Here’s the thing- I don’t do violence. As someone said in another thread somewhere, “once violence is on the table, you’ve already failed”. If I am driven to the point of physical violence, it means I’m out of other options.
There is no fucking way I’m getting into a fistfight with someone. That’s not how civilized, rational people do things. I walk away (which, again, for those of you in the back, is the greatly preferred option), or I end things using whatever means doesn’t jeopardize my own safety.
I am under no obligation to engage my assailant at the level of violence they choose. I am under no obligation to let them harm me, because of some duty to put their safety before my own.
Happened to a friend-of-a-friend a few years ago. Some drunk at a bar wanted to start a fight and cold cocked him from behind. He got up, seemed fine, drunk gets kicked out of the place, everybody goes home. Died in his sleep from a brain bleed. Every fight carries the chance of permanent injury or worse, because shit like that happens. Hell- With my blood pressure where it is, I’m liable to have a stroke or cardiac incident just from being around that sort of situation.
I’m not willing to put my life in jeopardy because someone else wants to take that risk. If someone is going to start a barroom brawl over a goddamned Walmart notebook, that is not a person I trust to stop that fight before someone sustains a life threatening injury. I am walking away, and if that is impossible, I am ending it in whatever manner poses the least risk to myself and/or the innocent people I’m defending. That is my obligation- Not ensuring the assailant’s safety.
I’ll pose the same hypothetical to you that I raised above. If the lady with the gun had shot and killed the women fighting with her daughter, would that have been appropriate?
My first post on this mentioned my aversion to owning a weapon. I had one years ago, someone broke into my home a few weeks after I had bought it (never buy a former crack house even if it has been renovated)…I could have shot him over this. I decided that my belief system did not allow me to take his life to defend my own. Someone else that I loved? This might have been a different situation. But you are absolutely right, putting yourself into danger is moronic. I can’t stand people that have to resort to violence over trinkets.
The person was ON THE GROUND WITH THEIR HAIR BEING PULLED TOWARDS THE GROUND. Honestly, are you blind? I guess so.
God fucking dammit…now it is ‘parsing words’ which is the last place idiots that have lost intellectual fights go. She stopped the fight and could have escallated it further if someone would have then attacked her. Was it stupid for her to pull a gun? Sure. I wouldn’t have done it. HOWEVER, it wasn’t my daughter being attacked.
But it was just ‘hair getting pulled’…by three grown women twice this girls age after they had shoved her to the ground. ‘Okay’. I’m done with you. I hope.
Editing my post because I misread it based on the other posts! I agree with this. And this is exactly how I feel. I don’t feel that allowing further harm to myself or others is ever something I should feel guilty about. I don’t believe in taking anyone’s life…but to save an innocent person’s life? I might. Still…I’d be afraid that I’d be the guy that shot the wrong person. Yet another reason I don’t like guns.
So agree 100% with you. Thank you for not being an idiot that is like “what if you shot the woman trying to beat the shit out of your daughter? What then? What would you do? I challenge you to tell me!!!” Because it sounds like you already have the same answer I do.
Unless of course the daughter started it. Then fuck her.
So we’re agreed they weren’t having their head bashed against cement.
Quite the opposite. I’m taking your argument at face value.
Why was it stupid? I’m really asking you here, because if you truly believe that, then we probably don’t disagree with as much on this topic as your personal vitriol seems to indicate.
I’m not entirely sure why you’re this angry with me about our disagreement here. I disagree with some of what you’re saying quite a bit, and I’m not entirely sure that you actually believe some of it, but for the record I don’t think this makes you a bad person or unintelligent.
It is very amusing to me, that when someone says “I’d kill that dude blah blah blah” the commentariat will mock them for being an “Internet Tough Guy”, but when someone says “Oh, I’d totally act in accordance with calm reasoning based on my philosophical beliefs if my child was getting beat up” there’s no similar derision.
In Real Life ™ we are all the descendants of people who defended their children instinctively. If you think you are one of the tiny fraction of people who are sufficiently mentally aberrant to act differently… you’re almost certainly wrong. It’s really, really hard to be a Quaker, and more than a few Quakers fail to live out their beliefs when the moment is real.
In my experience when one’s child is threatened (regardless of whether it’s your adoptive or biological child) parents aren’t doing a lot of unemotional reasoning.
The minute you tell someone their rationed arguement is bullshit and then practically makes shit up, it throws any thing out the window. I’m sorry but I’m not going to argue with you on this subject anymore. Maybe there will be another that we can discuss rationally in the future but this isn’t one of them.
I do think that argument is dead wrong, but that word was probably unnecessarily harsh to open with so I apologize. I don’t think you’re a bad person for making the argument, I just think it’s a bad argument on its face. But, I don’t think you actually believe it, as my hypothetical demonstrates. And that hypothetical wasn’t rhetorical, by the way. I really do want to know whether you’d consider that action appropriate or not, because that question gets to the premise of the argument. Our responsibility to act reasonably doesn’t get tossed out just because someone is fighting with a family member.
And if you believe I “practically made shit up,” then you can point it out to me and I’ll certainly reexamine. But I’d really appreciate if you refrain from general accusations of bad faith in the future, so thanks in advance.
If she had shot and killed her, it would have been a terrible tragedy- But I don’t believe I can fault someone for protecting their child.
And once again- This all goes back to how this whole thing started over a notebook? Someone thought a $0.79 office supply was worth physically assaulting another human being.
The number of lines which had to be crossed, the number of failures which had to occur, the number of bad decisions which had to be made to get to a point where someonepulls a gun is so far over the edge of civilized behavior that I think anything which happens after that is kind of a moot point.
That’s why i said in my last post, we can talk about it all day but when shit happens to you in real life there’s no way to tell how one will react. Hindsight is 20/20.
In particular to this case, was she justified in pulling the gun? I think it was reckless, not because of the assault of her daughter but because she allowed the situation to escalate to that point. It’s not like these other shoppers showed up and started a fight out of nowhere. I would have gotten the hell out of there if someone was being overly confrontational over a notebook. And if i had a child no chance would i put my kid in the middle of that.
Many years ago I Lost. My. Shit. when my daughter was attacked when she was about 3yrs old. My reaction surprised and scared me. It also taught me quite a bit. One of the many things it taught me is that firearms have no place in society. They are a useful tool in certain situations. They are a fun toy in certain other situations. Shopping for school supplies fulfils neither of those criteria, and neither does self-defence in the vast majority of situations (‘vast’ being the same as ‘all’, to five or six decimal places).
Spoiler: I’m a soldier, and have been for a long time. I’m not scared of firearms, I don’t feel weird about carrying or using them, and I’m quite competent with them. They are a tool I use at work, not something I get a stiffy about on my own time. I doubt many builders carry a hammer around with them at all times ‘just in case’.
Seems to me that if the results are the only thing that matter, a ‘sick stick’ would have been a better, non-lethal solution to this needless altercation over a fuckin’ notebook; albeit a much messier one.
