“Now: firstly, the idea that somehow the pizza delivery guy and the robber are morally equivalent because they were both packing heat is just plain silly.”
Not to Dave Musgrove, Democratic voter and blogger. Since Democrats see criminals as victims, when a crime victim resists it victimizes the criminal-victim. Whether or not that twisted logic makes sense to you really depends on whether or not you’re a Democrat.
To those of us who aren’t Democrats the real issue is whom to trust, an existential internal dialogue compressed into a few milliseconds’ time for a critical binary decision: obey or resist?
If you obey your life depends on an implicit bargain with the criminal: allow him to hurt you a little and maybe he won’t hurt you a lot.
If you resist your life depends on your situational awareness, training, tactics, and initiative relative to your opponent’s. Maybe he’ll see you coming and kill you before you fire a shot or maybe he’ll die before his brain even processes the visual dissonance produced by the sudden perception of a blue steel tube where a tan leather rectangle was expected. It all comes down to reflexes.
That brings us back to the question of trust: “Do I trust my reflexes more than I trust the implicit promise of a criminal?”
There are a number of people for whom “yes” was the correct answer. I count myself among that number.
I’ve found that in life, whether spanning years of effort or seconds of terrifying armed conflict, trust in oneself is rarely misplaced.
