Brain Enema

The best way to protect your own freedom is to watch everybody else's back. That's the essence of community.

If you value a predator's life more than your own family, or your own life, you don't need a gun. You need some psychiatric help.

When someone tries to use a strategy which is dictated by their ideology, and that strategy doesn't seem to work, then they are caught in something of a cognitive bind. If they acknowledge the failure of the strategy, then they would be forced to question their ideology. If questioning the ideology is unthinkable, then the only possible conclusion is that the strategy failed because it wasn't executed sufficiently well. They respond by turning up the power, rather than by considering alternatives. (This is sometimes referred to as 'escalation of failure'.)

It is better to avoid than to run; better to run than to de-escalate; better to de-escalate than to fight; better to fight than to die. The very essence of self-defense is a thin list of things that might get you out alive when you are already screwed.

Brave men and boys didn't die on foreign soil so that citizens can be searched at random by police in New York City.

You ever see those monks spend weeks making sand paintings, and then blow them all away when they're done. That's all ANY of us are doing.

Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.

It's amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness. People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we're compassionate we'll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.

It all comes down to this: Is there an inalienable right to self-defense? If there is, each man has indisputable, inestimable value, value that he may rightly preserve even if the life of another man is forfeit. A man may kill another in lawful self-defense even if the policy preferences of the state would prefer his death. If a right to self-defense actually exists, it is in a very real sense the highest law of the land and all lesser laws must pay it deference. It fundamentally defines the social contract, the nature of the relationship between man and the state. But if there is no such inalienable right, the entire nature of the social contract is changed. Each man’s worth is measured solely by his utility to the state, and as such the value of his life rides a roller coaster not unlike the stock market: dependent not only upon the preferences of the party in power but upon the whims of its political leaders and the permanent bureaucratic class. The proof of this analysis surrounds us.

The 2nd amendment was never intended to allow private citizens to "keep and bear arms". If it had, there would have been wording such as "the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed".

The reason that you and I can never find common ground has absolutely zero to do with me regarding you as a cockroach to be exterminated. It has everything to do with the basic fact that nobody, Democrat OR Republican, is willing to leave me alone. That's all I've ever wanted: to quietly and peacefully pay my own way through the world, living my life as I see fit while doing no harm to others. Nevertheless, at every turn I've got both sides of the aisle sticking their fingers into my pockets and their guns into my face, demanding that I do this and pay for that, for some loosely-defined "common good" that I neither need nor want, and certainly never asked for. And then there's the ongoing vilification: that I'm some selfish asshole for only wanting to pay for the commons according to my (extremely limited) consumption rather than according to my means. You want accommodation and understanding from this particular member of the proverbial Other? Get the guns out of my face and the hands out of my pockets. Deal with me as an individual rather than some faceless member of a collective that requires Team Blue's benevolent management. If you fail to convince me of the merits of your plans through reason, don't then turn around and dragoon me into them through force. Stop yoking me to your utopian designs through the fiction that I owe "obligations to society" or, indeed, to anybody except to the extent I undertake such obligations voluntarily. For the love of God or Gaia or whatever secular savior you give thanks to: Leave. Me. Alone. I absolutely promise I'll show you the same courtesy. No bullshit. But until you're willing to do that, there will be no joy in Mudville. Not because you're a cockroach, but because you're trying to make me your slave.

why the gun is civilization Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it. In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some. When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender. There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat–it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly. Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weightlifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and easily employable. When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation…and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act.

Want to change your life forever? Commit right now to never make a half-assed decision again. Stay in bed or get up, but never again lay in bed thinking that you should get up. Jump in the water or don't, but never wade in slowly to get used to it. In combat, if you are aware, you know what needs to be done. Do it. In life, you know what needs to be done, you know the right things to do. Do them.

Anger is always the shortest distance to a mistake.

Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars.

Political correctness is trying to pretend there is a good end of a turd.