Month: October 2014

Are You Defending Your Physical Person or Your Ego

Self-defense is a complex topic. Between skills, philosophy, and legal issues involved one could write an entire encyclopedia on the subject and not even begin to scratch the surface.

I’ve written quite a few posts talking about the idea of appropriate responses. That is how much force, if any, is proper in specific situations. But today I feel like writing about something a bit different. Consider this video. The video started off, supposedly, as one of those YouTube pranks where somebody acts like a raging asshole at random people and laughs at the response. In this case the person acting like a raging asshole slapped another person in the face with a piece of pizza. Unlike most of the YouTube pranks you see this one did not end well for the prankster since he got punched in the face.

I’m not going to lie, I rather enjoyed watching the prankster get slugged. If you play stupid games you will win stupid prizes and I’m rather tired of these YouTube pranks that more resemble assaults than fun and games.

But a worthy question to ask is whether the person who slugged the prankster was defending himself. As I obtained this link via Reddit I already read through a length debate over whether incident was self-defense or not. Assuming one considers it self-defense (I don’t but bear with me) the next question that comes to mind is, was the guy who slugged the prankster defending his physical person or his ego?

This is something to consider. Some self-defense situations seem to more accurate reflect an individual with hurt feelings retaliating against the person who hurt his feelings. Situations where one individual shoved another only to be punched in the case for doing so, in my opinion, is an example of ego defense than self-defense.

Self-defense, in my opinion, involves defending your physical self. Ego, on the other hand, has no place in a self-defense situations (again, in my opinion). My reasoning is that physical harm can lead to potentially long-term negative side-effects or death whereas a bruised ego can lead to butthurtness and whining. When you enter into a physical confrontation the risk of injury or death is always there. Therefore, in my opinion, is best to avoid physical confrontations at all costs. A hurt ego won’t lead to injury or death unless it turns into a physical confrontation. Do you really want to be the one to turn a situation that resulted in you being butthurt into one that may result in you actually getting hurt?

The New Birther Conspiracy

Since Obama’s election there has been a branch of the neocons obsessed with the idea that he was secretly born in Kenya. They demanded that Obama unveil his birth certificate. When he finally did they started claiming that it was fake. But there’s a new angle to the birther conspiracy and it’s even dumber. Now a branch of neocons are insinuating that Obama’s two girls aren’t actually his girls, at least genetically speaking, but adopted children from Morocco:

While some Americans feel that the two girls have very little resemblance to their parents, others claim that the pair were adopted from Morocco. Similar to their father, there is very little evidence surrounding the two girls’ birth and background. Online searches for either of their birth records come up completely dry.

Why am I wasting your time with this? Because conspiracy theories fascinate me and therefore amuse me. They almost always involve some kernel of truth that is extrapolated from to absurd levels. In this case the evidence cited by the conspiracy theorists is particularly absurd:

Ancestry.com and GenealogyBank.com have no records of the two sisters.

Well that settles it. If Ancestry.com and GenealogyBank.com don’t have records of the girls then they must have been adopted!

My gods this shit makes me laugh so hard. I mean, seriously, there is a list at least a light year long of valid criticisms against Obama. Why are so many neocons obsessed with manufacturing conspiracy theories that are unrelated to the man’s office and entirely irrelevant even if they were true? This behavior baffles me.

Warning Shots are Never a Good Idea

There is a lot of bad self-defense advice out there. One of the more frequently recycled pieces of bad self-defense advice is to fire warming shots in an attempt to scare away a threat. This advice is commonly given by individuals who don’t understand self-defense laws and vice presidents (but I repeat myself). A man is now facing the consequences of following bad self-defense advice:

Chris Harris said he was coming from church when he and his girlfriend were surrounded by nine men looking for a fight. He said men made threats and the couple was scared for their lives, but Harris explained he was the one that ended up in cuffs. And facing some pretty serious charges.

“It was one of the most scariest experiences I have ever been though,” said CC Roxby, Harris’ fiancé.

“They surrounded me saying some pretty vulgar things like they were going to rape my wife in front of me, cut me,” Harris said.

Roxby said she called 911, but one man continued to be aggressive.

“The kid kept advancing on me, saying it wasn’t a real gun, and I would much rather shoot a shot into the air to prevent them from attacking me rather than them attacking me and me shooting someone,” Harris said.

“The cruisers were coming down the street at that point and the young men ran away,” Roxby said. “Instead of them following the gang, the officers arrested Chris for firing a shot into the air.”

Some people are probably asking what the living fuck is going on here. Let me explain. Warning shots are a bad idea both defensively and legally. Defensively a warming shot is a loose round, which means where it lands is anybody’s guess. That’s a major risk to innocent bystanders.

Legally speaking warning shots take away your claim of being in immediate fear of death or great bodily harm. By firing warning shots you legally admit that you believed the situation could be resolves with something less than lethal force in that moment so employing a lethal weapon was not warranted. In other words, legally speaking, if you use a firearm you damn well better believe that lethal force is the only option left to you to preserve your life.

Based on the description of the situation, nine aggressive opponents against two individuals, I would argue that lethal force was certainly warranted. But firing a warning shot was not because of the potential risk it put innocent bystanders in.

Two Different Ways of Responding to Threats

I’ve been talking about threat models lately and how people respond to them. Most recently I discussed Sarkeesian canceling her event at Utah State University because the police were unwilling to prohibit individuals with valid carry permits from carrying at the event.

Looking at threat models and responses at a very high level there seems to be two types of reactions. The first, which Sarkeesia demonstrated, is a reaction that attempts to control the threat while the second reaction type is an attempt to harden the threat’s target.

Let’s consider a threat model commonly discussed here, individuals facing the potential of being murdered. Gun control advocates look at the model and identify the threat and focus on controlling that threat. In their eyes the threat is an armed aggressor and their reaction is to attempt to restrict their access to arms. A gun rights advocates look at the model and identify the threat and focus on hardening the target. For them the threat is an armed or unarmed aggressor and their reaction is to attempt to ensure that the target is equipped with a means to defend against the aggressor.

Obviously I’m of the thought that an appropriate response to an aggressor is to harden the target. The reason I subscribe to this school of thought is that the target is the factor in the model that you can control whereas the threat is not controllable. If somebody threatens to kill me I can take measures that make carrying through with that threat difficult. Some of the actions I can take is to train in martial arts (which, in my opinion, includes firearm training), carry a weapon to defend myself with, wear body armor to make certain types of attacks less effective, randomize the routes I take to go from home to work, install audible alarms on my doors and windows, carry a bright flashlight that can be used to blind an aggressor, etc. These are all things that I can do.

But what can I do to control the threat? Truthfully there really isn’t anything I can do in that respect. Laws are ineffective against the unlawful. Since committing murder is already illegal it seems unlikely that the threat will abide by any laws that attempt to restrict his or her access to arms. Furthermore weapons are simple things to construct so even if the laws decrease the amount of available weapons the threat can craft his or her own. There is also no reliable way for me to control when the threat will attack me. This is an interesting point in regards to Sarkeesia’s situation. While the threat that was issued said that the attack would occur at the campus there is no way to know that the issued threat wasn’t disinformation meant to throw the target off. The threat could very well attack when Sarkeesia made her way from the airport or hotel she was likely starting at to the campus or after she left the campus.

I would argue that any threat model response that relies on controlling the threat will be ineffective. Short of killing the threat there is no way to absolutely control his or her actions. But even killing them requires that you can first identify them, which is often not possible until the threat makes a move against you. This is why any competent security team focuses on protecting the target. Whether you’re talking body guards, building security, or computer security the focus is always to harden the target.

What is AgoraFest

The guys over at Anarchy in Action put together a short video from AgoraFest 2014. Since we’re already in the process of planning AgoraFest 2015 I thought it would be a good idea to post this video as it gives a small idea of what the event is (which is to say it’s not a bunch of people dressed entirely in black plotting to blow up some bridges):

There’s an Election On, Which Means Politicians are Politicians are Pandering to Their Bases

There’s an election on November 4th. Dozens of people (it’s not a presidential election) will travel to their polling place to select the master they would most like to obey. But before we can get the meaningless voting ceremony out of the way we must listen to politicians pander to their bases as they participate in a country wide circlejerk. Elizabeth Warren, who has her sights set on the Oval Office judging by how hard she’s pandering, was recently in Minnesota to participate in a circlejerk with Al Franken. As expected this circlejerk involved blaming the Republicans for everything wrong in the country:

“The game is rigged, and the Republicans rigged it,” Warren said to loud cheers.

The amount of irony in this single statement cannot be measure by currently existing ironymeters. Warren is correct, the game is rigged. But the Republicans didn’t rig it alone; they had a lot of help from the Democrats. To play on Warren’s most famous speech:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful politicians who agree with me—because they want to take even more. They know they didn’t—look, if you’ve obtained power, you didn’t get there on your own… If you are powerful, somebody in your party gave you some help. There was a party convention somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to get your foot into this unbelievable political system that we have that allows you to rule. Somebody invested in campaigns and political alliances. If you’ve got an oligarchy—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

Everybody who currently enjoys the benefits of political office got there by pandering to a lot of outer party officials and blowing inner party officials in one of the two major parties. There were a lot of promises kept to lobbyists and broken to voters. It doesn’t matter which party your decided to ally yourself with since they both rule in the same oligarchy. The only thing that does matter is that you now sit in a position where you get to rig the game for the proles.

Stand Your Ground Should Apply to the Home

South Carolina passed a law that removed people’s duty to retreat when attack in a place they have a right to be at. This law, common referred to as stand your ground, is usually seen as a companion to the law that says you do not have to retreat from your home if somebody breaks in, which is usually referred to as castle doctrine. Whitlee Jones, a woman residing in South Carolina, recently made the news because she stabbed her abusive boyfriend and was eventually charged with murder. Her lawyer attempted to use the stand your ground law to argue that her actions were self-defense:

Whitlee Jones screamed for help as her boyfriend pulled her down the street by her hair. Her weave fell from her head and onto the pavement.

A neighbor heard Jones’ cries and dialed 911 on that night in November 2012.

But the scuffle ended before a North Charleston policeman arrived and asked Jones’ boyfriend what happened. Eric Lee, 29, said their argument over a cellphone had never turned physical. The officer left.

A short time later, Jones went back to the home where she lived with Lee. She planned to pack up and leave for good.

But after Jones gathered her things, Lee stepped in front of her. Though authorities later contended that Lee didn’t attack her, Jones said he shook her and blocked her way out, so she pulled a knife and stabbed him once. Lee died, and Jones was arrested for murder.

Nearly two years later, a judge found earlier this month that Jones, now 25, had a right to kill Lee under the S.C. Protection of Persons and Property Act, which allows people in certain situations to use force when faced with serious injury. But to the 9th Circuit Solicitor’s Office, Jones is not the kind of person legislators had in mind when they passed the “stand your ground” law in 2006. It does not apply to housemates in episodes of domestic violence, the prosecutors argued.

Stand your ground laws dictate that one has a right to defend themselves from aggression wherever they have a right to be. I would argue that one has a right to be in their home so understand stand your ground laws should have a right to defend themselves. Furthermore I’ve never seen a stand your ground law that made an exception if your attacker was a husband, boyfriend, or housemate. Based on her boyfriend’s earlier actions that precipitated their neighbor calling 911 I would say she had reason to believe he meant her further harm when he attempted to block her exit.

In truth self-defense shouldn’t be location or aggressor dependent. It shouldn’t matter if you’re at home, at work, or out and about and it shouldn’t matter if your attacker is a complete stranger, a neighbor, or a significant other. If you are attacked you should have a legal right to defend yourself.

The Butthurt is Strong with This One

Gun control advocates can be quite the hysterical bunch. Usually it doesn’t impact us gun owners much since their hysteria usually takes the form of infinite fountains of impotent rage. But once in a while their hysteria leads them to do something that we have no choice but to notice. A gun control advocate in Rochester went and did one of these things:

Matthew Halleck brings his two girls to and from the outskirts of Harriet Bishop Elementary in Rochester every day. “I’m going to protect my children anyway I can,” said Halleck.

For Matthew, that means carrying a concealed gun that he has a permit for, while adhering to all legal boundaries. “It’s not crossing the street here, where the crosswalk is, it’s making sure it’s concealed so the kids can’t see it,” he said.

But Matthew is no longer the only one who knows he’s carrying a gun. Recently a sign went up in a front yard across the street from the school. It has Matthew’s picture on it and reads, “This man carries a loaded gun around your children every day.”

“Since we don’t have a way to stop him, we felt it was important to notify the neighborhood and the parents that there is an armed man in their presence,” said Kimberly Edson, a Rochester resident who put the sign up. “The first couple days of school he had it very visible, we saw it and were quite concerned,” she said.

You can feel her butthurt from across the Internet. According to the story she also called the police on Mr. Halleck but was informed that he wasn’t breaking the law so wouldn’t be arrested (once in a while you get a sensible cop). Mr. Halleck also called the police regarding Mrs. Edson’s sign and was told that she has a First Amendment right to put up such a sign (two sensible responses from the police is rather remarkable).

Obviously there’s nothing Mrs. Edson can do as Mr. Halleck is operating within the law. Likewise, although he’s contemplating a libel lawsuit, there shouldn’t be anything Mr. Halleck can do since Mrs. Edson is exercising her right to expression. But this story does a good job of point out something that should be stated more often: if you don’t want the whole world knowing that you carry a firearm then don’t tell anybody. Concealed means concealed and advertising the fact that you carry a gun means somebody could announce that fact far and wide.

Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun

With a double barrel pump action shotgun:

The DP-12 goes down a completely different, and decidedly unconventional, path. It has 2 7-round tube, but it also has 2 barrels! That’s right…a double barrel pump gun. Two rounds are chambered with each pump; the trigger is then pulled 2 times, the first to fire the right barrel, the second to fire the left barrel. Pump, and you’ve got 2 more rounds.

Every since I was mowing down Strogg with Quake 2’s super shotgun I’ve wanted a double barrel pump action shotgun. Now somebody is finally producing one and I’m afraid I may not be able to resist buying it when it’s released.