There’s a Substack colum that I read occasionally called Weapons and Strategy and it’s written by Steven Bryen. And in his commentary on the Israeli attacks, the very end of his commentary, he came out with two points. And these are two points I think are very specifically germane to us here, once again, in the self-defense landscape in the United States.
The first is, relying just on deterrence is a huge mistake. And obviously you saw that on a macro scale in Israel this weekend. But on a micro scale, we talk about deterrence. That’s when you think the threat is enough to keep your enemy from attacking. And whether that’s the police on the street, whether you live in a gated neighborhood, those elements of deterrence are useful, but you can’t just rely on deterrence. You can’t just rely on the shield.
The sword has to be there with the shield. And that applies to us individually as well as it does to nations.
Second point — and I think I should have this tattooed on my head — this is a critically important point and I think it’s brilliant. Again, Steven Bryen. You get comfortable with your enemy, then you are dead. Let me repeat that. You get comfortable with your enemy, then you are dead.
Obviously it applies on a macro scale and on a national scale, but think about that on an individual scale. You know, it ties back to what we were talking about earlier, which is like, wow. Those people who say we should be killed, or those people who think we should go to a camp, those people who think maybe we should take a lovely scenic trip in a box car, ‘It’s [really only] a euphemism!’ They [really] don’t mean that!’
That is the definition of being comfortable with your enemy.
‘Now come on, they said that, sure, but come on, do you actually that they mean that stuff?’ No?
But if we extrapolate from that, if you get comfortable with your enemy, then you’re dead. What is the ultimate extrapolation from that line? It’s pretty simple.
I have a concealed carry permit, but I only carry when I think I’m going to need it, right? I only carry when I think it’s possible that I’m going to be attacked. I got an email saying that I’m going to be attacked later today or a buzzer went off on my phone with a notification that says hey, be careful today because today is the day you’re probably going to be attacked. Today is the day that’s the “day of wrath.” So you might want to stay home. Have a pizza delivered.
Not carrying a firearm to defend yourself and defend your family in a time of uncertainty, in a time of specific threat like like we’re living in, is the ultimate expression that you are comfortable with your enemy. You are so comfortable with your enemy you don’t feel a need to have some type of defense should your enemy decide that today is the day and you’re it.
What’s the second part of that quote? Then you are dead.
— Michael Bane in Hard Lessons From Israel
the pizza delivery man is a home invader.
self defense starts with home carry. why would you be less armed when venturing into the void?
– Maid service is recon
– Community canvasser is recon
– Personally, I think delivery drivers (choose one or all carriers / Amazon) are taking notes.
But that’s me.
Some of them actually are. A few years ago, we were somewhat surprised when a group of S.W.A.T. vehicles converged in a rush around a UPS delivery truck in our neighborhood. Turned out the driver had been collaborating with the members of a local household in a scheme of scoping out “addresses of interest” to commit crimes. S.W.A.T. was involved because the scheme had advanced to include guns. UPS driver was taken away in cuffs.
The amount of theft related to UPS drivers is amazing. It’s the dirty little secret UPS hides through immediate insurance payments. Thousands of firearms, high value tools and narcotics dissappear annually.
If they are, the conclusion at my place would be “choose another.”
Not really, the conclusion is you have stuff (guns) they want, they’ll figure out when you aren’t there and break in. You can’t be home all the time.
Take issue with you re delivery drivers. Everyone knows they can’t write….
That pizza guy comes up the drive in a tactical vest and an AK on a single point and he’s gonna be the one surprised when the door opens, not me.
serves you right for ordering cevapcici and skripavac pie.
The trick is ordering anchovies – when you do that they figure you are toast anyway, and leave you alone.
those things. even on half they ruin the whole thing.
lately i’ve been telling them to leave ’em on the salad just so i have to struggle through it.
Sleepin wit da fishes
No anchovies please.
https://youtu.be/6Dbh_4PKsHg?t=2
Thanks for the hearty laugh!!!
It happens I do like anchovies, so maybe I’ll remember that trick.
Far safer yet is making your own pizza at home with toothsome ingredients, including the anchovies. WHY even have a stranger come to your door in the first place?
You’d end up with healthier better tasting pizza AND greatly reduce your risk.
Wokeism teaches us there are no enemies except for the unidentifiable ones oppressing us and that even people who call for your extermination daily are really just friends you haven’t met yet.
And if by a very slim chance somebody should actually harm you it doesn’t count as long as they feel sufficiently marginalized by one of those unidentifiable mechanisms of oppression.
Palestinians and leftists call Israel colonizers and oppressors. BLM and leftists call white Americans colonizers and oppressors. BLM officially endorsed what Hamas did. Get it?
Michael Bane has been my mentor for 15 years.
Follow his wisdom. I reread the 1st half of Day of Wrath by Wm. Forstchen yesterday. It is scarier than I remembered…
“…relying just on deterrence is a huge mistake”
This is absolutely correct. This is the problem with a large group of patriots open carrying AR’s outside of the Virginia capital trying to send a message to Ralph Northam. All it really is is a deterrent. It doesn’t actually accomplish much of anything worth while. You can even block highways with a bunch of 18 wheelers for the same reason but it wont last long and gains just as much. Sure, all of this might get a few headlines (maybe) like thousands of cars honking their horns outside the capital building in an effort to get the attention of law makers. But anything that might look like it worked just ‘looks’ that way in the end. You do what you can in this life but sending letters to congressmen and commenting to the ATF asking “please don’t take this away, it’s unconstitutional anyway” is just playing their game and gets you nowhere. We see this craziness all the time and even with international politics with the way Israel interacts with it’s neighbors. Your dealing with people that hate you to the point of wanting you dead.
The only thing that actually works is to remove them from power. Replacing a tyrant with another tyrant is a useless act of futility. We see that process play out constantly in Chicago, New York, and California.
Everything you just said is the perfect definition for Liberal/Progressive democrats.
If you can carry, but don’t, you have declined to be an adult, and relegated yourself to the status of a minor child who needs to rely on the kindness of strangers.
You have regulated yourself to being a Subject of the Government. Rather than a Free citizen who controls the Government.
AKA….victim-in-waiting….
RE: “Not carrying a firearm to defend yourself and defend your family in a time of uncertainty, in a time of specific threat like like we’re living in, is the ultimate expression that you are comfortable with your enemy.”
Well Michael Bane…Jews were not exactly “comfortable” with nazis and even after stacks of tortured and murdered Jews still there was no lesson learned about Gun Control. The lesson is Hamas took advantage of people subjected to Gun Control.
Unfortunately lessons learned throughout History about the perils of defenseless people subjected to Gun Control are barked at, criticized and ignored by the dumbest sacks of sht on earth. You want to protect you and yours and your country then you better bury Gun Control.
Debbie W putting up Chip Roy wins big points from me. Chip for speaker please.
Bryen is also interesting. He has interesting things to say about dumpster and Israel.
Well if y’all live behind the ‘iron’ curtain (East Coast) and everywhere you go is now considered a “sensitive place” (post Bruen).
Maine to Vermont is fine as is Pennsylvania and Connecticut is surprisingly easy to work with. Otherwise about right till you hit Virginia. It’s more the city heavy regions of the northeast and midatlantic.
Yeah Bane is ok. He certainly doesn’t look like he’s a badazz. I’m going on 70 but “look”the best I’ve looked in 10years. We’re way too comfortable living amongst our enemies. TTAG is an offender with deleting any comment criticizing the “religion of peace”. Woe to you who call good evil & evil “good”! Have a swell Friday the 13th🙄
They’re now know as The Religion of “Mostly Peaceful.”
fww – I had a similar thought – not only should we not get ‘comfortable’ but we must be VERY careful about who/what we are ‘tolerant’ of. Note Well, that does NOT mean we should become intolerant by any means. What I mean is that we must maintain our vigilance at all times and places. There ARE people/groups who DO wish to do us harm simply because we ain’t them or because they cannot control us.
Exactly- Palestinians gave up their guns and they’ve been treated like subhumans for decades.
I support 2A for Palestinians.
Egypt can take them if they care so much. But they don’t care, and none of the other nations of mostly peaceful care either. They all use the so called palestinians as pawns to maintain a foothold is the land that shall not be named as to not offend the algorithm. And you don’t care either, you just hate them because of their religion, which is fine but be honest.
yeah? and the boomers can send their own money and hop a flight to go join 👁️ df and live by their claimed principles instead of clamoring against US Interests by demanding US involvement that results in blood and treasure the belongs to other Americans being expended for something that isn’t our problem. Fk them both, neither party to the conflict are “the good guys”.
There can be no peace until the religion of peace is extirpated. “First the Saturday people and then the Sunday people” is something I was told many years ago. World domination is the only peace they recognise.
They’ve been treated like subhumans by their leadership, because what their leaders want is the extermination of Jews. That’s what that “from the river to the sea” crap is about. The lives of the Palestinians are not important. In fact, according to a senior Hamas official who went on RT the other day, martyrdom for Palestine is what Palestinians love most of all.
If you care about the lives and living conditions of the Palestinian people, then Hamas and organizations like them are not on your side.
“The Palestinians have been crying for a homeland for four generations while looking at Israel and turning their backs on the Palestinian homeland that is…JORDAN.”
IIRC, “The West Bank” is Jordan’s Gaza. The “Palestinians” tried to overthrow the king, and were rounded up and sent to camps on “The West Bank”. Thinking the “Palestinians” turned their backs on Jordan, and were exiled as a result.
Palestine is an artificial construct by the British after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after WW1. Those Palestinians are ethnically Jordanian. You are believing in a fiction.
Thank you Jim. I’m glad I’m not the only one to know this. The Palestinians have been crying for a homeland for four generations while looking at Israel and turning their backs on the Palestinian homeland that is…JORDAN.
I heard the best argument ever the other day:
There are 22 Arab nations across northern Africa and the Middle East all the way to the Indian Ocean. That means there are 22 Arab nations where “Palestinians” can go and live in peace with like-minded people of the same lineage (children of Abraham) and religion (Islam). Why can’t Jews have one nation–the size of New Jersey–among 22 Arab nations?
Notes:
Both Arabs and Jews are descendants of Abraham.
Both lived in/around present day Israel thousands of years ago.
Both could make ancestral claims going back thousands of years.
Why not let Jews have Israel when Arabs have everything else?
You are a terrorist supporter!
what have guns ever done for the Palestinians?….except get them killed!….try peace for a change…
that’s because they have shown they are prone to violence against others and can not be trusted with firearms.
who just attacked other ??
try again.
“Exactly- Palestinians gave up their guns and they’ve been treated like subhumans for decades.
I support 2A for Palestinians.”
100% false – there is in reality no such thing as a ‘Palestinian’ because….
1. There has never been a Palestinian state of any kind, ever, at any point in history.
2. There was a region known as “Palestine” (since about 134AD) when the Romans applied that name to the land that had previously been known as Judea, that is, ‘land of the Jews’. In other words it was only a name the Romans used for the region because they did not like Jews and didn’t want to call it Judea.
3. The region remained known as “Palestine” when the Ottoman Empire held it. In the early 1920s, just before the Ottoman Empire fell completely it conceded control of that region and it became known as ‘Transjordan’ and then (and now) as Jordan to the League of Nations. On July 24, 1922, the League granted administrative control over these territories to Britain with specific instructions to create a “national home for the Jewish people.”
4. Britain immediately turned over 77% of the Mandate to the Arabs to create Jordan but remained generally committed to establishing a Jewish national home in the remainder (collectively, the gaza, west bank, and area delineated as Israel today). This was known as the Mandate for Palestine. This is used to claim a Palestinian state that supposedly predated Israel, but this is not true because the land had been explicitly set aside for Jewish settlement nine years before the founding of the modern state of Israel. And in 1939 a flag was established for this region called ‘palestine’ and it had a star of David on it (the modern day Flag of Israel) to stake the sovereign territory of a Jewish state.
5. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, it immediately had to fight a war for its survival against the surrounding Arab nations that had vowed to destroy it. Then there were two occupations: Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria (which it renamed the West Bank). Israel won back those territories, their territory, in the Six-Day War of 1967, but that was actually ending an occupation, not starting one because the only international law governing sovereignty over those territories stipulated that they were to be part of a national home for the Jewish people.
6. Israel has never ‘occupied’ ‘Palestinian land’. they have been all this time ‘occupying’ land belonging to Israel.
7. The idea that Israel is occupying ‘Palestinian land’ was furthered in the 1990s by the Oslo Accords, to which Israel (unwisely) agreed in which it only agreed to work toward the establishment of a ‘Palestinian state’ in the West Bank and Gaza.
In other words, there was never a ‘Palestinian’ people or a Palestinian state/nation, and the land in the Gaza and West Bank still, under international law, belongs to Israel and that’s what they are defending now.
Correction for “and the land in the Gaza and West Bank still, under international law, belongs to Israel and that’s what they are defending now.”
that should be…
…and the land in the Gaza and West Bank still, under international law and historically and traditionally and by virtue of it being ‘settled’ by the Jewish people originally as Judea until renamed as a region to ‘palestine’ by the Romans, belongs to Israel and that’s what Israel is defending now.
clarification for: “and then (and now) as Jordan”
as in the documents created at the time.
Nice recap, thanx.
“The first is, relying just on deterrence is a huge mistake.”
‘Why can’t we all just git along?’
In addition to laws being the root cause of crime, crime becomes a matter of equity. If everyone has the same, no one is rich, no one is poor. Under that paradigm, a person who becomes rich will be a target of law enforcement; anyone who becomes poor will be the beneficiary of government largess designed to put such people back into the hive at equity with everyone else. No one would have “more”, or “less”. Thus it is equity that matters, not pocket guns.
Perhaps there is room for appointing everyone (age 18 and up) to be enlisted as a law enforcement agent, permitted to arrest anyone for suspicion of becoming wealthy (non-equitable)? Or, have authority to deliver neighbors, when they become poor, to homeless facilities, or other social welfare program, whether they like it or not.
This isn’t rocket science, we can do it – better, faster, stronger; we have the technology.
all of the “palestinian” people can move into egypt, syria, saudi, yemen, etc. muslim “brotherhood, you know.
nobody wants them…they’re a troublesome lot…..
Enemy, I suppose.
A nice full belly and you feel pretty comfortable.
Liberty>Life
It’s tattooed on my hand. It’s my base principle!
I can’t imagine the internal mindset of anyone who is comfortable with the baby-beheading terrorist cult of murder and death, but apparently many are and celebrate their “religion of peace” make-believe status.
We live in strange times.
“…and celebrate their “religion of peace” ”
“Peace” is a subjective term. When all the infidels are dead, peace will be universal among whichever sect of Islam remains. Just as the US will have peace when all the “deplorables” are exterminated.
the religion of peace is a website that tracks Muslim attacks on others.
it’s a dot org.
you should check it out for reference
Is this it? couldn’t find a religionof peace.org URL
mostly stupid kids…nice to see a little “pushback”….
Too far out of town for pizza delivery. UPS etc meet me at the gate. Just easier than having to open gates and play around letting them in and out. Not giving the punch code to anyone I don’t know and trust.
SAID IT ALL …
BIG 10-4