I need this crocheted in a pillow or a frame.
By Miguel.GFZ
Semi-retired like Vito Corleone before the heart attack. Consiglieri to J.Kb and AWA. I lived in a Gun Control Paradise: It sucked and got people killed. I do believe that Freedom scares the political elites.
Apparently some people _do_ care, although I can’t fathom why.
The logic is that ‘statistics’ show that most robbers only want your stuff so it is immoral to assume they’re there to hurt you and defend your life/property. IOW, you should rely on the assumed good will of the person who has already violated social standards to not hurt/kill you and your family.
That’s part of what’s wrong with the “just give the robber, or rapist, what he wants”. A whole bunch of them will kill you, either for shits & grins, or to get rid of the witness.
But apart from that, the property they are taking was acquired by your labor, which means by a slice of your life. There is only a difference of degree between robbery and murder, NOT a fundamental difference in nature. Try to take part of my life, or all of my life, I’m morally justified to use deadly force to stop you.
The fact that the law, by and large in most states, doesn’t recognize this moral principle is a defect of the law, not an error in the moral principle. In civilized states we can ignore this defect, pretty much, because “reasonable fear of death or serious bodily harm” very much applies in the case of robbery, and honest DAs and decent juries know this. It may not help you in s**thole states like NY, of course, but it should work in decent places like NH.
Came here to say this, albeit not as eloquently.
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It’s a perspective I appreciate more as I get older. In some ways it’s depressing (or, to be a little pejorative, materialistic) to consider one’s “stuff” (be it property or savings) as the benchmark of one’s life’s work. However, it doesn’t change the fact that it is, in fact, just that. “Stuff” can also mark events in one’s life, time spent in the company and life partnership with loved ones, etc.
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As the saying goes, you are not valuing your stuff more than the thief’s life. The thief is the one making that value judgment.
Re “depressing”, that’s a point but it’s not quite the same thing as what I said. It isn’t that your property is the measure of your life’s work. But it is true that your property (for the vast majority of us) was produced by time taken from our limited lifespan. If someone steals my car, he steals the value of that car, which equals some number of hours of my labor at whatever pay rate my labor may command right now.
Hazlett used a variation of this observation to show the fallacy of the notion that breaking windows is good because it keeps glaziers employed. He says that yes, maybe so. But it takes money from the home owners to get the glass repaired, money that home owner wanted to use for a more valuable (to him) purpose.
And of course the notion of “give him what he wants” is particularly repugnant in the case of a rapist. There we’re not at all talking about “mere things” that can be replaced “it’s just money” or even more absurdly “it’s insured after all”.
“Gun control is the assertion that a woman raped and strangled in an alley is somehow morally superior to one who shoots her attacker stone dead.”
Oh, I’m stealing this one! 🙂
HP,
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Oleg Volk may have a poster of this for you.
I’ve seen it in a slightly different form, with attribution:
“Victim disarmament types are sick, sick people, who’d rather see a woman raped in an alley and strangled with her own pantyhose than see her with a gun in her hand.” — T. D. Melrose, quoted by Neil Smith