The Gun Counter

This is burning up Facebook as an example of a very WONDERFUL and CHRISTIAN thing to do.

Fucking moron was lucky. A lot of these crooks aren't the brightest bulbs in the box. If you do anything to startle or confuse them, they'll just kill you to simplify things. "Shoo, He CRAZY!"

Link

As I just read today either here or on another site. There are victims, and then there are volunteers.

"And that is called paying the Dane-geld; but we've proved it again and again, that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld you never get rid of the Dane." Rudyard Kipling

I can't fault the guy for living up to his beliefs. He put nobody but himself at risk. Notably, he didn't start a Facebook campaign to spread the news far and wide either.

One can drop money into the poor box and collection plate, and still have no compunction about putting a loaded pistol onto the night table.
Or vice versa.

As long as this is noted as a optional personal choice, I have no problem with it whatsoever. It takes all kinds.
Make it official policy, and I'll agitate for shooting the mugger and the government, as there's little functional difference between them.

Aesop wrote:I can't fault the guy for living up to his beliefs. He put nobody but himself at risk. Notably, he didn't start a Facebook campaign to spread the news far and wide either.

One can drop money into the poor box and collection plate, and still have no compunction about putting a loaded pistol onto the night table.
Or vice versa.

As long as this is noted as a optional personal choice, I have no problem with it whatsoever. It takes all kinds.
Make it official policy, and I'll agitate for shooting the mugger and the government, as there's little functional difference between them.

Sorry, but not so much.

The next person the criminal encounters may not be so fortunate, especially since he fed into the "I'm entitled" reflex of the perp. The way to prevent criminal activity is to make criminal activity too risky, and you don't do that by giving them not only what they demand, but a little something extra.

It's a very different thing to give money to a panhandler/begger/whatever who ASKS you for money than to give to someone who threatens you and DEMANDS that you give him money.

This is coming from someone who DOES give a good deal of money to charities, including two churches (my wife and I go to different churches), AND who would not only ventilate someone breaking into my home but who hopes someday to move to America where my right to self defense doesn't end at my property line.

Frankly, giving handouts to the panhandlers I would see as a greater crime than this.
It's one thing to surrender your wallet to someone with a knife when you're unarmed.
But when you hand out money to somebody begging for it under no threat, that's irredeemably pitiful, unless they're so helpless and destitute they deserve the charity.
(I have yet to see one panhandler incapable of gainful employment other than choosing not to do so.)

It isn't my job to solve every criminal's problem, or every other citizen's.
If he mugs you next, he's your problem. Do as you see fit.
That's the beauty of a free country.

I'm not advocating this guy's solution, nor stating that it would have been my first choice.
But that he did it is no cause for alarm.
Something about giving a man your cloak as well, and turning the other cheek either means something, or it doesn't.
This guy risked nothing but himself to let it mean something.
Results after that are God's problem.

So is deciding whether he's a better person than a guy who would've pulled a CCW piece and ventilated the kid.
Both actions are justified, but I can't weigh souls and tell you which one is better.

I can tell you he ended up not being robbed, disarming the kid, and may have started him on a better path.
At any rate, next time, the kid won't have his knife. So it's not a wash. I'm only saying I could live with that.

There's room in my world for Mother Teresa and Dirty Harry, and nothing wrong with using all the tools in the box.

Won't have his knife??? Um, there are plenty of knives laying around. If he continues on a better path, Society is for the better. If he were ventilated instead, same outcome. As Texas Ranger Captain Augustus McRae said in Lonesome Dove, "You ride with outlaws, you die with outlaws."

Aesop: see my other reply about the danegeld.

shitthatdidnthappen.tumblr.com

Aesop wrote:I can't fault the guy for living up to his beliefs. He put nobody but himself at risk. Notably, he didn't start a Facebook campaign to spread the news far and wide either.

And yet it's on the Internet somehow.

Lessee, aggregator, article-is-image, absolutely no source... complete BS.

MarkD wrote:Aesop: see my other reply about the danegeld.

I did.

Of the two, a panhandler proves that much more so than this pitiful attempt at a mugging.