“From any perspective of rationality, the thing to do with a robber is to cooperate politely.” So sayeth Franklin E. Zimring in The New York Times article Robbed at Gunpoint, Some Bronx Victims Resist. “You don’t have much money on you; it’s nuts for the victim to refuse. Here’s the second layer of nuts: You’ve got a rational robber. If the victim refuses, why doesn’t he just find somebody else?” Mr. Zimring is a criminologist at Berkeley Law School. Their motto: “Big Ideas, Bold Action.” And there’s your morning dose of unintentional irony. But wait! There’s more! . . .
While reporter J. David Goodman’s clearly amazed by citizens standing up to violent assault—never once mentioning the advantages of armed deterrence or defense—he dutifully reports that armed robberies are becoming increasingly violent:
With decade-long declines in crime, some scholars have noted a change in the nature of robberies. A 2009 study of national victim surveys taken since 1993 found that not only were robberies becoming less frequent over time, they were also becoming more violent, in part because of what the authors describe as “victim hardening.”
“Softer victims take precautions,” said Rajiv Sethi, a Barnard College economist and one of the study’s authors. In addition, he said, many people who may have become robbers in the past may instead have gotten jobs as urban economies improved, leaving the more-hardened criminals to encounter more-hardened victims on the streets of certain neighborhoods.
“You get more resistance in high-crime areas than low-crime areas,” he said. “People who would not resist have left the areas. Those who stay can’t afford to leave or to give up the little property that they have in their possession.”
Wow. That’s a whole lot of theorizing in a relatively small space, without a link to the study in question. Now how much would you surrender to an armed thug? Don’t answer!
The general perception of bad guys may have changed as well. Decades ago, many harbored an understandable fear that a gun-wielding assailant, fueled by drugs or desperation, would shoot at the smallest provocation. But a spreading sense of safety in many areas of the city, fostered by the falling murder rate, may lead some to doubt that a gunman these days will pull the trigger.
Does that mean victims are more stupider than they were back in the day or . . . no I guess that’s it. Which fits the theme of the article perfectly, right? You’ve got to be nuts to resist a bad guy with a gun. Did I mention that the article starts with three anecdotes of New Yorkers who did that and got shot for having a set?
That’s not to say that there isn’t a single person in the story who sticks up for what those who live in a moral universe call justice. There is. One.
Around the neighborhood, many offered theories for why four of their neighbors, when confronted with a gun, had decided to put up a fight.
“You figure he worked hard for his money and it’s rightfully his,” said Margaret, 60, who declined to give her last name because the site of the first shooting, on Light Street and Harper Avenue, is only steps from her home. “It’s not fair.”
Of course, the Times can’t end it that way. We all know why the Old Grey Lady published this story in the first place: they feel that resistance to an armed robber is meshuga. And that’s because they’re a bunch of unarmed wimps who couldn’t imagine standing up to a violent assault. So here’s the parting shot:
Others expressed shock that anyone would think to tangle with an armed robber in defense of a little bit of pocket lucre.
“You only live once,” said Omar Dailey, 35, while cutting the hair of a local tailor at a Bronxwood Avenue barbershop near the site of one of the shootings. “I’m giving up everything. What you want?”
Don’t get me wrong: armed or unarmed there are times where submission to a violent attacker is the best course of action. But treating people who stand up to an armed robber as “nuts” rather than “heroes” is nuts. And keeping the law-abiding populace disarmed? Well that’s insane.
Sheep, wolves, sheep dogs.
Only 2 kinds of animal in this world. Predator and prey. Each person has to decide for themselves what they are.
Whoa! Only two kinds? You mean I’m either going to prey on people or be prey? I need to make up my mind which it will be?
How about a third option? You know, like protector? That’s what I’d like to think I am for my wife and daughter.
As for being prey, I may one day become a casualty in the war against crime and evil, but I will NEVER be a passive victim. And by God’s grace I will NEVER be a predator.
Disclaimer: I’m just a regular joe, not a cop or anything, that believes he has a duty to protect the innocent – especially those of his own household.
I’m not a sheepdog, Dogs are wolves that have had their developement stunted to keep them puppies for ever. I’m a wolf. Don’t believe me, mess with those i care about.
Maybe I should have said a predator with a conscience.
I’m with jwm here. A sheepdog or protector is still prey. The predators still want what you have. It’s a noble cause, but it’s still prey. On the other hand, I think many of us fit into jwm’s “predator with a conscience” category. When that wolf comes after you, you can protect and defend, or you can strike back. I’d rather strike back in order to end the threat as quickly as possible and go about living my life peacefully. Predator with a conscience.
In that case, I’d like to be either a Weimaraner or a bald eagle. My dogs sleeps 17 hours a day, and spends the rest eating playing, and stealing bones from the lab. As a bald eagle, I could fly all around the world, nest in high place, and I’d have a natural patriotic and pissed – off look. Very cool. Plus, I could be bald without people giving me a hard time. That’d be nice.
I once had an interview where the HR person asked me, if I could be any barnyard animal, which one would I be. I told her I’d be the farmer.
I didn’t get the job.
What I want to know now is, do human “sheepdogs” spend a lot of time licking their . . . you know? Or is it just a figure of speech?
Well screw em if they can’t take a joke. If you’re gonna bomb a job interview, then go down inflames with style.
And I really wouldn’t want to know how a human sheepdog would take care of its hygiene.
I would want to be a Honey Badger. The south African Army named one of their vehicles after this animal. Their name is really misleading.
Guess I’m your Predator w/conscience also.
I wanna be like the DeNeiro old-time Godfather where he starts out as a protector of the people. Baddest MoFo in the streets 😀
jwm and Jason, your posturing is just plain misguided. A sheepdog is protector, not prey. You say you’re “predators with a conscience.” Assuming you prey only on violent predators, how many have you gone out and taken down?
Unless you spend your nights shooting criminals like Charles Bronson, you’re not a predator, so stop the silly talk. The good guys in this world are sheepdogs.
http://www.killology.com/sheep_dog.htm
“While reporter J. David Goodman’s clearly amazed by citizens standing up to violent assault—never once mentioning the advantages of armed deterrence or defense—he dutifully reports that armed robberies are becoming increasingly violent:”
I say “No Sh!t Sherlock!!!”
Do these morons even LIVE in NYC? They should all hold a “journalist’s jog” in Central Park at 2:00 am with no police escort. Call it “research” I guess! Wow, when did we start swapping places with the Bizzarro World? No one must really be reading that bird cage liner, I’m sure this was gotten online. Has to be!
To the last question in the article – what if he wants no witnesses?
+1 bingo
Then it goes something like this: http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/04/daniel-zimmerman/it-should-have-been-a-dgu-no-loose-ends-edition/
And you’d better get used to it, because trying to resist is just crazy. It must be true, because the New York Times said so.
One of my greatest pet peeves is the tendency for liberals to think everyone is a liberal. “Oh he’s a ‘rational’ actor who will logically move on if you don’t provide money!” Uh no, he’ll stab you repeatedly.
I kind of agree with Goodman: crime is seemingly getting less frequent and more gruesome. But, what happened to the great American serial killer? Is our collective attention span so short that long-term planning is leaving our budding killers? Have spree-shooters replaced such childhood favorites as Ted Bundy and the BTK killer?
I’ve made a similar observation. I’m less likely to get murdered today but more likely to fall prey to a violent home invasion.
Violent crime is down but the violence we do have is more brutal than ever. I can’t imagine living in a place like New York where they seem to expect you to just roll over for an assailant.
I wouldn’t resist over money. I’d resist because I don’t want to send the message to anyone that brutalizing people for any reason nets them a reward.
The statist has to believe that brutality has a net reward, because that is precisely what they seek to do with government.
“I wouldn’t resist over money. I’d resist because I don’t want to send the message to anyone that brutalizing people for any reason nets them a reward.”
Agreed! You nailed it. I find it fascinating that Liberals (Social Progressives) tend to be in the “social conditioning” camp, but fail miserably to make this simple connection when it comes to crime.
Leftists thrive on brutalizing people for a net reward. Just look how they react when they lose a legal fight or someone like Chick Fil A dares to have an opinion they don’t agree with.
Leftists are simply terrorists too lazy to build a bomb.
Not all of them. With the notable exception of Timothy McVeigh, most of our home-grown terrorists have been lefties.
My motivation for going armed is that I don’t want to be negligently complicit in the murder of the next person if I fail to stop someone who threatens me. Too many years in the military, I suppose…
Now we all have a clear vision of the world that the NYT wants us to live in. It’s world where crime victims cower and beg for their lives because that’s what makes them smart. In this upside-down Times universe, good is bad, strong is weak and courage is stupid.
Take a big whiff of the Times’ brave new world. Can you stand the stench? I can’t.
Another NYT article full of stupid. Arm the bad guys, disarm the good guys, have at it. If the good guys were armed, less bad guys would be on the street as they would be laying in the morgue with a toe tag.
Why are anti-gunners so pro-criminal?
Because they know their constituency.
Absolutely!
Bingo! That was a lawyer who said that, and a cop who agrees with him. What is this world coming to?
At least there’s some sanity on these pages. Let RF know how much he’s saving me on anger management therapy. Not really. Well, kinda.
Because they like the way criminals vote (once in office that is).
A man I once worked for had his 15 year old nephew visiting from NYC. The kid had a special 50 dollar bill that he always carried to pay off muggers. It shouldn’t be surprising that NYC has so many muggers, they have it made!
That’s my biggest problem with the proliferation of the “give them what they want” attitude that’s been thrown out a lot lately. Any serial mugger/armed robber only has to read the news and see that the 1%-ers are encouraging exactly what they want; disarmed, passive victims, who won’t bother resisting. These people are quite literally encouraging criminals to mug and rob average citizens. I say, forget that. The media and politicians should encourage as much as possible the armed resistance against crime. Maybe then muggers and low lifes wouldn’t want to go out on a night of collections. Ya know, cuz they might get shot. As it is, the only deterrent is that they might get arrested. Because New York cops have so much time on their hands, they can follow up on every average mugging lead, right?
@swampsniper, it’s called “Mugger Money,” and NYers have been trained for generations to carry some. Supposedly, it keeps the muggers calm so that they won’t kill. Utter nonsense, of course. In NY, muggers do not ask for your money. They come up behind you and render you unconscious so that they can pick your bones clean. But the myth of Mugger Money persists.
they are simply trying to pre-victimize all of us. Thus, leaving us without a choice but to comply with their view of the world.
I highly recommend watching – “The Kings of Comedy” – Cedric the Entertainer’s set in particular. If you can stand the use of a certain politically incorrect word, you can learn the difference between “hope” and “wish”. Many around our fair land go around w/ a “hope” mentality: “I hope nothing bad happens to us”. Some have a “wish” mentality: I wish a “^%#* would try to rob me”. Safe is not always best 🙂
It seems to me that this follows the pattern for those who despise violence, even the justified kind. They don’t see the need to resist because MOST of the time, people are left unharmed. They don’t see the need for citizens to have guns because MOST of the time, people go through life never needing one. They don’t seem to accept that a valid choice is to prepare for situations that don’t fall into the MOST of the time category. They’d prefer to be blissfully ignorant of the alternative possibilities. Or at least they’ve judged for themselves, and for everyone else, that the perceived risk of that preparation for the “what ifs” doesn’t outweigh the lives of those who may fall afoul of their idealized world view.
Berkeley Law School? I’ve never heard it referred to that way. It official title is University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. It is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Law” or “Boalt” or “Boalt Hall.” (No, I didn’t go there.)
If you give someone a reward for bad behavior, they continue to behave badly.
$50 is one thing, but what if what they want is your children, as in a kidnapping.
With human trafficking still alive and well despite efforts to squash it, that is a possibility.
“From any perspective of rationality, the thing to do with a robber is to cooperate politely.”
… and pi&& and sh!t yourself all over you money!
NO NO NO!! That is what you do if you are being raped…
Is there like an armed robbers’ credit union where I could deposit like a tithe, like 10% of everything I have or whatever, and then receive a get-out-of-robbery card that I flash when accosted? “I gave at the office” sort of thing?
If not, there should be. Here’s why:
Eventually, under a system of giving robbers what they want in a “pay forward” scheme, we could do away with the whole formality of the actual messy confrontation thing. Instead, we’d have like a robbery tax. The Dems would go for that and the GOPs would be powerless to defend against the obvious logic of the thing.
It gets better….
Robbers would no longer need to go to the trouble of taking a living, and possibly a life. Everyone’s safer! Win-win.
As a double bonus, this common-sense proactive approach to meeting armed robbers’ demands before they’re enumerated saves time and frees law enforcement agencies to search the homes of less resistent strains of the population. It also opens up precious prison space for citizens who insist on exercising archaic rights.
One last, but in no sense least, point: The process is fair.
Currently some people might go their entire lives and never meet a working armed robber. Under this equal protection measure, we’d all contribute to the common good of armed robbers. No one would feel left out or left to shoulder more than her/his fair share.
Finally, someone who has given the matter serious thought! I take my hat off to you, Megrim. Have you called Bloomberg yet?
Would the robbers be required to pay in 10% of the pay the get from the fund? similar to being taxed on your SS benefits…
I wonder if the NYT would recommend the same course of action for violent rapists? Just lay there and make the best of it ladies….
Ya know, just think of it as rough sex, make the experience fun. Leave that thought of a loaded 38, .380, or 9mm to those crazy folks with the archiac belief of personal diginity and respect for life.
Conversation with a liberal:
Lib: “If I am robbed I’ll just give up so he won’t hurt me.”
Q: “Why wouldn’t he just kill you and eliminate the witness”
Lib: “That would be wrong.”
Q: “Isn’t robbing you wrong?
Lib: “Well yeah, but killing me would be more wrong.”
Q: “Why?”
Lib: “Because if he was caught he would be punished more.”
Q: “Is he more likely to be caught if he kills you?”
Lib: “Uh, no. …?
Q: “So why wouldn’t he kill you?”
Lib: “Ummmmm…”
The NY subway man had the right idea & a “plan” years ago when he was confronted by 3 screwdriver wielding robbers. He said, “I have something for each of you” & commenced firing. I hope that plan was ok with the bradys, Randy
It was like 5 thugs and his name was Bernard Geotz.
He shot 3 of the 5, the last one in the back, (fleeing)
but still got off on the attempted murder charge. The
these |€{>~€]*|!~+ POS thugs sued. Not sure how that
came out but the one punk is still in a wheelchair. Hard
to mug people from a hover-round LOL!
Prolly drawing SSI and welfare and food stamps and rent money.
Just proves Bernard Geotz should have taken Front Site or something
Harry “What if they shot me in the face?”
Beth Jordan “That was a risk we were willing to take”
Ah yes, the progressive/liberal alternative reality that infests our institutions of higher learn,.,,..oh wait, strike that.
“Softer victims take precautions.” ??? I don’t consider myself “soft” just my precautions are far more thought out. Read more Col. Jeff Cooper. Much more based in reality than the faculty lounge. Geez.
I grew up in Brooklyn. The thought of owning a gun never even crossed my mind.
I mean the only people that had guns were cops and robbers; at least as far as I knew.
It wasn’t until I moved away from NYC that I realized how crazy and out of balance that is. In cities across the nation, folks need to be un brainwashed about firearms.
Of course I am not sure how that will happen with articles like this circulating. Hopefully 2A groups can educate folks. Now I have my LTC and when I speak to my friends from back in the day I try to enlighten. However, most of my homies just think I am a ” gun nut”…….maybe I am . 🙂
I remember a similar post from you before Leon. Keep up the good work. Gun rights are winning because of people like you.
And try to take your friends shooting whenever possible … if you can find any ammunition that is!
The thing is, leftists have absolutely no dignity, pride, or anything resembling a human spirit. They can’t understand that when you submit to a criminal like a cowardly dog, you lose more than your money, you lose your dignity. They have none to begin with, so they don’t see the problem in just being submissive dogs.
Every single living being on the planet has an inherent defense mechanism that they do not repress. It’s a cornerstone of nature. The only living being that doesn’t is the leftist. Which makes them unnatural, in more ways than one. And their unnatural worldview is an infection.
The greatest threat civilization as a whole has ever faced is the leftist.
My great uncle once told me, “Any man can get robbed and earn his money back, but if I die with a knife in my gut from an attempted mugging, I’ll die happy knowing I fought to keep something priceless, my dignity.” By all means, if the pansies in NYC want to give up their money, clothing, and first born child to muggers, let ’em. It just bums me out when they expect others to follow their slave-like protocol and “give up” when they’re assaulted. I feel no pity for these people who demand that others choose to be a victim so they won’t feel alone in their servile response to a threat. All they’re doing is emboldening the dim-witted criminals and getting more innocent people maimed and/or killed with their suggestions.
I haven’t read all the comments so forgive me if someone else already said this. Plenty of armed criminals have become angered that their victim doesn’t have enough money and then stab or shoot them or whatever in “retaliation”.
The old strategy, “You can trust the nice armed criminal who just threatened your life.” is insane in general and downright foolish give that many armed criminals are not satisfied with the amount of money you have or don’t want witnesses and proceed to stab/shoot/bludgeon the victim.
It’s all ridiculous. They say “no resistance” because they want to save face for something they wouldn’t do (resist). When in fact, they are cowards unwilling to put up a fight, unwilling to prepare for the fight, and unwilling to accept that those around them putting up fights is the right thing to do – simply due to cowardice.
The bottom line – Obama, Bloomberg, Schumer, Feinstein, etc are cowards in the face of an attacker who would use physical force and intimidation with a weapon to obtain what they wanted. They would rather live in an idealistic make-believe world filled with unicorns and rainbows where guns didn’t exist and if they were bothered by an antagonist they need only call the police and file a complaint. They live detached from reality and from what the rest of us “real-world” people must experience everyday.
They remind me of those people with bright colored hair and purple lipstick on the hunger games.
Does the goverment officials think that if they convince people to just give up their money & goods they would get increased tax revenue when the criminal reports it on his taxes? Right after he does the background chh ed ck on his illegaly obtained “weapon”? Or get a conceal and carry for it afterwards so when he hides it he won’t get in trouble with johny law?
DUH!