I’ve had to spend a long weekend explaining to a lot of “progressives”: it’s entirely possible that not only are both of the following true:
- Something can be a bad idea, legally and in common sense terms,
- Self-defense is not only legitimate, but a very high hurdle to meet under the law in every state I’m aware of; that it’s a “license to kill” if you consider being arrested, spending two months in jail, having to bond for $2.5 Million to get released, spending 15 months in legal limbo, God only knows how much in legal bills, standing trial with a risk of two life sentences and a couple more decades to boot, and having to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder in case some depraved, entitled lefty narcissist decides to “even the score” to be a “license to kill”.
Most disturbing? Beyond the number of people who think that:
- we should just ignore the law and make Rittenhoue an example because “we don’t want people wandering around defending themselves, or that
- “crossing state lines” is a crime, or that
- Kyle Rittenhouse was a “vigilante” for going to a riot with a gun, but Gage Grosskreutz wasn’t, or that
- Rioting is sacrosanct protected speech?
…what could be worse?
This: I think both sides missed the most important lesson.
Which is, I believe, this.
Some Background: It is human nature to create order.
thout order, prosperity is impossible – and by “prosperity“, I don’t mean “his and hers Bentleys“, I mean living as something other than a subsistence farmer.
Without prosperity, freedom is academic. (And without freedom, order is tyranny, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves).
I’m no expert, but I think this is the real lesson of Kenosha that a lot of people on the right, and a lot more on the left, need to get.
We pay taxes to government – lots and lots of them. And providing “order” is the one unambiguously legitimate role of government.
And if government isn’t going to provide order, fairly and equally across society, in exchange for the burden of supporting it, and keep our businesses from getting burned, our cars from getting stolen, our kids from getting mugged on the way home from school?
People will start creating order for themselves. And one of these next times, it won’t be a 17 year old kid with more idealism than common sense and a loaner rifle.
It’ll be people who won’t run to the police to surrender when nasty nastiness happens.
It’ll be people who do their self-defense pre-emptively. People who don’t care about the high rhetoric and due process of the legal system.
People for whom shooting people isn’t something from video games; it’s something they do or did for their livelihood, either in the neighborhood or in Fallujah or Mogadishu or Helmand or somewhere in the Pine Barrens.
It’ll be people who keep secrets – you could even say, people who observe, and enforce, “codes of silence”.
Sounds like…the Mob? A Cartel? Omar’s crew from The Wire?
Weird.
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