The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
A leading Republican, who was in Congress for more than 10 years, answered my question: “Who can beat Obama?” with a casual, “a mammal”. Then he added sadly: “But they are all reptiles.” — Mark Mardell, BBC North American Editor, “Are the Republican candidates all crazy?”
Pithy.
And read this associated QotD from July of 2010.
Earl has video of the spontaneous disassembly of an M1 Garand. It’s almost as painful to watch as it must have been for the young lady holding it when it KABOOMed.
This is what happens when you fire a live round into an obstructed barrel.
Avoid it.
I read this morning about a woman who shot an intruder in her home in Blanchard, Oklahoma. Apparently he’d been stalking her, and when he and an accomplice broke into her home, she killed him with a shotgun:
Sarah Dawn McKinley was home alone with her three month old son at the time.She says she heard a knock on her door and looked through the peephole to see two men, one of whom she’d met a couple times before.“I saw that it was the same man. He had been here Thursday night and I had a bad feeling then,” said McKinley.McKinley says she moved her couch in front of the door, grabbed her son and her shotgun, called 911 and went in a back room.She says for an agonizing 21 minutes, she listened to the men try to break in.“He was from door to door trying to bust in, just going from door to door,” said McKinley. “I waited till he got in the door. They said I couldn’t shoot him until he was inside the house. So I waited until he got in the door and then I shot him.”
Those twenty-one minutes must have lasted an eternity, another example of “when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.” And to paraphrase Tam, if you don’t have your own gun, you may have to wait the rest of your life for the police to arrive with theirs. But here’s the part that has me scratching my head:
McKinley says she made the tough decision to shoot in order to protect her son. “There’s nothing more dangerous than a mother with her baby. But I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t for him.”
(My emphasis.) I was reminded of a post I read recently at A Girl and Her Gun – Labels, Labels, Everywhere, But Not A Single One For Me. In that post the author talks a bit about her decision to become a gun owner. (She discusses that decision in greater depth in another post.) In “Labels-labels” however, she says something very similar to young Ms. McKinley. Discussing her recent reading of the book Boston’s Gun Bible, she says:
When I read…
“Mothers defending their offspring can exhibit terrifying ferociousness, but they must be trained to become ferocious when protecting themselves.”
I actually lost my breath for a minute.
That about sums it up for me.
The old me.
I wonder what would have happened if my daughter wasn’t with me that day. I bought some time by doing things to distract the guy while I tried to get her to a safe place. I never one time thought about myself. In fact, for weeks, she was the only thing I thought of.
I wonder, if I had been alone, if I would have bothered to fight at all or if I would have just given up the second he approached me.
I instinctively knew she was worth every effort to protect, although I was totally unprepared, I didn’t just hand her over to the creep. I didn’t have to be taught that she was worth my life.
What I had to be taught was that “he” was NOT worth MINE.
I am not sure if I am a sheepdog or a warrior. I don’t know if any label fit me before or if any of them fit me now.
What I do know is that I no longer have to be taught to be ferocious.
Read the whole piece, please.
But the old mindset is the one I just don’t get. Being oblivious I get. But being unwilling to defend yourself? I don’t get it. Why is it that people need to be trained to defend themselves? I’m not talking about self-defense skills, I’m talking about self-defense mindset – as she puts it: “I will fight and you will lose.” Honestly, I’d never even considered the question before. It had literally not occurred to me until I read her post, and to see it twice in this short of a span makes me think that the attitude is not the exception.
Discuss. I really want to hear what you have to say, especially those of you on the distaff side of the question. Is it a male/female dichotomy as Boston T. Party states, or is that just a sexist papering over of something that is not uncommon regardless of plumbing?
ETA: Is this part of it?
Edit #2: AGirlandHerGun comments below. Excerpt:
I have read story after story in my email box and on other people’s sites of similar mindsets to my old one and it does not appear to be a plumbing an issue.
Lots of men are exactly the same way. We have socialized the “aggression” right out of society.
It’s a problem. To raise boys and girls to believe that everyone else’s life is more valuable than theirs is stupid and it is making the bad guys job a whole lot easier.
I am reminded of another old post, Americans, Gun Controllers, and the “Aggressive Edge” about the casting of the film Aliens in the UK. Casting Agent Mary Selway spoke of the difficulties she had finding… well, let her say it:
“It was INCREDIBLY hard to do, because, um, James kept saying, ‘State of the art firepower. They’ve got to be incredibly, sort of on the cutting edge of American military…’
“So, what often happens here when American actors come to live in England, they become a bit Anglicized, and they don’t… they lose that really, sort of aggressive edge if you like, that this sort casting required.”
And we’ve been doing that to (some) of our children for generations now. I guess that answers the question.
More disturbing, I think, is the extent to which America has suffered not a failure of the elites, but a failure of the people. Do we measure up to the founders of this country? The fact that Americans fought a revolution against Britain in the first place continues to astonish me. When in all of history have prosperous men with property — farms and businesses — risked their lives and fortunes to establish a better political order? Only a spiritual grandeur of a depth we barely can imagine today can explain it. When in all of history has a country gone to war and sacrificed a 5% of its total population to suppress slavery? The evangelical zeal that sent the North to war, singing of the grapes of wrath in the apocalyptic vision of Isaiah 63, surpasses our understanding today. — David P. Goldman, Has the Conservative Elite Really Failed?
A failure I blame on public education.
I’ve done this annual review post each January 1 since 2007 – I guess that makes it a tradition. According to Blogger, I wrote 453 posts in 2011, down a bit from 2010. Down a bit more from 2009. Down a bit more from 2008, the peak year here. I kinda wonder if I’m running out of things to say. Or the urge to say them. I do find myself repeating a lot, referencing older posts. Even more, I find myself using other people’s words rather than my own. Anyway, let’s do this one more time:
January started off with a tragedy – the spree shooting here in Tucson that claimed the lives of six people and left twelve others wounded, including the primary target of the shooting, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Among the dead, nine year-old Christina Taylor Green, who had been born on September 11, 2001 – a life book-ended by tragedies, as her father put it. He had some other words that should not be forgotten.
In the aftermath of the shooting, with lots of blame cast about in the media, we got an example of how exercising your First Amendment rights could cost you your Second Amendment rights.
February was a light month for posts here. After the sh!tstorm of January, I was suffering a bit of ennui. There were a lot of QotD posts, and one link to a fascinating TED talk about how computers and the internet can be used by children to learn on their own, with adults merely providing guidance and support. If you missed it, I urge you to watch.
March got an überpost, Our Economic Titanic. Actually, I worked on that one most of February, and it was the cause of that ennui.
I didn’t post much in April, either, but despite our economic Titanic, I bought a 2011 Mustang. If we’re going to hell, I decided, I was going to enjoy the ride. April also brought me a comment that reminded me why I do this blogging thing.
May was a banner month, with 51 posts! Just trying to keep up with events. Osama Bin Laden assumed room temperature. I quoted Christopher Hitchens for a QotD. The blog turned eight years old (that’s like, 90 in human years). I went to BulletFest 2011 in Knoxville courtesy of LuckyGunner.com and plane tickets provided by U.S. Citizen. (Thanks again!) And I reminded everyone of one of the other wonderful things about the interwebs, the ability to produce truly excellent writing that otherwise no one would ever produce and no one would ever be able to read. If you missed the three-part Perspectives stories, by all means, read them now. Larry Correia isn’t the only talented writer in our midst by a long shot.
I guess I suffered some burnout after May, as June was another light month for posting. I did, however, respond to Jennifer’s question and cranked out a post on How I Became a Gun Nut. Then I took another hiatus. Two weeks this time.
July started off with a bang, though. July 1, I posted Lend Me Your Ears!, with apologies to The Bard. On the Fourth I put up the überpost TL;DR. I did a few other posts that month, but nothing all that exciting.
In August there were riots in (formerly) Great Britain. How far they have fallen; from the Tottenham Outrage of 1909 to the Tottenham Rampage of 2011. Suddenly many Brits found themselves in a situation where being disarmed in the face of face of violence was no longer a theoretical situation, and many decided that they didn’t like the odds. Still, the traditional “stiff upper lip” and understated eloquence was in evidence. My long exchanges with Australian blogger Tim Lambert on the topic paid off; I got a post out of a comment I left at SayUncle on the legality of self-defense in the UK.
Finally, my mother underwent open-heart surgery and had two valves replaced. She still hasn’t fully recovered as of yet, but she hasn’t lost a bit of her fiestyness.
I started off September with a prediction: I predict that the 2012 election season will be the ugliest, dirtiest, nastiest thing anyone living has ever seen. September brought us the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and I had something to say about how we as a nation have handled that, too. Actually, Mark Steyn said it. I just quoted him. September also brought Gun Blogger Rendezvous v 6.0. Much fun was had by all. GBR VII is now scheduled. You really ought to make plans to attend.
I don’t know who said this, really, but it was too good not to make QotD. And here was another.
I changed jobs in September, leaving the Consulting/Specifying Engineer role to return to the retail end of electrical engineering. At the time, it didn’t look like such a smart move. While I love what I’m doing now, it still looks like it might not have been such a smart move. Of course, if when econo-geddon does come, it really won’t matter much what job I have.
The week after GBR VI they held the Reno Air Races. There was a crash, and one pilot and several spectators were killed. The nannies were immediately up-in-arms over the crash. Bill Whittle responded.
Expanding on using other people’s words when they say it better than I can, I have started taking excerpts from fiction when I find them particularly apropos. October brought one such selection from the Sci-Fi novel Road to Damascus.
Operation Fast and Furious was in the news (finally), and spawned one of the best Downfall bunker-scene parodies I’ve ever watched.
Not exactly an überpost, but I wore out my fingers with CTRL-C and CTRL-V producing a post of 90% other people’s words in True Believers and the Machinery of Freedom and Oppression. Please read that one if you missed it the first time.
I spent a lot of October driving places. It gave me time to think. One result of that thinking was a multimedia post, The Selfish Gene.
I moved into my new office space, and once again experience the reality that Dilbert isn’t a cartoon strip, it’s a documentary.
October ended with some sage words from Robb Allen. Too good to quote from, I just linked.
I finally purchased a firearm in 2011, a Smith & Wesson 327 TRR8 revolver. One gun is well down from my normal three a year, but I’m pretty well stocked with lead delivery systems. I spent quite a bit of money this year feeding them. And Mustang payments.
In November I posted a QotD that echoes October’s True Believers and the Machinery of Freedom and Oppression post: And This is Why the Party’s Over. You might also want to read System failure on a global scale by Alan Caruba. Econo-geddon. Then again, you might not.
In December I didn’t have much to say, but I strongly recommend you read The Corruption of America by Porter Stansberry.
And that concludes The Smallest Minority Year in Review. What have I learned from this exercise? I don’t do a lot of deep, thoughtful posts anymore. I quote others extensively. I do a lot of linking. I’m deeply pessimistic.
Expect more (or perhaps less) of the same in 2012.
Happy friggin’ New Year.