> -----Original Message-----
>
>
> > Here's one for the testosterone fueled... Of you guys that
> actually carry
> > guns, how many of you have ever had to use them in any kind of
> self-defense
> > situation?
I didn't respond to this before, because I figured I'm not testosterone
fueled, but it might be useful to have some info from someone who's not
built like a wookie.
I've almost always been able to get myself out of harm's way before
potentially dangerous situations got really critical. There have only been
2 times in my life that I felt badly threatened. The first happened at
around 3:00 p.m. across the street from the University of Texas School of
Law--broad daylight and not a dangerous neighborhood. I was cutting through
a park to get to my car, and a guy was hiding in some bushes I walked past.
He grabbed me around the neck and started choking me, pulling me off balance
so that it would have been hard to get to a gun. Possibly if the gun had
been in a handy location and if I'd spent enough time practicing with it
that I could have gotten the safety off and fired without even thinking
about it, a gun would have helped me out. (I know people are going to wonder
what happened in this situation, so here's the way it went: the guy was a
whole lot bigger than I was and trying to drag me down into a creek bed, but
I grabbed hold of a tree trunk that was of a small enough diameter that I
could get my hands around it, and I held on tightly. He left off choking me
to try to pry my hands loose, and once he stopped choking me I could talk--I
couldn't talk while he was choking me. So I said the first thing that
popped into my head: "Listen, before we go any farther with this, there's
something you need to know." He said, "Huh?" and stopped trying to pry my
hands loose. "I have Parkinson's disease," I said very gravely. He moved
away from me and bent down to pick up my purse which he held out to me.
"You dropped your purse," he said. Weird, huh? I never have been able to
figure that one out. Maybe he felt sorry for me for having Parkinson's
disease.)
The second time I felt really threatened was when the guys in the black
helicopter paid me a visit along with a bunch of their buddies on the
ground. This was a Ruby Ridge scenario. They claimed that from the air a
couple of Vitex trees I had growing in my garden looked like marijuana.
These guys were very well armed. If I'd had a gun in my hands, I have no
doubt whatsoever that I'd be dead now. The guy who appeared to be the
leader was very nervous; he seemed to think that I had a cult of followers
secreted in my house or something and that he might never leave my place
alive. I talked soothingly to him to calm him down and after a while he
lowered his gun. I don't much like to tell this story, because some people
think I was a coward for not either a. fighting and "taking out" as many as
I could before I went down (and at an abstract level, I think they're at
least partly right [except that my daughter and her friend were here--what a
dreadful choice to have to make, between being a coward or leaving my
daughter motherless--or maybe dead in case they just started shooting
wildly--they seemed very nervous, so they might have done that]if more
people would fight this sort of thing, maybe it wouldn't keep happening); or
b. suing the federal government for sending men onto my land. Maybe I should
have done more research on the latter option.
They said they had the right to come onto my land without a search warrant
because they had probable cause to think that illegal activities were going
on here due to the Vitex trees, which, as I said, they mistook for marijuana
plants. The way I viewed it at the time was that I wouldn't get far by suing
them--others had tried it and failed to get anywhere. I hadn't suffered any
real damages--in fact, they helped me out by cutting back a root that was
blocking a gate. I don't know, though. It's still something that bothers
me. I remember once seeing a man being taken into the federal courthouse in
handcuffs and thinking, "Oh, there's a criminal, a bad guy," and then
suddenly realizing that odds were he wasn't a bad guy at all, that he'd
probably done something I wouldn't consider a crime at all. That, in fact,
the bad guys were the ones wearing the guns and driving the car.
>From time to time I hear of people being tortured in prison here is the US,
and I wonder: truly, how far have things gone? I know Germans who were
alive during the 1930's and early 40's who had no idea of what was going on
behind the barbed wire fences. Maybe, yeah, they looked the other way some,
but how do I know I'm not doing that right now?
I hear of political atrocities in other countries supported by US dollars.
And I look the other way and say, "Well, there's nothing I can do about it."
What IS to be done? It seems as though, once you pass a certain point, the
path is more or less fixed. It will be traveled. And the observers' only
choice is to stand there and hope they don't get mowed down; or to leave.
So many times people have ended up being trapped because they were afraid to
leave the comforts of home, even when they saw bad things coming down the
pike. "It can't happen here. It won't happen to me," and all that.
Am I safe because I'm a nobody, a poor person living on trash land that no
one else wanted? I don't know. When is the time to stand and fight, and
when is the time to say, "Count me out of this game" ? Am I paranoid
because of my bad experience? I hear of this sort of thing happening
everywhere, but maybe I exaggerate the problem in my mind.
On a brighter note, as far as regular old protection goes, dogs are great.
Bonnie
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:33:51 MDT