Middle-class Americans need to be taught to be more, rather than less, aggressive in self-defense situations, Glenn Reynolds believes, and he cites Jeff Cooper (from To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth) on how you might feel if you kill someone in self-defense:
We are told from all sides that if one wins a lethal encounter, he will feel dreadful. It is odd that no one seems to have felt dreadful about this until very recently. Throughout recorded history the winning of a fight has generally been considered a subject for congratulation. It is only just now that it has become presumably tainted…. a predatory felon who victimizes innocent non-combatants on the streets is a proven goblin, sentenced by his own initiative. Some men may be upset by killing him, but not anyone I have met.
Reynolds continues:
Cooper suspects that this dreadful feeling is “primarily a public relations innovation designed to parry various sorts of preposterous litigation which have become common in our courts.” That’s probably right, and defenders are probably well-advised to fake devastation even if they really feel much better about the whole thing. That such fakery is required, however, is probably not a sign of societal health. As Cooper writes, “This sudden notion that there is something disreputable about winning in mortal conflict is peculiar and, I think, aberrant.”
Jules Aimé adds his own experience:
In the fall of 1990 I was walking by the gas station on the corner of Bank and Catherine streets in Ottawa when I saw a guy pull a knife and brandish it at the teenaged gas jockey. I stepped in between the kid and the guy and he turned away started running up Bank Street. But then he stopped and came at me.
The fight was very one-sided in the end. The guy managed to get a few hits in, including a kick in the head when I threw him down on his back and started to pin him, but it didn’t do him any good. I was stronger, faster and smarter. He didn’t have a chance. When the police arrived (they got there in about three minutes, which is impressive), I had the guy pinned down on the sidewalk and all they had to do was cuff him and throw him in the car.
I felt and feel very good about it. I was a young, single man and I did what a man is supposed to do.
But I got a rude shock a few years ago. I got a call from the police. The guy I had captured had been arrested again in Calgary. It was only the latest in a long-line of arrests for violent crimes and they wanted to sentence him as a dangerous offender. The officer who called me wanted to know if I’d be willing to testify about the effects this encounter had had on me. She assumed the effects were devastating.
I told her that it was one of the great events of my life. I’d been tested and I’d done the right thing and I’d passed the test. I’d behaved up to the standard that I think men should behave and you never really know how you are going to act until you are actually tested that way. She was surprised to hear this. The file she had, the file the investigating officer wrote up, described me as a victim.
(Hat tip to Ilkka.)
Of course the file described him as a victim. It’s a dead certainty that the “victim tally” used to justify the department was incremented by one for him, too.
Somehow, I doubt that the “civilian peace officer” tally was incremented …