“Self-defense is the clearest of all laws, and for this reason: lawyers didn’t make it” ~Douglas William Jerrold
Is the average citizen really not all that smart? Is the average citizen not capable of making competent decisions about self-defense? That is what seems to be conveyed in this latest political campaign of untruths from unelected Police Chiefs around the granite state. Stuff made up of whole cloth long ago and regurgitated presently by the Nashua Chief of Police.
Nashua’s Chief Don Conley tells the Union Leader yesterday, “Senate Bill 88, will empower those individuals who want to engage in bad conduct; It sends the message that law enforcement isn’t necessary, and that people can take matters into their own hands…” Translation: The citizens are not smart enough to know the difference between defending ones’ self from a violent criminal attack from engaging in street adjudication, also known as “vigilantism”.
Chief Conley’s next assertion is that SB 88, “Sends the message that law enforcement isn’t necessary, and that people can take matters into their own hands…” Nothing could be further from the truth. More often than not, violent crimes occur in the absence of law enforcement, with the criminals taking flight immediately after the crime to avoid prosecution. Invariably, the crime victim — the citizen, always loses. This law empowers law-abiding citizens to minimize or prevent losses, fend off violent attacks, and enjoy a quality of life not subject to curtailment in favor of the criminal element.
A common metric of police advice is that law-abiding citizens should give an accommodation to the criminal element in the form of a wide birth of operation, under the premise of denying them crime victims. But what does that say about society when a law-abiding citizen cannot walk a dog after dark, walk to the corner store for Milk or Bread?
In bass-ackwards fashion, the law enforcement talking heads would have us stay in our houses…barricade our doors….don’t resist….comply with the criminal, all for the sake of being safe. The ultimate flaw in this reasoning is that compliance places ones’ fate completely in the hands of criminals. If a person fully complies with a criminal’s demands and is killed thereafter, what is learned? One must ask ones self if he or she wants to be a dead compliant victim.
Don’t resist…don’t fight back….don’t go out at night in that area…run away, if you can….give them the money—all of which should be personal individual choices, not mandates from police who are 10 minutes away when one is being robbed.
It makes no difference what laws we pass or do not pass. Criminal behavior is the same with or without Senate Bill 88. While the Police Chiefs would have us believe such laws are bad and will make the streets run red with blood, they overlook the thirty-one states that have adopted Stand your Ground laws similar to SB 88 (California and Massachusetts among those). Citizens are far smarter and more intuitive than the Self-anointed police gods credit. Overriding Lynch’s veto of SB 88 is the right thing for this legislature to do.
