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KBCraig wrote: We have got to stop sticking our heads and our children's heads in the sand, pretending evil does not exist. Unless we recover the fight-back spirit buried inside ourselves and pass it own to our kids, we are doomed. No one can predict or stop the next horrendous act that will surely come to be. What we can do is assure that our survival instincts will lower the number of victims.

What other choice do we have?

Billie Louden (loudenview@aol.com) is a deputy sheriff in Denver and an Army veteran.

You and the author of that piece are so right.

The sad thing is if history is any guide, people who have deluded themselves to the extent that our "elites" have do not often come to their senses without a major wake up call. And in this case, the wake up call will likely involve a huge amount of human misery.

Prior to WW2, the overwhelming sentiment in America was to avoid conflict in Europe and the Far East. Roosevelt knew better, and exercised true leadership such as we, in our lifetimes, have never seen.

It took Pearl Harbor to bring people to their senses and recognize the true threat to our very survival that was at hand. In the end, millions died. But the survivors have been characterized as our "greatest generation".

The hard truth is that tough times produce tough people. The corollary is that "utopia produces irresponsible fools and wimps" (F_T_Y, 2007).

I think this all has something to do with eating the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil.

Things haven't been tough in America in a long time.

In recent history, societies have responded to threats in two ways. The UK model has been to virtually ban self defense and all effective means of doing so (to minimize the opportunities of criminals of getting their hands on weapons), and to put cameras (now including microphones and even speakers) everywhere to speed the response of "authorities" to citizens in peril. This casts the people as helpless victims, trusting mostly to luck as to whether they live or die.

The Isreali model is quite different. The Isrealis have basically armed themselves to the teeth, and encouraged citizens to take responsibility for both their own defense and that of society themselves.

You won't find any gun free school zones in Isreal.

Where we go is still to be determined. I think it is only a matter of time before Islamic militants will take advantage of our open society and begin committing small scale acts of terror here. It won't be the Cho's we will have to worry about. It will be militants, probably with automatic weapons, shooting up shopping malls and other public gathering places.

Logic tells us that it is impossible to defend all of these places all of the time without transforming our society into a full-fledged police state. (And maybe not even then.) The only alternative is for people to take responsibility for defending themselves, as the Isrealis have done.

But logic may not prevail. That's why we, in what I would call "the self defense movement" need to do our best to make our case and inculcate our values into the larger society.

Otherwise, a police state is waiting just down the road.

stevie_d_64 wrote: "If he (owner) had just left the (alleged assailant) alone, and just call the cops, no one would have gotten killed."

For years I have had this nagging little feeling that there is this general consensus in the general non-carrying public, and maybe within the very slim fringes within our own community that if you "verbally" instruct someone to stop doing something forceful, or potentially injurous or deadly to someone else, you are escalating the situation...Therefore you are creating a situation that forces you to react possibly with the use of deadly force (extreme)...

It is just something that bugs me a little bit about this, and a few other incidents over the years...

Oh it's more than a nagging feeling to me. I'd consider it pretty much the lay of the land in much of the country, including the so-called (self-annointed) "elites".

I could rant for page after droning page on this, but the short treatment is that the "non-confrontational" philosophy is in essence an elaborate effort for people to rationalize their own cowardice.

Ironically enough, the purveyors of avoiding confronation, of choosing a strategy of abject surrender ("give them what they want and they won't hurt you"), and of "letting the police do their jobs" (when they do not really know what those jobs actually are), tend to be the same people who make a big deal of the importance of having high "self esteem".

So how much self esteem is exhibited by immediately surrendering to the demands of a criminal attacker?

I think that most of us on this forum actually do have high self esteem. We hold ourselves in such high regard that we are not willing to "outsource" the protection of our very lives, and the lives of those important to us, to "hired help".

Read "A Nation of Cowards" by Jeffrey Snyder for a full treatment of this idea.