You should absolutely fight back against criminals who are actively turning your home into a third-world country
The following video, showing looters ransacking an Apple store in broad daylight while everyone around them just lets them, has become a relatively common sight in recent years:
And I have to say this just flummoxes me. You watch two cowards in masks rob a store of thousands and thousands of dollars in merchandise while nobody does anything—and while employees urge customers to “back up” and “let them go”—and you’re just struck by the comprehensive lack of action on display, as if this were a video game and the bystanders were merely programmed to stand around gape-jawed and passive. There were many people in that store, many of them grown men, and there was no real reason that these guys should’ve been able to get away with this. And yet they did; they took their time, appeared in no hurry, and were apparently unconcerned that they might be accosted in any way, by anyone, at all.
Here’s an urgent plea: If you see this happening, don’t let it happen. Do not just stand by and allow criminals to turn the place you live—your home—into a kind of third-world hellhole. Fight back. And by “fight back” I mean physically stop the people doing these crimes. Grab them, shove them, throw them to the ground, punch them, just incapacitate them in some way until police can show up and arrest them. While you’re doing that, be sure to rip off the masks or face coverings they’re wearing so everyone can see who they are and their faces can be broadcast globally on social media. Clobber them, shame them, and let the entire world see their shame and laugh uproariously at it over and over again. Then hand them over to cops. There’s your deterrent.
I am not sure at this point what the practical objections to this might be. I get that I’m an extremist conservative or whatever and we have all sorts of crazy mercenary ideas about self-defense and civil society and whatnot. But whatever this might have been at the start, it feels like a pretty bipartisan issue now. Do you think we should just leave the police to deal with this? Well plainly the police aren’t dealing with it or it wouldn’t be happening. Criminals are very good risk analyzers and they know how and where to hedge their bets. Obviously they have no concerns that they’re going to get caught by the cops either in the commission of these crimes or at any point afterward. You know what does give a criminal pause? Getting decked in the face, dropped to the ground, humiliated on the Internet, and arrested. If that happens enough times—like, less than half a dozen well-publicized incidents—then you’re going to start to see less of this.
I get that it can feel daunting to contemplate getting in a physical altercation with a criminal. I understand that. This proposal certainly demands no small amount of bravery. But here’s the good news: Once you do it, you’ll find you won’t be alone. Many of the people who will complacently stand by when nobody is taking action will change rather quickly after one guy starts to fight back. A good number of the men who appear to be cowards in the moment will suddenly find themselves more disposed to valor in the clutch. It often just takes one brave person to get things going.
The alternative, I guess, is to just stand around meekly as criminals essentially do whatever they want, all the time, forever. I’m sorry but I’m honestly not sure how else to imagine the consequences of that sort of submissive ethic. That’s certainly not the world I want to live it; it is emphatically not the world I want to give to my children. Be brave and fight back. Don’t “let them go,” stop them. Don’t “back up,” move forward. Make the cost of doing criminality too high and too embarrassing and this debased insanity can end virtually overnight.