Thursday, December 3, 2009

Don’t Be A Vigilante

It’s one of the things you should have grown out of before you turned 21 and could buy a pistol. The fantasy that you can be Batman. The fantasy that you can be some avenging angel of justice, thwarting evil at every turn.

Resist this urge. Especially if you are and adult and a gun owner.

I admit, in my younger days, full of idealism, I had those thoughts. It’s one of the reasons I joined the military. I wanted to confront and overcome evil. To seek it out and triumph over it. Damn commies. It feels romantic, the idea of righteous vengeance. To put yourself in a position to be a hero. A little bit of that feeling and desire will always be there inside you. It's there in me. Don't trust it.

Just don’t. Mature beyond that urge. Be the OLDER kind of sheep dog, not the pup.

This is the second time this has happened in as many months. The other was folks in the Pacific NW getting CCWs and walking around in bad areas with the PURPOSE of possibly getting attacked so they could respond and take out a bad guy. They were… corrected… of that notion, if indeed that is what they were thinking.

The motivation is admirable, but enthusiasm can lead down dark paths, unintentionally. And the no-confidence, defeatist, Leftists are waiting for you to make that mistake, because it reinforces their defeatism and allows them to control YOU, politically. So resist the urge to be a vigilante. You don’t provoke evil so you can react against it. You don’t poke into dark corners to get evil to jump out at you so you can put it down. Evil men are not like coyotes. They aren’t a varmint or pest. They are persons, like you. Even though they might not deserve it, they do have rights. You have to be reactive, not proactive. It’s part of the deal. It’s part of the burden of carrying with you a deadly means, a weapon besides your brain that you are prepared to use when appropriate.

Know the appropriate.

‘Flushing out a bad guy’ from a park with a random LEO is not, generally, appropriate.

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