Tara Servatius pens a must read column this week that starts off thusly:
I’d just started the gas pump when a beat-up old car that had just passed the station did a quick U-turn and pulled into the lot. I instinctively knew something was wrong, but I barely had time to react before the car pulled alongside mine. The two occupants looked like they were drunk or stoned out of their minds, or both, and the driver said something crude to me and demanded I get in his car. Within seconds he’d hopped out, telling me he was going to put me in his car.
Had I not had a gun in my coat pocket, I’d have gladly paid thousands of dollars for one in that instant. As he closed in on me I pulled it out, planning to fire and to keep firing until he stopped. What shocked me was that I didn’t have to. In fact, I never got the chance to fully point it at him. The sight of the barrel alone froze him in his tracks, just feet from me. It changed his whole demeanor. He put his hands up. He slowly backed away, looking at me like I was the crazy one.
She goes on to note the bizarre disconnect between CMPD policy and all the criminals lately being dispatched by gun-toting citizens in Charlotte. Police honestly seem more concerned about the criminals than the public — implying that honest folks should not be fighting back to keep their property. We should, per CMPD policy, lie back and take it — then call our overwhelmed 911 system and hope for the best.
More Tara:
Call 911? You mean like the triple homicide victims at the house on Patricia Ryan Drive did twice before they were murdered? Officers who responded the first time didn’t attempt to enter the house even though the victim asked 911 for help. The second time, due to technological difficulties, they didn’t respond to at all.
And what about 57-year-old father of four Larry O’Faire, a long-time trucking company employee who was killed outside his home on Horne Drive last week while being robbed by repeat felons Ronaldo and Rodarius Frieson? The “don’t fight back” concept didn’t work out so well in that case. Or in the case of the Feb. 5 shootings of former Fort Mill Mayor Charlie Powers and clerk Yen Nguyen at a Fort Mill convenience store during an armed robbery. Or in several others across the region in recent months where those who complied with armed robbers wound up dead. Though it’s possible I missed one, after much searching, I couldn’t find a single case of a victim seriously injured or killed because he or she fought back in the past six months. So here’s last month’s toll for the area — four victims who took the CMPD approach and complied with their robbers or relied on 911 are dead and two more were seriously injured. The two victims who fought back during armed robberies came out just fine.
I’d say much, much better than just fine. In a couple cases they killed the career criminal who was attacking them, doing what CMPD and our local courts could not do, which is protect society from violent predators. This is not some minor nuance. It goes to the core of the purpose of civil society and why we call governments into being.
Every person has an absolute right to be secure in their person and property. From that right, a right to defend oneself and property flows. There is some question as to proportionality of response in a given situation, but it is totally reasonable to fear for one’s life — or that of a loved one — in a face-to-face encounter with an armed attacker.
CMPD, completely reflecting the outlook of Social Worker-in-Chief Stephens, does not accept this view of the world. Instead, it manifestly rejects individual property rights and posits some communal notion of property, the distribution of which is more or less arbitrary, and certainly not just. This means that those without property — or less property than they would like — have an understandable urge, if not need, to acquire the property of others, possibly by extra-legal means.
It is the job of the police force and the courts to discourage this behavior and manage it in such a way that no one gets hurt and overall social unrest is kept to a minimum. Were those with property to begin to routinely defend themselves with deadly force, this might have the effect of making those who feel entitled to the properly upset and perceive an even greater level of injustice in the distribution of communal property.
A vicious circle might ensue — not unlike trying to arrest your way out of a crime wave — making violent criminals yet more pro-actively violent, which would then make them harder — and more dangerous — for CMPD to apprehend and for the courts to release back into society.
For all these reasons and more, local residents need to be ready to draw down like Tara — or face the brutal consequences of a broken and deluded criminal justice system.
