I’ve got a new post up at the PJ Tatler:

For the past few days, the internet has been buzzing about two amazing self-defense stories, each involving young people.  The first to hit the wires was the story of 19-year old Sarah McKinley.

On Christmas Day, McKinley’s 58-year old husband died of cancer, leaving her alone with their three month old baby.  When two knife-wielding men attempted to break into her home to steal her late husband’s painkillers, McKinley grabbed her guns, called 911, and asked for help.  In a polite colloquy with the 911 operator, McKinley asked if it was okay to shoot the intruders if law enforcement, which was still several minutes away, didn’t arrive in time.  The operator said McKinley, who fortunately lives in a state giving homeowners the right to armed self-defense, could do what she needed to do to protect her baby.  McKinley did just that:

Read the rest here.

Not only is this a beautiful example of self-defense (watch Derek Mothershead move in smoothly, disable the robber’s gun hand, and throw a powerful left hook haymaker at the robber, landing him on the floor), I just love Mothershead’s money quotation about this serial criminal:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If he wants money.  Get a job.  Work, like everybody else in this world.

I finally figured out the Second Amendment when Hurricane Katrina struck.  I mean, I’d always known before that the police can’t be everywhere and that they often show up to mop up after a crime, because the criminal and done and gone so quickly.  The knowledge that they’re out there is certainly a deterrent to crime generally, but it cannot stop all crimes specifically.  Knowing that intellectually was not the same as understanding that viscerally.  Hurricane Katrina brought the whole thing home:  with the best will in the world, it was impossible for New Orlean’s police to protect citizens literally left adrift by the Gulf’s raging waters.  Those with guns protected themselves.  Those without were vulnerable.

Mike McDaniel gets this.  A former police officer and current Second Amendment stalwart, he understands the limits of what the police can do, and the point at which the citizenry is responsible for its own care.  It’s a post that’s worth reading.  I don’t have a gun in my house for various reasons, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t think you shouldn’t have one either.

One of the blessings of blogging is that I’ve met so many wonderful people.  I haven’t met most of them in the conventional sense — that is, I haven’t been in the same physical space with them — but I’ve corresponded with them over the years and feel I know them as I well as if I’d met them at a PTA meeting, Republican gathering, soccer game, or at the dojo.  One of those people is Mike McDaniel, who blogs at Stately McDaniel Manor.  Read Mike’s writing and you know you’re in the presence of a mensch.

This particular mensch happens to be a big Second Amendment advocate, and he recently published an article at the Gun Values Board about the rising number of women who have guns.  We women are raised to be afraid of guns, but more and more women are recognizing that a gun is a great equalizer.  Whether you’re facing a random crazy person or an insanely angry spouse, a gun provides women with the margin of strength that nature denied them.

I used to think that guns meant mayhem.  I’ve now come to understand that guns in the hands of amoral bullies mean mayhem.  A moral, armed citizenry is a safe citizenry.

America’s First Sergeant has a related post, not about guns per se, but about our obligation to defend ourselves.  As he makes clear, there is a difference between bullying and self-defense.  The Left has raised a generation of children who cannot make this distinction, meaning that the bullies rule.

(P.S.  America’s First Sergeant is also a mensch, although I’m not sure you’re supposed to say that about a Marine Sergeant.)

We spend a lot of time talking here about the way our Progressive culture infantilizes young people.  Just think about the way the whole liberal world had a collective head explosion when Newt suggested that young people get jobs to learn the value of discipline and achieve the satisfaction of wages.  But all is not perpetual babying of our youth when it comes to the Progressive education establishment.  Woe betide the child, even a 7-year-old, who dares to transgress political correctness.  Under those circumstances, no consequences is too severe, both to punish the malfeasor and to stand as a warning to all other children tempted to violate Progressive norms.

I speak, of course, of the child who punched a bully in the crotch (something, by the way, that we are all taught in self-defense classes is the best way to disable a predator) and was charged with sexual harassment.  The story would be a non-story had the incident been treated the old-fashioned way, with both bully and victim hauled off to the principal’s office, to get proportionate punishments (with, I hope, more serious punishment going to the bully).  In my day, those punishments included staying after school, missing recess, perhaps a one- or two-day suspension and the dreaded “I’m going to have to tell your parents about this.”

Mark Steyn summarizes perfectly the horror unfolding here, and I do mean horror.  This is not just a silly joke about an over-reactive school administration.  This is a life-long sentence for the 7-year-old:

There may be “another side” to this story, but it’s hard to foresee any version of events in which a First Grader can plausibly be guilty of “sexual assault”. Nevertheless, if found guilty, Mark Curran when he turns 18 will be placed on a “sex offender registry”, and his life will be ruined. If officials of the Boston public schools system genuinely believe that when a seven-year old kicks another seven-year old in the crotch that that is an act of “sexual harassment”, then they are too stupid to be entrusted with the care of the city’s children. If, on the other hand, they retain enough residual humanity to understand that a seven-year-old groin-kick is not a sexual assault but have concluded that regulatory compliance obliges them to investigate it as such, then they are colluding in an act of great evil.

Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. If you’re wondering how a candidate’s presidential campaign can be derailed by allegations of “gestures” of “a non-sexual nature” that made women “uncomfortable” two decades ago rather than by his total ignorance of foreign policy and national security, well, this stuff starts in kindergarten. The loss of proportion and of basic human judgment in the American education system ought to be an unnerving indicator.

Yeah, you got that right.

I used to love Star Trek : The Next Generation.  I still get a kick out of the time-space continuum episodes, but the neocon in me cringes at the relentless Leftism that some of the plots display.  Still, there were the moments.  This was one of my favorites:

Click here to view the embedded video.

That line (“if you prick me, do I not . . . leak”) has been running through my head today, ’cause I’ve got a migraine.  When I get bad migraines, my eyes tear.  I’m not crying — that is, there’s no emotion connected to the tearing.  It’s more like the pressure in my brain forcing tears out of my eyes.  In other words, like Data, I leak.

This leaking precludes higher brain function.  In addition to doing a lot today (including a self-defense against weapons class, at which I was unusually clumsy), my leaking eyes made me disinclined to sit down and blog.  It’s just distracting.

Tomorrow or the day after, when I’m feeling a little less lachrymose, I’ll tell you about the self-defense classes (yes, I took two this weekend), because they’re pretty interesting.

I’ll continue the faux Shakespearean vein of this post by saying, “now to bed,” which is definitely the best place for someone with an imminently exploding brain.

One of the most basic principles of Anglo-Saxon common law is a homeowner’s right to defend himself against intruders.  Oh, wait!  That’s not quite true anymore.  In England, which practically gave its name to the notion that “a man’s home is his castle,” homeowner self-defense is against the law (emphasis mine):

Myleene Klass, the broadcaster and model, brandished a knife at youths who broke into her garden – but has been warned by police that she may have acted illegally.

Miss Klass, a model for Marks & Spencer and a former singer with the pop group Hear’Say, was in her kitchen in the early hours of Friday when she saw two teenagers behaving suspiciously in her garden.

The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away.

Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an “offensive weapon” – even in her own home – was illegal.

Mind you, the above rule is separate from the fact that the UK’s strict anti-gun laws have cut off completely one way in which homeowners can defend themselves against intruders.  The inevitable, is that burglars feel free to break and enter occupied houses, since they needn’t worry about staring down the wrong end of a gun barrel.  (Crime, too, has sky-rocketed.)  What’s different about the rule announced in the above article, is that it isn’t just about removing the homeowner’s most effective instrument of defense; instead, it’s about destroying entirely even the thought of self-defense.

I think Miss Klass is to be highly commended for doing whatever she could to defend herself and her daughter against these intruders.  After all, if she ever cracks open a paper in England, or turns on the news, she knows that Yob violence is out of control.  Britain has successfully turned itself into Anthony Burgess’ Clockwork Orange-vision of a nation equally divided between compliant victims, on the one hand, and brutal psychopaths, on the other.

Thank goodness that, at least in Oklahoma, people are still allowed to defend themselves against home intruders.  Otherwise, one very brave and frightened woman, instead of having successfully and with great physical and moral courage defended herself, could be as dead as the average British homeowner:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(You can hear the whole 33 minute long 911 call here.)

I took my daughter to the doctor today for what turned out to be a sinus infection.  The pediatrician is a lovely man — kind, skilled at his work, and (obviously) good with children.  I trust him as a doctor.  As a deep thinker, though, well . . . the jury won’t be out very long.

My daughter is a chatterbox and somehow she drifted into the fact that she met the flight surgeon for the Blue Angels and that’s the job she wants:  to be in the military, but not have to kill people, except in defense.  The doctor said, “I can understand why you want to be a doctor, but why would you want to be in the Navy?”  My daughter looked at him blankly.  She’d just described to him an incredibly exciting and responsible job with amazing people.  What more could she say?

I filled the silence:  “Join the Navy, see the world.”  He looked at my as blankly as my daughter had looked at him, and then said, “Join the Navy, kill people.”  Out of deference to the situation, and recognizing the fact that his mind was locked, I refrained from saying, “Some people need to be killed.”  In my head flashed pictures of Mao (70 million dead under his leadership), Stalin (around 30 million dead under his leadership), Hitler (25 million or so dead as a result of his war), and Pol Pot (one third of his country laid in shallow graves).  But I didn’t say anything.  I knew that he, being a liberal who cannot seem to accept the lessons of history, wouldn’t have understood.

My daughter, bless her heart, did understand.  In the car on the way home, I discussed with her the fact that there is evil in the world.  I said causes are often irrelevant.  Whether the perpetrator didn’t get enough oxygen at birth, belongs to a religion committed to the deaths of others, got beaten as a child, or intersected with any other root cause no longer matters once the perpetrator is arrayed against you with weapon in hand.  It’s a no-brainer that, if you face this situation as an individual, you must and would defend yourself.  In the same way, a nation facing an enemy determined to annihilate it must also act to defend itself.  Further, when you see the guns aimed at you, self-defense often means firing the first shot.  (Something every American who watched old Hollywood westerns easily understood).

In America, it’s our volunteer military that provides this defense.  These men and women willingly do the dirty work to keep us safe.  My daughter instantly understood the saying, often attributed (wrongly) to Orwell, that “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

As if to underline my point, as we drove home, the 40s channel on my XM radio played a song paying homage to General MacArthur.  I said to her, “Can you imagine a song nowadays praising the military?”  There was a huff from the back seat.  While her imagination can encompass evil, it couldn’t stretch to an American popular culture that openly admires our volunteer military.  Or, as she said, “It’s despicable that there aren’t songs like that.  I’ll write one.”  And as musical as she is, she just might.

This clip of today’s Sotomayor hearings may just have hit upon the most important constitutional question that faces us all as we confront our devolution into the Obamatopian State.

In this segment, Senator Tom Coburn (R., OK) asks Judge Sotomayor whether she agrees that Americans have a basic right to self defense. The ensuing silence is deafening. It is enlightening in that it reveals her not only to be mendacious but clueless: asking herself whether the Constitution grants Americans a right to self-defense, the judge could not even answer her own question. She said that she could not think of such a Constitutional right.

Now, granted, Judge Sotomayor has a difficult job. She needs to communicate answers which sound rational, reasonable and wise while obfuscating what she truly believes. Not everyone is adept at such two-track thinking and thus, the wheels turn slowly. The net effect is somewhat akin to a cell phone call fading in and out of range as the caller ducks behind rhetorical hills. So let me help her out by pointing to one of the underlying foundations of our Constitution as enumerated in the Declaration of Independence . . . you know, the one that refers to a God-given right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

My life is my own. It was given to me by God, or so says the Declaration of Independence. Supposedly, the State can make no claim upon my life . . . at least this is what I presume to be the underlying principle of the 13th Amendment banning slavery or involuntary servitude. Yet, this is exactly what the State does when it professes to dictates if, when, how and under what circumstances I am allowed to preserve (or end, for that matter) my life. It asserts a right over my life that could only exist if my life was subject to the whims of the State. At that point, I would not be a free citizen.

Just for the record, I will refuse ever to cede that right to the State, even on pain of death. I was born free and I fully plan to die free. I will never accept the right of the State to dictate if, when and whether I must sacrifice my life to another. This is a big part of what makes me an American.

Other countries don’t accept this and it’s not just barbaric backwaters like North Korea and Iran. British or Canadian passports, for example, quite explicitly (even proudly) proclaim their members to be “subjects” of another human being, Her Majesty the Queen. Although there is talk about redefining British subjects as “Citizens of the EU”, the words EU and “free” hardly go together, do they. Citizens of the EU quite explicitly do NOT have a right to self-defense.

Now, in fairness, the 13th Amendment does not preclude voluntary servitude and I suspect that this is where many of my fellow citizens on the Democrat /Left long to go. They want to abdicate their freedoms under the delusion that a benevolent master will relieve the burdens and responsibilities of freedom from their shoulders in the coming Obamatopia. To them, I say you’re welcome to it: just find a way to finance it yourselves and then get out the way of those of us that insist on staying free men and free women. After all, making claims on my labor without my consent also violates the 13th Amendment. Perhaps we really are devolving into a two-tier society: one of citizens, the other of serfs.

The title of this post is the cri de coeur of a father whose son died in his arms.  We can all sympathize with how he feels — except that it gets a little more complicated when you read the story about how his son died.  You see his son, armed with a gun, and an accomplice, armed with a knife, tried to rob a 21 year old man at a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station, a robbery accompanied by threats to kill the victim.  The victim fought back and, in the melee, managed to inflict a fatal stab wound on the assailant holding the gun:

A 23-year-old visitor from the East Coast had just gotten money from an ATM when he told his friend on a cell phone that he had a bad feeling about two men approaching him at the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland.

His worst fears were realized when one suspect, Victor Veliz, 18, held a folding knife with a 5-inch blade to his neck and the other, Christopher Gonzalez, 18, threatened to shoot him Thursday night, authorities said.

In a blind panic, he lashed out at his attackers, grabbing the knife from one of them and punching the other as his friend listened in horror on the phone.

Without realizing it, authorities say, the man stabbed Gonzalez in the chest. Gonzalez stumbled to his family’s home around the corner, collapsed into his father’s arms and died.

The victim immediately turned himself in and is not being charged.  He was upset to learn that, in defending himself, he killed a man.  The dead man’s father is upset too, but not that his own son’s wayward conduct brought about his death.  Dad is upset that the victim dared defend himself:

Javier Gonzalez sobbed at the loss of his son, who worked with him in his roofing business and at Oakland Raiders games.

“I’m angry at both of them,” he said of the robbery victim and Veliz. “They took my son away from me. He was a hard-working kid.”

He added, “My son is dead. I want somebody to pay for this.”

Dad gets something of a pass here, because I can’t imagine the horror of having my son die in my arms.  Nevertheless, I still find it unnerving, at a deep cultural level — a level about personal responsibility — to hear a man laud as a hard-working kid the son who tried to rob a man at gun and knife point, while blaming the real victim for defending himself against this murderous assault.  I can understand blaming the dead guy’s compatriot (you know, “his friends led him down the wrong path”), but to blame an innocent victim of a felonious crime hacks me off.