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The outrage is palpable. The condemnations are unanimous. The images of blood and death are ubiquitous.
News of school shootings permeate the airwaves (think "Columbine"). Gangs assault each other and murder innocent bystanders. Video games splash gore and horror across television screens and computer monitors. Rap songs cry out for the demise of cops. Robbers kill customers in that quintessential symbol of America, our fast-food restaurants. Zoos become venues for slaughter.
Violence.
"It's everywhere," they claim. "Stamp it out! Destroy it! Ban it!" they scream as they cram more gun laws down the collective craw of America. "Zero tolerance!" of violence makes criminals of small boys showing friends toy soldiers and dangerous deviants of girls carrying nail files.
Violence is ghastly! Violence is detestable! Violence is abhorrent, abominable, appalling, dreadful, and evil!
I'm here to tell you it isn't so. Such blanket judgments are wrong, untrue, and damnable lies.
I am here not to bury violence, but to praise it....
I can hear the gasps.
"Loathsome! Repulsive! Revolting!"
Of course, those whose utterances drip such contempt no doubt failed to catch the crucial adjective in my statement.
Blanket judgments. That modest modifier makes all the difference. A "blanket" judgment is one applied to all examples and in all situations.
Those who decry violence do so in mindless parroting of the statist media mantra. Major newscasters nauseatingly parade victims across the national stage. Cynical politicians relentlessly crawl over the cooling corpses of small children and old ladies to push their agendas of power and control. Professional amateurs stage "million mom marches" to twist public opinion and distort reality.
Denouncing "violence" without understanding what that concept truly means is to engage in the same kind of mental laziness that characterizes those who resort to baseless stereotypes. Bigots who attack and demean entire groups of people without differentiating the individuals in those divisions are irrationally seeking a short-cut to thinking. A few cases are expanded by means of hasty over-generalizations to represent all members of a particular class. Such simplifications preclude further analysis or examination of possible counter-examples.
"WASP males are racist, sexist, and homophobic."
"Women are irrational, overly-emotional, and impulsive."
But there is no short-cut to thinking.
Pick your favorite stereotype and fill in the blank. If you rely too heavily upon false stereotypes, you can save yourself a great deal of intellectual effort. No need to consider nuances or important distinctions. Slap each new instance into its confining box, and you're done, arrogantly confident in your superiority.
So, too, with violence. "Violence" is not a formless mass, all samples of such behavior identical and interchangeable. There are degrees of violence: a slap is not the equivalent of a gunshot. There are cases in which violence is justified and some in which it is not. There are times when violence is immoral and times in which not to engage in violence would be heinously reprehensible.
This is the distinction the statists, the collectivists, the power-hungry would have you never learn or, otherwise, forget or ignore. By smearing your mental grasp of this important fact into a blurry, fuzzy blob, they hope to slip their con unnoticed beneath your radar. What you are unaware of you cannot challenge and resist.
Of course, we all view murder and rape, robbery and assault as violence that should be banished from legitimate human interaction. Those who initiate violence against innocent and peaceful others deserve nothing more than to be convicted and placed behind bars (or worse). There, such predators -- whether of the common street thug or the political variety -- can do us no further harm.
But automatically to equate "violence" only with such immoral acts is to wipe out a vitally important point. If you grant the opponents of "violence" their initial premise that "violence is bad," then when they shift from rightfully battling bad kinds of violence to impugning good types of violence, you will be helpless, intellectually and morally disarmed.
It is in such murky circumstances that it becomes possible to ram through more laws disarming victims, more laws ceding greater power to the FBI and the CIA in the name of fighting "terrorism," more laws waging "Drug Wars" that destroy people, not drugs.
Anyone who takes up a gun or a knife or a baseball bat and uses that weapon to defend himself against an intruder attacking him is committing moral violence. Any mother who savagely assails a child molester or kidnapper to save her offspring can proudly proclaim the propriety of her violent response. Any person who takes up arms to wage battle against tyrants and dictators endeavoring to destroy our freedom, our lives, and our property deserves the highest praise for resorting to violence.
When the stakes are those of your supreme and most noble values, violence may be your only valid and appropriate choice. Don't disarm yourself when you most need to fight. Violence may be all that saves you from total destruction.
