Social Responsibilities: Self-Defense

With all the talk going around today regarding what to do about guns, it's pretty impossible to not to hear "self-defense" brought up at some point. But like just about any/everything related to guns today, even the concept of self-defense has be politicized.

But for now lets push everything the law makers and talking heads have been saying. It certainly is a right, under both criminal and civil law you have a right to use force, even lethal force in some instances to protect yourselves and others. But more than that, it is a social responsibility.

One might say, "but that's what the police are for." Well the response to that is yes, and no.

"...fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen." - Warren v. District of Columbia (444 A.2d. 1, D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981)

Even setting this aside, police resources are finite. Individual officers can only be at one place at any given moment, and there certainly aren't enough officers to respond to every crime. In short that means when one officer responds to delinquents vandalizing private property, that's one officer who's not responding to a home invasion.

There's also the whole matter of response time. A crime can happen in a matter of seconds, where are police will arrive in a matter of minutes.

But people aren't entirely powerless. The law at the very least has given people the right to protect themselves. A person making use of that right, and using the tools necessary can actually prevent the crime, reducing the finite amount of time and resources police need to spend on the crime. A crime that could have been prevented frees up an officer to respond to another. More often than not, many of these criminals are armed in some form of another.

You can probably already see where I am going with this, but lets stroll down this road because it's necessary to get a good look at the scenery. 

Say you are confronted and over powered, what then? You might think that surely someone will come to help. Well, no one came to help Kitty Genovese.

Here's a summary of the Bystander Effect/Genovese Syndrome:
The bystander effect occurs when the presence of others hinders an individual from intervening in an emergency situation. Social psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley popularized the concept following the infamous 1964 Kitty Genovese murder in Kew Gardens, New York. Genovese was stabbed to death outside her apartment three times, while bystanders who reportedly observed the crime did not step in to assist or call the police. Latane and Darley attributed the bystander effect to the diffusion of responsibility (onlookers are more likely to intervene if there are few or no other witnesses) and social influence (individuals in a group monitor the behavior of those around them to determine how to act). In Genovese's case, each onlooker concluded from their neighbors' inaction that their own help was not needed.

In light of this, the sad truth is, for one reason or another, you can't count on someone comming to help you. People who don't take responsibility for protecting themselves or their families, instead relying on the state/police or others to come and help, have effectively abdicated this responsibility. They have abdicated a key social responsibility in living in an ordered society.

The fact is there is evil in the world. That just isn't going to go away, no amount of "positive thinking" will change that. Refusing to acknowledge that is akin to burying your head in the sand. We all need to take a serious approach to this responsibility, take realistic steps to protect ourselves. Criminals will take any and all means to complete their crimes, therefore each and every one of us needs to take an and all means to protect ourselves. The impact of abdicating this responsibility is that you place others in danger that in some cases may not need to be placed in that danger. Those that come to help you because of this abdication, and those who have no one to help them because police officers have come to help you because of your abdication. If you have a family, your spouse and children are put at risk by this abdication as well. Encouraging, or out right forcing, others to abdicate this responsibility as well though legislation is just as socially irresponsible, if not more so.

Now it might not seem that someone abdicating this responsibility is not a big deal, but we can think of responsibilities like this as like social matter. In chemistry you learn that you cannot destroy matter, only change it's phase. Well these responsibilities are sort of the same way, just because you abdicate it, doesn't make it go away. What it does is it transfers that responsibility to keep yourself and your family protected to some other party. Be it the State, or a good Samaritan who assumes that responsibility by stepping in your behalf. So what this does is for the State it adds yet another burden on it's finite resources, and for the Samaritan it adds the responsibility of protecting you one top of their responsibility to protect themselves. Not only is abdicating this responsibility socially irresponsible, but it is also unfair to the rest of society.

Now I'm not saying everyone should be strapped, but everyone should take what ever measures available to be able to protect themselves and their families. Be it martial arts, or firearms training.


In the end we all have responsibilities if we're going to live in an ordered society. One of those is a responsibility to protect ourselves.