On Self Defense: Conservatism Works in Reality, Liberalism Does Not

Perhaps you've had this discussion with a Liberal:  What would you do if you are in a store and a person enters, points a gun, and announces his intent to shoot people.  He's not there to rob the place.  His plan is to take out some kind of revenge on a society that, in his mind, has done him wrong.  As a Conservative, perhaps you exercise your 2nd Amendment right to bear arms and have a legally purchased and licensed hand gun concealed on your person. You suggest to your Liberal friend that this gun gives you the ability to stop this crazy person before he harms another person, probably by shooting them first. After all, it's him or us, right? 

If your Liberal friends are anything like mine, they will tell you how horrible that would be of you.  You ask your Liberal friend what they would do.  Predictably, your Liberal friend says that they would try to talk the gunman out of his plan, perhaps by showing them compassion of some sort.  What is amazing to me is the fact that Liberals, at least the Neighborhood Liberals, truly believe this would work!  It's astounding, honestly, to think that a person who is legitimately out of their mind and intent on murder, would be talked out of it by someone nicely asking them to stop.

This attitude is the inevitable result of decades of Liberals not allowing the smallest of school yard scraps and telling children "fighting is never the answer."  Even at the school yard level, I've seen how this mindset fails.  In my own school experiences, I was told that, if a person attacks you, regardless of whether or not you provoked them, I should not fight back.  Instead, I was told that I should simply let them hit me until someone came and broke it up.  I was once told that I should not have fought back when, in junior high, someone hit me in the face with the handle of a lacross stick.
Thankfully, my parents did not subscribe to the school's mentality.  My father taught me to do my best to walk away and avoid violence.  Dad taught me not to throw the first punch and to do my best to resolve those conflicts without fighting.  However, my Dad also taught me that if a person took a swing at me, at that point I had the right to defend myself.  That was how I was raised: avoid fighting as much as you can, but when someone attacks you, don't let them. For the record, in the aforementioned lacross stick incident, I tried to walk away up until the point this person physically attacked me.  I fought back to stop this person from harming me further. (Translation: I decked the guy in the face and laid him out.)  I did not want to fight him, and I did my best to avoid it.  But once he struck me, I defended myself.

The Bible backs up this mentality:

A righteous man who falters before the wicked  is like a murky spring and a polluted well. 
Proverbs 25:26

If the thief is found breaking in, and he is struck so that he dies, there shall be no guilt for his bloodshed. Exodus 22:2

So the Word tells us not to falter before the wicked and even says that if a thief is killed while breaking into a house then the defender is not guilty.  (Please note this self defense freedom only lasts during the burglary.  If the homeowner harms the burglar the next day, aside from the process of bringing that person to legal justice, it becomes murder.)  How much moreso if one is defending his own life?  God does not tell us to try to "talk it out" with those who are trying to do us harm. He tells us we are within our rights to defend ourselves and our property if we or our property are being attacked.

Furthermore, the idea that you can reason with a school yard bully, much less a madman with a gun who is willing to kill innocent people, much less an evil tin-pot dictator who keeps his own people in secret prisons and murders them if they are even perceived as a threat to their power, is absolutely foolish.  This sort of people will laugh and continue their violence in the face of "rational dialouge." What does work is stopping them physically so that they cannot harm you or another.

If it takes using a legally purchased gun to stop a crazy person from shooting ten other people, my response is "BAM," and if necessary "BAM BAM BAM BAM."  That will stop innocent people from being hurt.  "Are you sure you really want to hurt us?  Don't you want to have a discussion about what's really bothering you" at best causes the villain in our story to tell our kindhearted Liberal friend to shut up, and at worst it gets our kindhearted Liberal friend killed.

Once again, Conservatism and our self-defense mentality, whether it be with our hands or with a legally purchased gun, works.  The Liberal mentality does nothing at best, gets people hurt at works.

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Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson,
Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.