25 Apr 18
“Is it ‘Legal?’”
I’ve written about this subject before, but the question keeps coming up in classes.
Inevitably someone asks:
“When this or that is going on, and this or that circumstance is extant, can I shoot this guy?
Is it ‘legal?’”
Such questions are meaningless and mostly irrelevant!
When you are compelled to shoot immediately in order to save your life, you won’t be asking yourself such silly questions!
When confronting a deadly threat, and you have no other viable option, then shoot carefully and don’t miss!
What other answer can there be?
We can’t know what prosecutors will do with a particular set of facts, but we shouldn’t be surprised when we see them enforcing agendas, not laws!
Three factors are universally present with recent mass murders:
1) The perpetrator suffered from well-known and long-documented mental illness, or was a religious ideologue, usually both.
2) Laws already on the books, IF ENFORCED, would have prevented the catastrophe.
3) Bureaucracies, whose job it is to protect us from these violent criminals, seem mostly interested in growing
their agencies, expanding their powers, protecting themselves, and little else!
When laws are not enforced (by design) and government bureaucracies thus consistently fail to protect us, politicians have only two “answers,” and they are oh so predictable:
1) More suffocating laws, bigger bureaucracies (with chilling new powers), and our individual rights as Americans “regulated out of existence.”
2) More malignant, burdensome, and noxious restrictions, not upon criminals (who won’t observe them anyway), but in an effort to “punish” every productive citizen who has something to lose and who therefore doesn’t commit crimes, who works for a living, pays taxes, tries to be a good person, and plays by the rules (incomprehensible though they may be).
Thus, who constantly ask, “Is it legal?” need to rethink the subject of gun ownership.
There is no “safety!”
In a recent bank-robbery trial, during cross-examination the defense attorney grilled the lead detective, who was on the witness stand, with:
“Do you really expect this jury to believe that my client was so stupid that he wrote the stickup-note on the back of his own deposit slip?”
The detective calmly answered:
“We don’t catch the smart ones!”
We all need to worry less about being “legal,” and more about being honorable, and smart!
It will never get better!
We’re on our own!
/John