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We hear it almost daily from various segments of the Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex: carrying a gun doesn’t make you safer, they tell us (Nick’s takedown here). It’s a self-afirming mantra they mutter to themselves despite all of the evidence to the contrary. But the mother out for a walk with her three-year-old in the above video no doubt would have preferred to have had a way to fend off the much larger, more aggressive woman who attacked her and threatened to kick her child in the face . . .

According to nj.com, the attacker, LaTia Harris, hasn’t yet been apprehended. The brutal daylight assault and battery took place in New Jersey. And Alan Gura’s wisdom notwithstanding, that state has determined that keeping people like this mother defenseless by force of law is in the public interest.

As Salem Chief of Police John J. Pelura III said, 

“There is a moral and social breakdown in the fabric of our society which is clearly evident when a woman gets pummeled in broad daylight in front of her child while a dozen people pull out their phones to record the incident instead of calling for help. There is so little regard for human life — by the actor and the bystanders.”

No argument here. But even if the reporter, Bill Gallo, Jr., followed up with a question (and who really thinks he did?) about allowing Garden Staters like the woman on the ground to avail themselves of their natural, civil, Constitutional right to armed self defense, the Chief’s answer didn’t make it into the article. Imagine that.

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130 COMMENTS

    • People wonder why there are stereotypes..look no further. I recently moved to GA and apparently the black people down here think it is socially acceptable to act like animals. I watched a dad and mom tag team beat the tar out of their kid, in public, with their belts, all the while screaming obscenities that would make Al Sharpton’s hair curl (so to speak). Of course they beat feet when the cops came and got away. That’s not all, I also watched a fine upstanding black man slapping the shit out of his daughter / wife while he was sitting at a stop light in front of me. Stuff I have never seen in my life, down here is par for the course. What a bunch of jackals. That is why we CCW folks.

      • Curious if you did anything about it, or, if as your comment states, you simply watched? In the video above, the bystanders “watching” are almost as much of a monster as the “monster” who is beating that poor woman….

        • Really? A Caucasian man fighting a black man in a Negro neighborhood? His wife better call his life insurance company first to be sure the premiums are paid. What about a Caucasian couple walking down the street as Negro “youths” decide to play the knockout game with them? Life is cheap in the ghetto. Why? Ask the race baiters like Sharpton, Jackson, etc.

    • The thing is, if you were to replace the black McDonalds worker with a pitbull, said pitbull would have been euthanized already. I don’t understand why we can’t have the same for people who clearly show themselves to have such violent and potentially deadly tendencies towards an innocent person, especially a mother with a small child.

    • That was disgusting. People are behaving exactly as they are trained to do. The prevailing message is “the Police will take care of it, stand back and stay out of the way.”

      It sure looks like the attacker was accustomed to behaving that way and had no fear of consequences. I would like to know what incited that kind of violence, was it unprovoked, was it verbal? Good to know if you are in Jersey.

  1. The Chief of Police called it – “…a moral and social breakdown in the fabric of our society which is clearly evident when a woman gets pummeled in broad daylight in front of her child while a dozen people pull out their phones to record the incident instead of calling for help.”

    This is not new – look up the Kitty Genovese murder in New York City, 1964. Same reaction by the bystanders: “I didn’t want to get involved.”

    This is the logical “unintended consequence” of a government and a media that have spent the last 40 years telling people to “call 911, let the professionals handle it” , and particularly a media that calls any example of armed self-defense “vigilantism”.

    Move to a small town in a rural state – you may not be completely free of this kind of mindless evil, but you will at least have neighbors who will help you and will applaud legitimate self-defense.

    • Those weren’t bystanders, they were accomplices. Whether they set out to be or not, just standing around spectating like that encouraged the attack.

        • No, he’s actually not reaching all that far at all.

          There is a deterrent effect in play when people, potential attackers, have to wonder if the guy standing over there or that couple just down the sidewalk might just come to the aid of the attacked person and beat the HELL out of the attacker.

          Grooming a bunch of sheep to sit by and watch people be victimized, and WORSE…be entertained by it…removes that deterrent effect.

          So, here we are in 2014 where it has become more important to video a violent attack than it is to help the victim.

          Willing accomplices is right on the mark, I’d say.

          There’s legal precedence for that concept, too. Felony Murder Rule tells us you don’t have to be the one to take a life. If your actions contribute, you carry culpability. It’s not much of a reach to make the claim “recording video” is an action that contributed, as that could sure be interpreted as willful encouragement to the attacker.

        • Nope, no stretch at all. The Kitty Genovese murder absolutely untied New York City in outrage. I was there to see it. Look it up in the Daily News or NY Post archives. I think even the NY Times was upset.

    • Agreed…my small town in Oklahoma had a case where a drunk boyfriend started slapping his girlfriend at a festival by the lake. Three complete strangers pulled him off and held him until police arrived while another woman tended to the girlfriend. I’ll take small towns any day.

      • Those 3 strangers are lucky the girlfriend didn’t turn on them when they intervened. In DV cases especially both parties will often turn on and attack an intervening 3rd party. Even cops have to be careful about responding to two people fighting as both persons can turn on the officer or anyone else inserting themselves into a fight between strangers. That is why you must be very careful about getting involved in a fight between people you don’t know because you do not know how both will respond to you. Also knowing NJ, when LE does finally show up they may charge you for your trouble. Just a lot of risk involved.

        • Cops rightfully hate handling Domestic calls because they never know if the the victim will turn on them too, and with what.

        • So, just because there is “risk,” are you saying the right answer is to do nothing?

          There’s risk getting out of bed in the morning. There’s risk driving a car on the public roadway. There’s risk eating dinner.

          “Risk” is a straw man. There’s ALWAYS risk in every single thing we do.

        • Not saying people should not get involved, but be prepared to fend off two attackers. Know what you will be getting yourself into. Injecting yourself into other people’s business righthully or not isn’t something to take lightly.

          Years ago, I was in a FL hotel elevator when a man stepped into it and lit up a cig. I told the guy it was illegal to smoke in a elevator and he might set the alarm off. The man responded by grabing my neck and threatining to burn my face with his cig in a southern accent. Those southern country folk sure are nice people. I knocked the glasses off of his head and we tossed until the door opened and I jumped out and ran to the lobby. The point is you never know how someone you don’t will react when you intervine in their affairs and it is a big risk. You saying there is a risk in everything is a strawman in itself and a weak comparsion. Getting out of bed isn’t as large of a risk as knowingly walking into an hostile situration evolving strangers whom you know nothing about or what they are capable of doing.

        • That happened to me some years ago when I intervened as a man punched a woman. I got in between them and put him on the ground. She then started attacking me so I ended up having to fend her off whilst making sure he didn’t attack me as well. Fortunately it all subsided very quickly.

          I would do it again but, perhaps, a little more cautiously.

        • “but be prepared to fend off two attackers. Know what you will be getting yourself into. Injecting yourself into other people’s business righthully or not isn’t something to take lightly. “

          Fair enough, and agreed.

    • I remember seeing something about that 64 case in the semester of college I took psych. There was a more shocking case here quite a few years ago though. Someone crawled into a gas station after being either shot or stabbed (I don’t remember) and laid there bleeding to death while people actually stepped over her to get to the register (that part I do remember). The state looked into charging those people with negligent something or other I think, but I don’t know if they ever did. Until then I never thought something like that could happen in Kansas (there’s no place like home just didn’t have the same ring anymore). It just goes to show no place is completely safe and counting on others for help is not a plan. You might as try just clicking your heels together.

    • “Hate crime” implies that there was racial motivation behind the attack. We don’t know if that was the case or not. Just because they were different races doesn’t mean the attack was racially motivated.

        • If the roles were reversed, I have no doubt that some would cry “hate crime.” They would be just as wrong if they made that assumption based on the limited information we’re given in this video.

    • I hate that term, “Hate Crime”. If it’s a crime, who cares if it was done out of hate or not? Punishment fits the crime, not punishment fits the emotion involved.

      • Agreed! A crime is a crime. Does it really matter if a person shoots you because they don’t like your skin color or just because they were having a bad day and you happened to be there?

  2. You need to understand that here in La-La Land (I count NY same as New Jersey), step in and you end up arrested and sued. Hell in NYC, Di Blasio is offering 7 figure settlements for assault, battery and attempted murder. Can’t wait to leave.

    • Maybe North NJ, but not south NJ, we are with Philly and more like a part of PA and not with NYC like northern NJ is. Here in southern NJ we hate NY and northern NJ because of their BS and being unclean.

  3. Everyone standing around, as well as the attacker, need to die a long slow painful death. That is all.

    P.S. The animal that attacked her is female? I wouldn’t have known.

  4. The world would be a better place if that woman weren’t in it. I’ll bet that poor mom is demanding action of a different kind.

    • Shannon and her gun-toting protectors wouldn’t be caught there in a million years. Too dangerous. I feel sorry for the good, decent people who live there.

      • And Shannon and her Moms Demanding Action are notably silent on cases like this.

        I’ve often wondered why it’s “gun violence” that is such a hot button issue to them, and not just “violence.”

        (rhetorical wondering….)

  5. I don’t care about the consequences, I would have stepped in. Just watching the video makes me want to knock her teeth out.

  6. And threatening to kick the child in the head?!?

    What kind of people are those that stand by and let a child actively try to stop that attack.

  7. Well, Mr. Police Chief, at least someone got a pic of the assailant, which is probably more than your after-the-fact arriving troops would have gotten. But actually, it sounds like those two know each other or at least have some connection. In some parts of the world someone might have been expected to intervene, but the nannies in Trenton probably frown on that kind of thing. They obviously prefer sheep.

  8. My god. The most heart wrenching part was seeing the victims son try to come to her defense by kicking the attacker. A dozen or more grown adults and teenagers are too cowardly to do what a 3 year old child had no problem attempting, the defense of an innocent victim. He’s got the right attitude and the right spirit… though after a dozen years of ‘quality’ public indoctrination errr ‘education’ my bet is he’ll end up right where those bystanders were. Not caring, not knowing what to do… I hope for his sake he’s strong enough to keep his fighting spirit.

  9. I thought most of those area states had Good Samaritan laws, at least that’s one thing I learned from Seinfeld.

      • I’m mean that if any onlookers (such as the cameraman) are positively identified by material evidence as not offering assistance to someone imperiled and it is judged that it would have been reasonable to do so, then civil or criminal charges should/could be filed against said onlookers. I’ve no clue as to the intricacies of the laws or even if NJ has any, I’m just wondering if anyone (Ralph?) knows. Negative reinforcement may get people to wake up to humanity a small bit.

        • You can’t charge someone with not taking an action. Even police don’t have to step in, which is very sad.

  10. “Good thing” the woman who was savagely beaten was white, right? When feral savages attack it’s all good. If the races were reversed and white person did what that savage did, it would be all over the local & national news as a RACIST attack.

  11. What does the police chief expect? After years of the “authorities” and civil attorneys telling people to NOT intervene – that’s what the police are for – perhaps many people believe just that? You can’t have it both ways: citizens are either responsible for taking action when they see harm being done, or they aren’t.

    Even the training classes we take frequently caution us to not get involved in domestic disputes, or situations where we don’t really know what is happening. So what’s the answer about third parties intervening in such a case?

    As far as the woman on the receiving end of the beat down being armed – who knows if she could have deployed a weapon in her own defense? It’s a big assumption that if she was bushwacked and taken to the ground immediately that she could have had time to draw. Guns and pepper spray are the best personal defense items we can carry – but even they aren’t a magic talisman against danger.

    …. now standing by for inevitable flames from the “sheepdogs”….

    • “What does the police chief expect? After years of the “authorities” and civil attorneys telling people to NOT intervene – that’s what the police are for – perhaps many people believe just that? You can’t have it both ways: citizens are either responsible for taking action when they see harm being done, or they aren’t. ”

      nailed it.

  12. But would that woman have carried? Really? She is obviously quite non-violent and did not make much of an attempt to fight, probably because she was under shock.

    I agree someone with firearm could pull it, shout “get the F@#$ back” and end the fight before it began, but then they would probably be in jail for “brandishing” or “threatening conduct”. Without the escalation there is no justifiable use. The legal system needs to end punishing people from defending themselves, but first people need to be willing to defend themselves. I don’t think the victim here was. I would suggest hand-to-hand training first, for everyone, then they can choose if they want to move up the chain. Simply having a gun won’t help when someone has no desire to learn how to defend themselves.

    Women love to talk about empowerment. The first area should be self-defense. Unfortunately, most people think they’ll never need it, that the world is full of happy well-adjusted people and not monsters that will beat you in front of your child(ren).

  13. impossible to say without knowing the intimacies of the situation. little lady might have had it coming… or not. if it was brutal and undeserved (didn’t look toooo bad aside from junior’s mental trauma) a gun would have certainly been advantageous.
    and the bystanders, well either they didn’t think they could take ms. perteet on or they’re hesitant to get involved due to litigation.
    which comes back to the enormous legal lobby.
    which comes back to greed.

      • not even a really tiny person acting with their child present that deservedly provoked such a response from an enormous person?
        stature and the presence of a child may often soften the outcome of a cultivated attack, but richly deserved is just that.
        midget horse thieves were still hung by giant hangmen kids or no. in public.

    • You strike someone while that person is on the ground, there is literally no legal defense. Once a person can no longer retreat, anything that happened before that becomes illegally non relevant.

  14. Suppose you were there, TTAG reader and CCW holder. You’re with your family and kids, strolling along minding your business, enjoying the day. You see what’s happening, unfolding before you. What do you do?

    Do you run or stride quickly to the action, unholstering and drawing?

    Do you run or stride quickly to the action, keeping your piece holstered, and shout to intervene, possibly using physical force to stop the assailant, hoping that she doesn’t have friends guarding against intruders such as yourself?

    Or do you at least call 911, knowing that you if had to unholster, you’re probably going to get in more trouble than it’s worth?

    • Walk in, attempt to break it up, run like a Brit if it doesn’t work. But really the thing to do is recruit the men around there to help break it up. You’d be surprised how often that will work when you simply say “you and you come with me”. Something I learned from a resource officer. As with most bullies once there is resistance they stop.

      • “But really the thing to do is recruit the men around there to help break it up. You’d be surprised how often that will work when you simply say “you and you come with me”. “

        What a great idea!!! Thanks for the tip!

        “attempt to break it up, run like a Brit if it doesn’t work.”

        LOL as I LMAO! What exactly does it look like to “run like a Brit”? I don’t think Daniel Craig’s James Bond appreciates your remark, LOL.

    • I don’t have a wife and kids nor do I think a gun is necessary in this situation.

      Kick the attacker in the face and walk off. Problem solved.

    • My wife calls 911, protects kid with my legal 5.5 TX blade while I go punt aggravated assaulter in the head. Draw down under section 9.04 of Texas use of force law, tell everyone to back off, secure toddler and mother and wait for the calvary. If anyone goes after me, the lady, child or my wife, I would use up to and including lethal force to protect all of them citing tactcial and legal deliberate indifference. After 911 Id call my affirmative defense attorney already on retainer and engage my Ayoob trained class protocol with responding officers. That covers the two main branching risk threats.

      • AMOKI,

        That’s a fantastic action plan. Really well thought out, and a great deal of preparatory thinking was put into action.

        And so the story continues. The assailant Latia, slightly woozy from the nose punt, looks up from the ground and sees your gun aimed at her, she then turns her head to hear your wife talking to the 911 dispatcher giving the location of the park, and what happened, and then she sees bystanders with their smartphones videotaping everything.

        She decides she doesn’t want to be there when the police arrive. She gets up slowly, and with the great residual anger still coursing in her veins, she yells out, “White Boy! You ain’t gonna shoot me, MF’er!! I dare you with all these folks watching, you MF’er!!”

        She then turns around, and does the chunky run away from the scene of the crime.

        Videophones swing back and forth from the Latia doing the chunky run outta there and you holding your gun.

        So you re-holster your gun and bend down to attend to the victim and her child. Among the trees, Latia shouts with malicious glee, “I told you White Boy that you weren’t gonna shoot! Eff you and your gun!!”

        You just shake your head. The victim and her child look at you with undying gratefulness. It was worth it.

    • physically intervene, yes. Draw/shoot maybe. Duty to retreat does not apply to someone defending another. from the POV of the camera, use of force appears justified. The issue i have here is ‘proportionality’. The attacker appears to be alone and unarmed and while it might be justified for a 5’1” female to shoot, a 6’2” male might run into some issues in using deadly force against a female even if she is the size of a large man.

      IMO had that been an MMA fight, the fight would have been stopped when the lady on the ground was being struck and was unable to intelligently defend herself. The attacker continued the attack to a grounded opponent who was not fighting back. A good argument can be made that this meets immediate and fear of GBI or death due to the continued attack. Threats against her child are just icing on the cake…

  15. Keep it up people – White America is watching you. And you scratch your heads wondering why there is racial distrust in this country.

      • Well, that would be gutted.

        Disgutted, would mean the opposite.

        However, this person’s user name is DisgutedAmerican (one t), which means he’s been deprived of access to his Swedish sheep*, presumably at the hands of a non-white American. Hence his comment.

        *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gute_(sheep)

    • What the hell does this assailant have to do with me other than the fact that we both happen by pure chance to be born Black? I hate it when people assume that I’m responsible for the actions of other people I have absolutely nothing to do with. They are their own person. I’m my own person and that’s the end of it.

      This is the same logic that anti-gunners use to try to tie us together with the mass shooters and other scumbag lowlifes.

  16. An Akita is a beautiful breed of dog that has a protective nature that is only rivaled by it’s affection for it’s owner(s).

  17. I intervened when a guy tried to kidnap and kill his Girl friend; I didn’t need to draw a weapon.

    Here in New Mexico;I would intervene in a similar situation as posted. There in NJ, probably not because the system would punish those that try to help.

  18. i said it before and I’ll say it again.. It won’t stop until we as good guys make it stop with the ventilation of bad guys. After GeoZim got (rightfully) acquitted, there were many threats not only to him but white people in general – and until bad guys , of any color, are actually scared that people will shoot and kill them while defending themselves from attack, it won’t stop. This barbaric animal woman up there sure wasn’t scared of any reprecussions and the filming kids were impressed, not appalled.

    This really disgusts me and it will not stop until it is made to stop. Think of the headlines if that poor woman managed to pull a legal, licensed pistol from her purse and shot her attacker and THAT part of the video got Youtubed. But no one likes that conversation.

    Ventilation is the best preventative defense against such attacks.

  19. Notice how this kind of stuff DOESN’T happen in “shall-issue” or “Constitutional Carry” states?

    An armed society is a polite society.

    • In all fairness, I think it DOES happen in those states.

      Not with the same frequency, but it DOES happen. Some people will never be deterred from doing what they do no matter the odds of the victim being armed.

  20. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing

    …pretty good example of this here

    • Let’s say that you’re the good person who intervenes after a good amount of bloodletting has occurred.

      The assailant stops and turns to walk away.

      You decide that it’s best to attend to the victim and her child rather than try to detain the assailant.

      That’s probably the wisest course of action as far as I can tell.

  21. Wow, what a horrible thing for a little boy to see! That being said, what a brave little one for trying to protect his mother with his tiny kicks! If that was my son I’d be ashamed he had to witness that, but proud of the way he acted.

    Watching it a second time, it is clear the attacker was wearing a uniform from a fast food rest. Looks like McD’s, but I can’t be sure. Someone local should call the area Micky D’s and see if they support that type of behavior from their employees.

    • A lot of what the attacker was yelling was hard to hear, but from I could tell it was about some earlier dispute and the attacker (McD’s?) got ratted on while she was on the job or lost her job?

      It’s a not a good reason to attack someone, but I’m still trying to figure out the context of this attack. It’s obviously not random; the attacking woman was definitely targeting the other woman.

  22. “According to nj.com, the attacker, Latia Harris, hasn’t yet been apprehended.” So, the police know who the attacker is, but they have not yet apprehended her yet? Can’t be that hard to find her…she said something to the victim about “almost made me lose my job”, and it looks like she’s wearing a kind of work uniform…what kind of police work do they do in NJ, anyway?

    I count 6-7 rapid punches to the victim while she’s on the ground…sorry, that’s just not acceptable behavior, regardless of what the victim may have said to the attacker.

    • “that’s just not acceptable behavior”

      In the broadest sense, hitting someone on the ground could arguably be not only unacceptable behavior, but also “imminent threat of death or serious injury.”

  23. Have you guys read the comments on the NJ.com site? HOLY SMOKES!!!! Some folks saying that a beat down is no big thing, and worse. I am sooo happy that I left NJ, and looking forward to retiring and not having to go to work there.

    • No I already killed enough brain cells from disbelief today.

      “Don’t enter a den of fools to convince them otherwise”

  24. ” that state has determined that keeping people like this mother defenseless by force of law is in the public interest.”

    TRUE. They determined its not in the public’s interest because its profitable government interest that matters. They have no interest in finding the woman because most likely does not have any assets to go after.

    The circle is this. Government creates programs that keeps people poor & un-educated, but provides for their basic needs. Create laws that prevent working law abiding citzens (who fund poor people) from protecting themselves, while providing a conduit allowing crminals to rob, rape, and murder. Then the crimminal justice system takes over and spends enormous amounts of money protecting or when the rap sheet gets long enough, place them in prisons.

    No other employment or business gets to tap both sides of the revenue stream, all funded by the taxpayer.

    Allow citizens to protect themselves infringes on the cash flow of government. It would be of great interest to know how much revenue is crreated on the revolving door of teh justice system.

  25. And black folks wonder why they get a bad reputation. Next time one of em pulls this and somebody with less pigment than them shoots em, there will be more riots. Want to be treated equal, want to avoid hearing or seeing blindly racist crap on the web….dont act like an animal.

    Im afraid chris rock nailed it down in his famous bit, that bitch is the latter.

  26. Story update:
    http://www.nj.com/salem/index.ssf/2014/06/salem_video_beating_suspect_latia_harris_still_sought_by_authorities.html#incart_river

    The victim was left with limited vision in her left eye and she was also threatened with being shot during the attack, according to the warrant issued for the suspect, LaTia Harris, 25, of Salem.

    Police said that the beating left the victim, a 27-year-old Salem resident, with “limited function” of her left eye, numerous contusions and a broken nose.

    “Her whereabouts are unknown, but we are actively seeking her,” Pelura said. The chief said when police went to her last known address — a Salem City Housing Authority complex on Anderson Drive — it was “vacant.”

    And she can’t sue because [obviously] LaTia has little or nothing to pay with. But she is “empowered”…

    And LaTia melts away into the anonymous city with her peers.

  27. There is a moral and social breakdown in the fabric of our society

    A gun doesn’t fire on its own and society doesn’t break down by itself. The breakdown is driven by people, like the social parasites that run NJ and the other social parasites who drain the state dry.

    • I find it funny that he acts all high and mighty and then says they should’ve called his boys. Not a word about intervening.

      The implication is that standing around and waiting for the cops to arrive while a woman gets her face broken is morally superior to standing around and videotaping the incident.

      Inaction is inaction.

  28. “you almost made me lose ma’ job!”

    What kind of reasoning is that for this kind of response? What would she have done had she have lost her job? And how will she react when she undoubted loses her job after this video comes back to haunt her?

    Violence is generational….its taught.

  29. This lowlife attacking this woman and threatening her 3yearold( ! ) needs a long term in prison where she can pick on people her own size. Of course it’s a HATE CRIME! Would I intervene? Hard to say since everyone else is a lowlife recording this crime. I don’t use hate crime lightly either. I also have no idea why the giant b##th was angry. I don’t care. From an evil old white man married to a beautiful black woman.

  30. I’m a pretty mellow guy IRL.

    I’d like to knock that scumbag’s block off. Disgusting.

    That is all. Carry on.

    • If that beatdown had happened to Shannon Watts, Hilary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, or Barbara Boxer, and those pictures were of them after they got beat down like that, I wonder if they’d understand the pro-2A position, and then maybe even support the 2nd Amendment themselves?

  31. And they just stood there watching and did nothing…that woman could have sustained serious injury the way she was being hit. Kudos to the kid for trying to help…

  32. Threatening to kick a three year old child qualified this beast for the “imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury” standard we have here in Tennessee.

    LaToiletta had already demonstrated a capacity for brutality, and the boy is only about a tenth of her size.

    It’s very clear cut – Her remark would have pulled the trigger and put 180 grains of copper-jacketed expanding hollow point dead center of mass. And I’d have had no regrets, putting a rabid animal down.

    • I just watched the video again and realized that at the point I would have “let slip the dogs of war”, the bullet might have gone “center of ass”. Oh well, all the same!

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