Archive for April 26th, 2005

Is God’s Only Concern a Beating Heart?

Posted by Bob in Musings about Life on 04/26/2005

Ok, this is where I have been heading tonight.

One thing all civilized people agree on today is that the only thing that matters is staying alive.

The police say, “Never never, never resist a robber. Give him your money. Your life is everything. Money is nothing.”

Liberals say, “Only the police should have guns.”

Conservatives agree. They worship the police.

Right-to-lifers say that all that matters is Life. God is worried to death about any beating heart.

As usual, I am the only one who considers all of this not only as wrong, not only as silly, but as utterly alien.

In the United Kingdom, the place that was once known as Great Britain, there is an unwritten Welcome Mat at every door. It says, “Burglars are welcome.”

The British police have two categories in their statistics that we don’t have. There are “hot” burglaries and there are “cold” burglaries.

In Britain, 43% of break-ins in private homes are “hot.” That means the thugs walk right into the house while the family is there.

Prolifers will be charmed by this because nobody gets killed. The children see their father helplessly giving the invaders anything they want. The British father in a “hot” robbery does everything our police officially recommend. He gives the home invaders anything they want, inviting them to rape his ten-year-old daughter if they feel like it.

They often do.

It works. The murder rate of British burglaries is almost nil.

But I have faced death many times. I know that I would far rather be killed than to live as one of those British fathers do after they gave their daughters to the home invaders.

I don’t have any ancestors who didn’t think that way. I guess none of them were real pro-lifers.

Life is not as precious as honor.

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Nonviolence

Posted by Bob in History on 04/26/2005

It is hard to believe today, but there was a time when hippies were brand new.

I remember the first time I ran into the hippie mentality. I was talking to a guy at the University of Virginia, and he said, “I could never kill anybody.”

I was taken aback. Men brag a lot, and a lot of men brag about all the people they would kill if they could. That was macho crap and we all knew it. But it was the kind of male bragging I could understand.

This was the first man I had ever met who BRAGGED that he could never hurt anybody. I was astonished.

But I am quick. I finally said to him, “You know, you’d make a great slave.”

The more I think about it, the more I think that that was a profound remark.

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The Point of A Gun Is to Up The Ante

Posted by Bob in How Things Work on 04/26/2005

I have had to use M-15’s and 16’s, Kalashnikovs and I probably spelled it all wrong. I don’t know a thing about them. I don’t know the difference between the British M5 and M6, and I’ve been chased by both of them.

I don’t think I’ve ever cleaned a gun. I know I field stripped one once, but I don’t remember how I did it. The thing was jammed and I didn’t have a hell of a lot of choice.

It’s only a matter of time before some Army geek will develop a weapon that no longer goes by the only rule I know: You point the hole in one end the other way, (No, Bob, you do NOT put that against your shoulder!) and you put your finger in the little ring and pull back the little pully thing.

Thus endeth our Weapons Training Program for today.

A Real Army Man will tell you that the idea of an armed militia as a defense against tyranny is absurd. You can’t fight the Modern Army with civilian weapons.

What the government calls “assault weapons,” the ones civilians are not allowed to have because they look mean, are weapons no soldier would take into real combat, into a real assault. The guns civilians can have are not combat weapons.

The Military Man will say there is no point in civilians being armed.

What his military training did not teach him is that that is not the point.

Until the World War II Generation took over, one of the staple pictures in magazines and newspapers was an old lady sitting on a porch with a shotgun on her lap. She was waiting on the bulldozer that was going to destroy the house she had lived in all her life.

Grandma with the shotgun didn’t have much book learning, but she knew very well that she couldn’t defeat the entire United Sates Army.

Her point was not, “I can fight the whole army.”

Her point was, “If you want to take my home, you’ll have to kill me to get it.”

Since the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation took over after four years of Obedience Training in the Second World War, old grandma with her shotgun is considered silly.

Now grandma is supposed to use Civil Disobedience.

But, unless the media is one your side, Civil Disobedience is Obedience.

That is why so many right-wing demonstrations are pointless. Civil Disobedience is only covered by the media if they want to cover it.

The media won’t cover grandma sitting on a porch with a flower in her lap. But if she’s got a scatter gun she gets attention, and lots of it.

If the media can disarm you, they can ignore you.

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