Archive for April, 2007
John Lott and Sonya Jones make some excellent points in thier column Flawed Laws Help Stalkers Victimize Women. I’d like to extend one of their points even further.
Firearms are often seen as “boy toys”, but it’s the ladies who really should be carrying guns.
Biologically speaking, women tend to be smaller and less able to defend themselves from physical attack than men. That’s not sexism, that’s the cold hard facts when biology meets physics. Force equals mass times acceleration, and males tend to have more mass.
If you love your daughters, wives, girlfriends, mothers, grandmothers, and female friends — take them shooting. Buy them firearms or make certain that they buy themselves firearms. Make sure that they know how to use them and that they always have access to them.
As Trent and Sonya remind us, “The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey has shown for decades that resistance with a gun is by far the safest course of action when one confronts a criminal.”
I’ve seen execution videos before, as most of us have. They are not really newsworthy, but I’ve made myself watch them to ensure that I make a deeper emotional bond with the world at large.
You can read about people dying and you can hear about people dying, but it doesn’t have nearly the impact of watching people die right before your eyes.
The most impact, of course, comes from being there in person — but most of us are lucky enough to spend most of our lives away from direct interaction with lethal violence. That is a good thing, but it does make it difficult for many people to understand the world beyond their doorsteps.
The latest execution video to find its way to my Inbox is Beheading execution of a Mahdi Army leader. This video is so extremely graphic that I am linking to it, not embedding it.
The most interesting aspect of this video is the complete lack of good guys and victims. This video shows a Shiite death squad leader being executed by a Sunni death squad. This is one bad person killing another bad person. How do you emotionally react to that? You can’t cheer for the good guy, you can’t feel sympathy for the person whose head is being slowly removed, you can’t feel that justice is being done, you can’t feel that the world is a better place — or a worse place — after this act.
If you are so inclined, please watch this video. But then watch yourself, because that is the real show. See how the video of this killing makes you feel - how it affects your view of the world. That is the real story behind execution videos.
It appears that since Osama bin Laden verbally attacked “pagan Buddhism” as a threat to Islam, followers of the mad mullah have attempted to assassinate the Dalai Lama.
The group that carried out the failed attack on the seventy-two year old pacifist was Lashkar-e-Toiba, which usually focuses its attacks on Hindu and Sikh civilians.
The Dalai Lama is now protected with a 3-tier security ring consisting of both Tibetan security guards and Indian police.
What sort of evil bastards would try to kill the Dalai Lama? Islamists, that’s who would try to kill a seventy-two year old pacifist.
Islamists seek to kill anyone and everyone who does not bow to their god — Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Atheists — everyone.
This isn’t a war of “American Christian Conservatives against Islamists”, this is a war of “Islamists against everyone else on Earth.” It’s time that the Western liberals figured that out.