What would you fight for?
Finding Your Reason
By Kathy Jackson
"It’ll just get taken away from you and used against you."
This annoying and offensive sentence, with its unspoken accusations of
female inferiority and lack of resolve, is nevertheless based upon an
important foundational truth. If you carry a gun and are not prepared
to use it if necessary, you are indeed at risk for a gun grab or worse.
A lot of concealed carry folks swim in a sea of euphemisms; I just did
it myself. "Use it if necessary" avoids the blunter but more honest, "to
kill another human being." If speaking bluntly about the purpose of our
concealed weapons doesn’t come easily to most of us, how much more difficult
would the deed itself be? Socially, psychologically, and emotionally,
few people are able to consider unwaveringly the full implications of
carrying a deadly weapon for self defense.
If speaking bluntly about the purpose of our concealed weapons doesn’t
come easily to most of us, how much more difficult would the deed itself
be?
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"A very large percentage of people who carry a concealed handgun do not
carry it as a weapon. They carry it as a good luck charm. They think of
it as a magic talisman that wards off evil, or as a rabbit's foot," says
firearms instructor Tom Givens. But the mere presence of the gun is no
magic bullet. Without the mental willingness to use the gun in the final
extreme, its usefulness is strictly limited.
So how do you come to the place where you are willing to risk killing
someone who is trying to kill you? Face it, this isn’t the sort of thing
that most people think about. It’s not socially acceptable to talk about
killing people. If there is a social stigma against carrying a gun, there’s
a much greater stigma against using one, even to save your own life.
Many women who carry a gun do so because they had some sort of an unpleasant
incident, an encounter which created in them an awareness of vulnerability
and a determination not to let it happen again. This isn’t universal by
any means, but it is a common first step.
But plenty of people encounter violence every day, and they don’t decide
to fight back next time. They don’t decide to go armed. So the journey
to determined self defense usually takes in a few other stops along the
way.
One bedrock question is simply this: what are you willing to fight for?
What is so important to you that you would be willing to do whatever it
takes to defend it? Is there anything?
A lot of people say no to this question, straight up. Nothing is worth
the risk of taking another human’s life, they say. But a little probing
might give a different answer.
"I wouldn’t fight back to save my own life," a friend of mine once confessed,
"but if someone tried to touch one of my babies, well ~!" This isn’t an
uncommon sentiment, and a lot of women who are otherwise passively unwilling
to fight admit that they would do literally anything to protect their
offspring. Some become willing to fight for their own lives the day they
realize that their kids would be harmed by growing up without a mother.
Nor is this dynamic unique to those who have children. One woman of my
acquaintance first became willing to use a gun simply because she heard
a news story wherein an intruder killed the family dogs before attacking
the female homeowner. My friend hadn’t previously been willing to fight
on her own behalf, but realized she would fight to protect her beloved
pets.
Self-defense guru Tony Blauer takes this common trait and runs with it
in his tapes and seminars. Blauer suggests that his students make a list
of things they would lose if they did not fight back, things which are
already present in the student’s life, which are personal to each student,
and about which the student is passionate. With these powerful personal
symbols, students give themselves permission to fight back.
What are you willing to fight for? What is so important to you that you
would be willing to do whatever it takes to defend it?
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Religious people often face more daunting hurdles on their road to fighting
back. From the sacredness of all life in some devotional traditions to
the staunch pacifism of others, from ‘thou shalt not kill’ in Judaism
to ‘turn the other cheek’ in Christendom, from the ahimsa of Hinduism
to the dharma of Buddhism, most religions contain at least some elements
that could be at odds with lethal self-defense. Overcoming the qualms
caused by these teachings can take time, diligent study, and much soul-searching.
Some religious difficulties are simply the result of misunderstandings.
While most Christians and Jews have heard, "Thou shalt not kill," for
example, only a relative few know that the Hebrew word often translated
as "kill," would more properly be translated "murder" by most scholars.
Many similar questions can be cleared up by discussion with a more knowledgeable
friend, or with a religious leader. Sometimes, the answers will be surprising.
When a little girl asked the Dalai Lama a question about school violence,
for instance, the Dalai Lama told her "it would be reasonable to shoot
back with your own gun" in some situations.
Occasionally, a deeply spiritual person will sense a conflict between
trusting God on one hand, and defending her own life on the other. Can
she really trust God to protect her, she wonders, if she takes steps to
protect herself? Further thought might show that trusting God to protect
her doesn’t have to be at odds with defending herself -- not any more
than preparing her own meals is at odds with trusting Him to provide her
daily bread. After all, God created human beings as tool-users with creative
minds, in a universe governed by cause and effect, in a world where actions
have consequences.
Does even a murderer or a child molester or a rapist deserve to be killed
for his actions? Such a question can haunt the ethical person. But perhaps
a more perceptive question would be, "Who decided that this conflict was
worth a human life?" When an assailant raises a deadly weapon toward an
innocent person, the assailant has already made the most important choice
of the day: he has decided that someone is going to die. The
only decision left for anyone else to make is whether the person who dies
will be an innocent victim, or one of society’s predators.
In the final analysis, each person’s journey on the road to self-defense
is intensely personal. The decision that her own life is worth defending,
even if it comes at the cost of killing an attacker, cuts right to the
heart of each woman’s most deeply held moral, ethical, and religious beliefs.
Ultimately, anyone who carries a deadly weapon must decide for herself
where her own boundary lines lie. She must decide for herself what it
will take for her to say to an assailant: "Not me. Not mine. Not today."
Otherwise, her gun could get taken away and used against her.