The God Given Right of Self Defense

Ugly busy at the paying gig today but feel a need to pass this one on.

Daughter # 1 lives in Philly. Last night into early this morning helicopters, cop cars, ambulances all around her apartment and surrounding environs. This morning she found out why:

Teen Girl Found Undressed, Disoriented In Fairmount Park

Cops don't know if it was a rape or not yet, nor if it is the serial Fairmount Park rapist of the last few years or some other unknown dirtbag. Doesn't matter. This is short blocks from where she lives.

The kid contacts me this morning and informs me she has decided to carry an extremely potent pepper spray I bought her some time ago to work even though it is against "the rules". (She does not have a CCW at this time but is thinking about it. Pennsylvania in general is great for being allowed to carry but Philly does not make it easy if you live there& she couldn't get it past the work metal detectors anyway) As she wrote to me:

"i would rather risk gettin written up in the off chance someone searches my stuff and decides its some sort of weapon than risk being a news article"

That's my girl :)

So I sent her the article below to reaffirm her decision. Now, a 14 year old of course would not have had access to a handgun or the pepper spray (I don't think). Which is unfortunate (and wrong to my thinking). But please keep the story above and below in mind when Obama moves on the 2nd Amendment. Don't Be a Victim AND DON'T ALLOW THE GOVERNMENT TO FORCE YOU TO BE A VICTIM.

So this from Brigid's Place back in February. I hope she'll forgive me printing it wholesale but this is too important and she says it better than I could.

You may disagree with me and that's up to you. It's your life. Your safety. And in the end YOU are responsible for it.

FIVE ROUNDS OF SELF DEFENSE

1. Be aware of yourself and your surroundings. Don't be concentrating on work, your love life or school. When you're on the street you need to be alert. Walk with head up. Walk strong.

2. If you feel afraid DO SOMETHING. Fear warns you.

3. When it is obvious that you are going to be attacked, take action at the first sign of threat.

4. If there is not time to flee, fight until you know you are safe.

5. If you carry a weapon. Know how to use it. Practice with it. Have it in easy reach.

I know many of my readers are married. I would think that more than a few of you have older daughters. But how many of you have had "that talk" with them. You know the one. The one about carrying concealed?

My daughter has a Glock. Now before you all jump up and down about bad parenting :-) I TOLD her she'd like a 1911 better, but you know how headstrong redheads are, so she has her Glock. If it was good enough for Grandma why listen to her mother. . . .

As my regular readers know, I did not raise her. I got pregnant just out of high school and gave her up for adoption. An open adoption where she could find me as an adult if she wished. With her parents blessing, I met her when she was 18. We are close. She has red hair, is 6 feet tall, and like me, loves sci-fi, steaks and the outdoors and, not to my surprise, had already learned firearm safety. I'm invited to the family gatherings. I was there when she graduated from college. I didn't lose out on 18 years to ever lose her again, so before she moved out on her own, we had "the talk", with her parents support.

For a young woman, for anyone, there are various methods of self defense. First and foremost is the brain. You always have it with you, and for most folks it's been optimized by evolution to keep you alive (though there are Darwin Award candidates that have proved me wrong).

Your brain is your best weapon with proper back up. The brain is an amazing thing. If you could witness it working, if it light up like a circuit board as it went about its processes, different areas would be popping on and off, one after the other. Those patterns, in their firing, are formed from unique experiences of our lives, giving rise to "instinctual" actions that are really based upon everything we've ever read, seen or felt, informed decisions at a speed of sound that could never be made by logic. All of these brilliant points of light taking place just beyond conscious thought, lightning strikes from shadowy clouds in the night.

Add drugs or alcohol to the mix and the lights become erratic sparks. Dimmer and dimmer. I enjoy my beer as much as the next person, and I didn't tell her she should never drink or that she wouldn't make it to 21 without one or two really good hangovers. But she knew the dangers, , drilled in from all of us, including a grandmother who is an LEO as well. Women who are solitary and intoxicated are the easiest of prey. Lambs led to slaughter.

It's not just the brain that will aid you in flight or fight. What I tried to pass on was that our whole body adapts to the environment, not just our brain. A lifetime of experience shapes our body's response and only a subtle change in the environment can mean that your body may not have the proper response, unless it's trained to respond.

Her brain is a self defense tool, but only if she practices the body's response to threat. Shooting paper targets teaches her hand eye coordination. What about moving targets? What about shooting in cold, dark, or wind? A rapist is not as likely going to try and snatch you from the parking lot in bright sunshine, though it does happen. Evil likes the darkness, and if there's weather adding noise to the elements to cover the scuffle, even better.

There's another factor biological of the body that needs to be considered. Stress releases cortisol in the blood, invading the hypocampus and interfering with how it works. The amygdala is powerfully connected to the rhinal cortex, the anterior cingulate, the ventral prefrontal cortex - the sensory cortexes. This means that the inputs and outputs of memory are affected and most people are incapable of performing anything but the most simple of tasks under stress. Stress also limits the abilities to perceive. Cortesol and other stress hormones interfere with the prefontal cortex, where perceptions are processed and decisions are reached. You will see less, hear less, missing cues that might save you. Everything becomes irrelevant noise, and if you are fumbling with a gun that you never took the time to learn to use until it was as natural as breath, the only sound your brain may register in that last moment is your scream.

You can prevent many crimes by being aware, using your eyes, your ears, and your brain. Prevent before you are in that fight or flight stress mode. But you must train. Prevention can fail, the body will flood with stress hormones, and even Superwoman will need to have something a little stronger than sass to protect herself. A confident, survival oriented attitude combined with a means to protect that is second nature, without hesitation, is a devastating combination.

If you truly believe you are strong, worthy of protecting, protecting to the death, you will project that attitude to those around you, and the average punk will tend to leave you alone. I'm told I walk differently when I'm carrying. I know I do.

Which is where we got to the carry part. On the college campus, they were handing out whistles. They called them "safety" whistles, not rape whistles. Rapes did not decrease.

I had missed out on telling her Fairy Tales as a child. But I could tell her this one. Believing that someone will come to your rescue when you blow a whistle or set off a siren is just that, a fairy tale. Don't fall for it. Not only are noise-makers and rape whistles ineffective at deterring crime, they are likely to do more harm than good, for several reasons.

When you hang that whistle around your neck, you are acquiescing to passivity. You are saying "I'm not strong enough to fight. I'll depend on someone else to rescue me!". You are pretty much betting your life that someone will hear the alarm, and if they respond, are capable of stopping the attack. That is way too many "if's" in one paragraph for me. Too much out of MY control.

The outcome of an attack is usually decided upon with the first 8 -10 seconds. It may be just grab the purse and run, it may be to kill. It's that fast. And you aren't privy to the thought process. But the act of activating the alarm or blowing the whistle can take 2 to 20 seconds. If the noise doesn't work, you're out of time, game over, and the criminal is free to try the other options he originally hadn't planned but now he might rethink. Rethink, seeing as how he has you all to himself and you can't hurt him. Stop or I'll toot is a joke.

Oh, and those little strings the whistles come on? They make great tools for strangulation or just choking into unconsciousness so he can take you elsewhere for his fun.

If you didn't have the whistle, you could scream, more time wasted while you increase your chances for victimization. Garner that breath, harness that adrenalin and fight. With tooth, nail or 9 mm. Fight as long as you have breath or can get away.

If you want to carry and legally can, do it. Don't let society, your peers or your environment dictate something as important as your life. Hecate tells a story of a rangemaster at the gun school, a sheriff's deputy, who met a nurse in the course of his work, a nurse who had serious ex-boyfriend problems. After responding to one of her 911 calls, he told her she should get a handgun. He offered to advise her on weapon selection and arrange for training.

She said she'd think about it, and asked her hospital colleagues what they thought. Thoroughly indoctrinated in pacifist attitudes, they were horrified and told her she should get a whistle instead. That was what she decided to do, and the deputy said he could not talk her out of it.

When her body was later found in the hospital parking lot, the whistle was still between her teeth. She had blown it until it filled up with blood as she died.

I think it's time you had that talk.