When asked, independent of any other information, to form a mental image of a dangerous criminal offender, we tend to fall back on a combination of half-remembered images from the past, examples in media and, to a very large degree, internally maintained preconceptions. But how closely do our personal impressions hew to the truth of
The article addresses the fact that many people tend to ignore the difference between what is legal and what is best. If you hang your Tactical Hat on an overly simplified understanding of “Stand your Ground”, you could not only find yourself in legal jeopardy, you might kill someone that you didn’t need to with a false confidence about being “right”.
Depravity: a condition that moves beyond bad conduct, beyond gratuitous infliction of pain and suffering upon others, beyond even cruelty. Depravity extends into a realm of the complete lack of moral compunction and a finding of joy in the devaluing and destruction of human life. As an artifact of human behavior, it bears some scrutiny for the fact that normal, ordinary, rational people are quite rightly loath to look into its abyss, leaving lessons unlearned.
Today’s case directly addresses one of the greatest fears of city-dwellers and suburbanites, young and old, those invested in self-protection and the unprepared: a moment of inexplicable violence that arises with the stark suddenness of a crevasse opening in ice beneath our feet. The natural questions arise: Who commits this sort of offense and why?
The features that separate normal, ordinary, rational folk from the particular subset of criminal offenders we refer to as Violent Criminal Actors (or VCAs) can often appear trivial, as they do in this case.
Teenagers in small-town environments, friends, and a mysterious disappearance combine here to yield a shocking outcome. As ever, seemingly inexplicable crimes with nebulous motives and incomprehensible levels of violence yield painful truth and insight, IF practitioners of self-protection can look past our inital horror at the circumstance and the shallow appeal of hand-wringing over the mistaken belief that “there’s no explaining the behavior of crazy people.”
William is one of the most thoughtful and articulate educators in the world of self-defense and his new series of contributions to this blog will be informative, enlightening and, I truly believe, compelling in regard to motivating people to be as prepared as possible to defend themselves and those they care about from violence. One of the most important lessons that William taught me many years ago was that you can’t worry about trying to make sense of why someone is trying to (or about to try to) hurt you… you just have to respond.
