street. Even if the gang could repeatedly elude pursuing posses of angry victims, the high attrition rate made it increasingly difficult to recruit replacements for the gang members that were left behind. Most of the infamous outlaw gangs faded away from attrition and "lack of enthusiasm" when the profit/loss ratio of crime became unfavorable - without ever being "brought to justice" by official lawman.

Perhaps most importantly, the majority of citizens were never called to stand up for their rights. Of those who found themselves obliged to act in their own defense, enough responded assertively to create an expectation of effective defense from all citizens in the minds of potential aggressors. And because most citizens were prepared for violence, they never had to face it. Peace came to the old west because the inhabitants were willing to stand up for themselves and for the natural state of order that develops among cooperative interdependent productive citizens. Without easy victims, the parasites had to find other work. Of course, after the peace was won, the "law" came along and "tamed the wild west". Unfortunately, along with the "law" came lawyers - who are considered by some to now pose a far more destructive and intractable threat to the public well-being than all of the overtly violent outlaws of old.