The Gap between Worlds
“By essentially requiring the citizen being stalked to enforce the law against battery and assault via the use of firearms, it is in face encouraging the citizen to execute vigilante justice upon the abuser. ”
Here, again, is an essential failure to communicate due to a gap in the difference in worldviews. In the rightwing view, each man is or should be mature and able to defend himself. More than this, it is his duty to defend himself and his family. The role of the police is limited to avenging wrongs after they are done, not preventing them. Police are not bodyguards and have no enforceable, legal duty to protect citizens. (This last is not an opinion but a legal ruling. I can show the case law to anyone interested: Warren v. District of Columbia (444 A.2d. 1, D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981).)
In the Leftwing view, all is reversed. Each man is or should be a child or an Eloi, unable to defend himself. More than this, any attempt to defend himself leads to accidental death and mayhem as the childlike creatures shoot themselves in suicidal moments, shoot each other in moments of rage, or shoot everyone accidentally through mishandling the dangerous weapon. In this worldview, the police are like bodyguards, trained and trusted professionals, and it is their duty and theirs alone to keep the childlike creatures safe.
The idea that the police derive their just powers from the will of the childlike creatures and are organized merely as a convenience so that the posse or militia need not gather at every crime or riot, this is an idea utterly incomprehensible to the Left, and it cannot be communicated to them.
I would love to be proven wrong on this last point. Is there any Leftist reading the words above who actually understands their import? Understands, not admits to be true. I believe the concept itself is incommunicable that the police are the agents of the people and have no powers aside from what the people themselves posses and grant them.
Note here the equation of ‘vigilante justice’ with the idea of carrying a gun for self defense. Now, I assume the writer (who I assume is a girl, and a somewhat neurotic girl at that) is too gentle and feminine a soul to understand the grim necessity involved, and too lazy in her brain to think through what is possible and what is not possible.
In a STAR TREK show I saw once, the police were able to teleport to the scene of a crime by means of transporters rays in less time than it takes to make a phone call.
In real life the response time of 911, depending on where you live, is between ten and forty minutes, and longer for rural areas. So the idea of having each citizen be protected the way the Treasury Men protect the President is not rational.
But, from the Leftwing point of view, the idea of having free men be responsible for their own actions, and act like adults, and treat firearms with respect, and use them wisely, is also impossible. Leftwingers do not know anyone who acts this way. Most of them are on drugs for emotional imbalances and come from broken homes. They have never seen a responsible male adult in their lives, except, perhaps, for a police officer.
As for the inability of gun control laws to control guns, that is a point where the Leftist mind simply stops and will not receive information, will not look at facts, and does not use logic.
If the Leftists were sincerely (or even slightly) interested in lowering the rates of gun crime, they would look to see what factors actually work to lower gun crime rates. If they were sincerely (or even slightly) interested in whether gun control laws were productive or counterproductive, they would look at the facts of what happens in places where guns are forbidden, and see what the effect on the crime rate is. (HINT: crime rates go up, not down.)
Paris has the strictest gun control laws in the world, and these did not prevent the various Terrorist murders taking place there. Strict gun control did not stop a military officer in Britain from having his head chopped off by a terrorist in broad daylight in a public street. Strict gun control did not prevent the recent bombings and suicide-shootings in Turkey.
But the Left are controlled by an ersatz religion. It is a set of articles of faith adopted not because they are thought to be true, but because they are thought to be compassionate, or fashionable, or soothing.
One such article of faith is the neurotic if not psychotic fixation on the idea that the government has the power to eliminate all guns, and that an evil Illuminati group or a coven of bad witches, sometimes identified as Jews, and sometimes as the NRA, out of mere malice and diabolic lunacy, uses charms and spells to prevent the good and loving and superhuman government from doing so, with the result that countless innocent people die for no particular reason.
I am not sure how any argument can proceed with a neurotic person. If one cannot look at the facts, if one cannot change an article of faith, if one cannot and will not distinguish between productive and counterproductive strategies, that is, between what works towards versus against one’s stated goals, then on what basis is the conversation to take place?
Does anyone think any sober man can be convinced by a flourish of rhetoric that conflates self defense with vigilantism? All I am convinced is that the writer does not know the definition of her terms, and speaks at random.
Again, I am open to suggestion. Can anyone see any way to hold a conversation with someone who steadfastly will not examine her assumptions?