A Simple Failure in Preparation

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It's FICTIONAL Friday on a Wednesday...
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A fictional parable on the innate right to self-defense;
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Three days before “the incident,” my wife told me she’d heard the beep of our alarm system go on twice and she couldn’t sleep the rest of the night.

Of course, upon walking the house the next morning, there was nothing out of place. I hadn’t been away from home overnight in over a week and we chalked it up to that. Still, we didn’t ignore that occurrence, we considered getting the alarm system monitoring back up and even thought about some protection for within the house, but we were both pretty busy and it slipped to a lower and lower priority and...well, you know how that goes.

The night “it” happened was just another night, like any other. Turns out the intruders came in through a basement window, which wasn’t wired anyway...neither of us ever heard them.

I woke first as the door to our bedroom flung open and upon jumping from our bed, took two shots – the first one to my upper chest and the second to my left side, the first one collapsed both my lungs, tore through the base of my esophagus and severed four vertebrae in my back upon its exit and the second one, among other things, catastrophically damaged my heart – stopping it, on impact.

I never fully grasped what was happening, but I do recall that my last thought was “What’s going to happen to my wife.”

Well, she bolted upright upon the sound of the first gunshot and was shot three times herself. She died in a few minutes aspirating on her own blood.

The hardest thing about it all was that I never got to say goodbye to my wife and my very best friend. I could live one million lifetimes and never meet someone like her again.

No, you don’t get reunited with all your loved ones afterwards. It’s a lot more amorphous than that, sort of like rays of sunlight returning to unite with the sun.

At this point, I’m not even mad about it all. Sure I feel cheated of what could and perhaps should’ve been a longer life, BUT, I feel like I’m home, after a long, strange journey...and so I am.

But YOU should be mad, no, not for what happened to me, but for what happens far too often and incredibly randomly...if nothing else, YOU might be next.

What I’m saying is that I should’ve prepared myself.

My wife and I were the first and most vital link in the defense we needed that night.

It took the Police, twenty-one minutes and nineteen seconds to arrive at the house that night.

I should’ve had the alarm system’s monitoring restored and I knew that the basement windows needed to be wired. I also should’ve had a weapon in the house.

The Police aren’t going to save you...they couldn’t have saved us.

I know what some of you are thinking, a weapon might not have saved us either, that’s right, BUT at least we would’ve had a fighting chance.

Sadly, crime victims are largely invisible. No one really wants to think about them because such thoughts inevitably hit too close to home, so we focus on “new laws,” new anti-crime initiatives,” or go after inanimate objects like the guns used in the crime.

After all, we don’t want to blame the killers, our system often treats them like “victims of society” who must be healed and “rehabilitated.”

Criminal rehabilitation – the biggest joke in the world. The most effective means of “rehabilitating” a known felon is though the aging process. Generally nothing deters a violent predator other than the ravages of aging.

In mine and my wife’s case, we didn’t have that long to wait.

But as much as it was the individual thug’s fault, the “incident” was also the fault of failed and nefarious policies and our own failure to be prepared.

The ugly truth about gun control is that it’s NOT aimed at criminals at all, it’s aimed at average, every day Americans. There aren’t any massive efforts to go after thugs who use firearms, no harsher sentences for gun crimes, in fact the sentences for gun possession are a joke, only “vigilantes” like Bernie Goetz and poor shopkeepers who use an unlicensed gun to thwart a holdup ever get jail-time on gun charges. In fact, that last fact shows exactly where the “business end” of gun control is pointed.

In short, gun control has been a war on self-defense and THAT is a most nefarious war, as it undermines the concepts of self-ownership and private property. Self-ownership comes with the implicit right that I can protect what’s mine (my SELF and my property) with whatever force I DEEEM necessary and private property rights come with the implicit understanding that the owner has an innate right to protect what is his.

But it’s not merely that nefarious war on self defense that causes the lethargy and lack of preparation, it’s the long odds of any of us actually becoming a crime victim. Most people look upon preparing for home defense the way they look at writing a will – it’s planning for the unwanted, the undesirable and most of us look to avoid that.

Certainly my wife and I did, and as it turned out, to our great detriment.

The cynic in you may be wondering “How’d you write this after you died?”

I didn’t...ironically enough, I wrote this two days before we were killed.