>ok, i see your point, and i kind of followed tha analogy blindly.
>here is my attempt to rescue my argument: what if the mugger also
>says "i am going to follow you to your house and then beat up
>your kids"?
recently my kid came home to say that a kid about 14 was walking around the parking lot in front of our apartment wielding a gun. since we know a bit about guns and how to spot a real handgun (though that's not reliable), we were pretty sure this was a problem. i'm a big 2a supporter so i was a little torn. if someone wants to carry a handgun around and they have a CCW or openly if they do not, big whoop. i also did not want to subject a poor black kid to the degradations of encountering the sizzlean. when he started wandering around the playground directly outside my second floor window, i called the sizzlean (my terms for the cops which are called pigs or bacon in US slang. sizzlean is fake bacon for people watching fat intake)
the fuckers ended up at my door and fast and i'm sure they had utterly no time to look for kid and intervene if necessary. they were more interested in talking to someone like me who knew how to identify handguns apparently. i wouldn't answer the door because they should have been on the playground, not asking me questions. plus, i'm generally more afraid of the sizzlean than i am afraid of anyone in my neighborhood. i regretted having called. but then, it turned out that the kid shot at someone.. ostensibly over drugs and stolen bike.
in the end, however, we all get to take safe little positions because, as carrol reminds, the US gov will do what it wants and it was inevitable a war would be a response. so, the real analogy here is this: the position taken here is one in which we see the kid with a gun, responding to violence with violence, a perfectly normal reaction to the conditions in which he lives. rather than calling the cops, we calculate that a bunch of other people will call the cops or given that there are six cops already living in this area (community policing doncha know) then we can count on them to intervene. so, we wait for the cops to make a mess of it so we can remain pure and, probably, alive when the sizzlean goes after the kid, his family, his friends and the entire neighborhood and the ones nearby, exacerbating an already ongoing harassment. if the cops really make a mess of it and step up their harass ment of the neighborhood and adjacent ones because of the incident and others, they probably kill and imprison some more. in the wake of all the terror, they'll organize a left movement building on the rage of the terrorized residents.
kelley