I got an automated phone call today to attend a Seattle police improvement meetting. I'm going to be pushing a victimproofing plan, and would love to have some company. Its at the Belltown community center at 6:30pm on this thursday.
I got an automated phone call today to attend a Seattle police improvement meetting. I'm going to be pushing a victimproofing plan, and would love to have some company. Its at the Belltown community center at 6:30pm on this thursday.
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To make a long story short, these people don't have a clue of how to protect themselves and the police aren't going to help them. .... and told them I walk anywhere, anytime in seattle, and I have no fear about it. ... and I told them about Victimproofing....
Everything you say is 100% true and correct. However, it just does not address the underlying issue - it's not just thast they do not have a clue about how to protect themselves (and carrying is only a small part of that) so much as they have no intention of protecting themselves. Whether it's a deeply-held conviction that violence is wrong or an overwhelming sense of learned helplessness, they have nothing within themselves (at least at this time) that would scream "DEFEND YOURSELF" if they were confronted by any situation - be it a mugging, a home fire, or an automobile accident. Their fight-or-flight response has been reduced to either flight or deer-in-the-headlights inability to form any sort of response to what to them is a completely foreign situation (as in never having experienced, never having contemplated what they might do). It's not that they are out of options - they have none to begin with.
You (specifically you, jsanchez) and I and we (the majority of those who are here on OCDO and all those others who carry) are significantly different from Mary and Collien and Chad and Carol and Stacy. For whatever reason, we have agreed with ourselves that we are the ones to be responsible for, among other things, our personal safety and self defense. That probably includes having had the internal conversation about whether or not we are willing to cause the death of another human being. Your table-mates have not done that (yet?). This is why although there are about 380 Million guns in the USA, they are owned by only about 3.5 Million people (iirc the stats) and why any state that has issued concealed permits/licenses to anything more than 4% of the population is considered to have a "heavily armed" citizenry. Even counting all the hunters and target shooters and SSA cowpersons and just-a-collectors, only about one tenth (1/10th) of the population has a gun - and that includes all the cops, even the ones that only carry on duty and do not own a firearm (especially a handgun) of their own.
So - how to we turn Mary and Collien and Chad and Carol and Stacy from Eloi into someone willing to stand up and defend themself (even if they do not choose the most effective and efficient means)? My opinion is that they need an infusion of what self esteem used to mean before everybody decided it meant nobody ever has to be embarassed by being less than the winner (even if it's the 37th-place winner out of a class of 36). Right now they are bribing the police to protect them - giving them money and hoping the cops will be around right before they are needed. They need to get moved to where this charming little old lady is - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfeAsOiaOkk .
Once someone finds out how to do that on more than an individual basis, we are home free. In the meantime, we are stuck with "A Republican is nothing but a Democrat who has been mugged."
stay safe.