"Illegal" Self Defense Killings

The law versus the social and cultural immune system

On June 26, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling that should never have been a landmark ruling in the first place, (if you could read and understand the plain English in which the Second Amendment was written) in which it stated,

Held:

1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a

firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for

traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.

Needless to say, this touched off a firestorm of controversy along one of the great social and cultural divides in America, a split between - let’s be honest, now - people who dislike and fear firearms, and want them banished from American society, and people who regard them as useful and even necessary tools which can be employed in many ways, including, but not limited to, sport, self and national defense, and as a general personal bulwark against threats to the nation as a whole and personal threats its individual citizens and their liberties. Also needless to say, the second group does not wish to see firearms banned in America.

However, we’ll leave that incendiary debate for another time, and note that another concept played a subsidiary, but important role in the discussions, to wit, the very notion of self-defense itself, which managed to achieve a fairly hot level of controversy all on its own. On the one hand, it was perceived by many not just as common law, but common sense, that a man had a right to employee deadly force, including the use of firearms, in defense of himself, his home, his family, and others. (Yes, I see the warning flags rising. I’ll get to them later).

On the other hand, many saw it as a simple matter of whether any individual should have the right to take the life of another human being, in fact, to take even his own life, no matter what the cause or justification. And that includes the justification of self-defense. Neither of these positions are entirely rational, but one is demonstrably more rational than the other. So let’s talk about them.

I think it is fair to say that, as a general proposition, humans do not like to kill each other, especially on a personal, one-to-one level. (Remote, button-pushing methods of killing have their own issues, although not the same ones that up close and personal does).

The reason for this seems simple enough. People normally place a very high value on their own lives, and unless they are deeply psychopathic, understand at least to some extent that other people do also. I contend that the deepest roots of the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” spring from this understanding. “I would not kill you, and you should not kill me.” Of course, this “rule” may only be a gloss on the most primal human instinct of all, the genetically deep-programmed instinct to survive: I won’t kill you, you won’t kill me, and we’ll both survive to perform our duty of seeing that our genes survive, which, from a genetic point of view, is really what it’s all about. If you won’t defend your own genes, who will?

So what should happen when the instinct to survive runs up against the command “Thou shalt not kill?”

Almost invariably, survival wins out, and a person whose survival is being threatened will use whatever means they can to survive, including killing the person threatening them. But should they? I would submit that, while this may fly in the face in the face of several thousand years of moral, (mostly religious) strictures to the contrary, the answer is yes. Resoundingly so.

If you even cursorily examine the course of human history, you will find that it is replete with killing, from the personal level to the level of the state, and even beyond, to the cultures themselves. The power to inflict death has always been the bedrock of state power. If, as many contend, the state is force, such force can most realistically be defined as deadly force. Most states will try to reserve the ability to effectively inflict deadly force to themselves alone, certainly always in regards to eliminating the ability of its enemies domestic and foreign to inflict deadly force upon the state itself.

The state’s justification for this is always that such monopolies on deadly force are necessary for the protection and defense of the state, which it claims is synonymous with the protection of the citizens of the state - who are not to be trusted with the ability to defend themselves, since such abilities might be turned toward defending themselves against the state.

The problem with effective means of self defense - by which I mean the ability to effectively counter attacks with enough force to deter or defeat them - is that such means can always be used offensively as well. Since states are exquisitely sensitive to potential threats against them, and since they invariably prioritize defense of the state over defense of their people, they will tend to create, or try to create, social and cultural norms in which personal self-defense is the province of state, not the individual’s personal use of force, especially deadly force. As always, in the general scheme of such things, the actual effectiveness of individual defense provided by the state is not regarded by it with any level of genuine concern. “When seconds count, the cops are only minutes away,” is a truism (and it is - speaking from personal experience as a 911 operator-dispatcher for the San Francisco Police Department) born of long and cynical experience in the real world.

Essentially the social norm promulgated by states for their citizens is, “We should monopolize for ourselves your ability to wield effective force in your own defense, while at the same time we will be unable to wield that monopoly to actually protect you when it matters most.”

Intelligent citizens will recognize this for the self-serving sham that it is, and reject it intellectually and emotionally, even when forced by law or circumstance to submit to it. And many will not submit, opting instead to quietly defy laws against the possession of effective means of self defense. Intelligent citizens will also reject the implicit notion that killing in self defense should be criminalized, and only the state should have the power to decide such life-or-death matters in every case.

The role self defense plays in what I call the sociocultural immune system is much less remarked upon than state efforts to monopolize the act of it. Keep in mind that society is made up of individuals, and a society’s culture is created by them. One can, without indulging in a stretch too far, make the case that attacking individuals constitutes attacks on the society and culture at large. This is, by the way, an element of the state’s claim on a monopoly on individual defense, couched as integral to its role as protector of society and, to some extent, culture at large. And the state might actually have a valid point, if it delivered on its promises of individual, social, and cultural protection. But it doesn’t. It never has, and it never will do so.

Jeffrey Dahmer - Wikipedia

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (/ˈdɑːmər/; May 21, 1960 – November 28, 1994), also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, was an American serial killer and sex offender who killed and dismembered seventeen males between 1978 and 1991.[4] Many of his later murders involved necrophilia,[5] cannibalism, and the permanent preservation of body parts—typically all or part of the skeleton.[6]

Caught, convicted, and sentenced to several life terms, Dahmer was himself brutally bludgeoned to death by a fellow inmate. Leaving aside the ostensible reasons for the murder (the killer was mentally ill, the killer was angered because Dahmer had murdered some young black men), the general public reaction could have been summed up as, “Well, some people just need killing.”

Self-appointed cultural arbiters inveighed against this seemingly casual acceptance of another murder, though.

The district attorney who prosecuted Dahmer cautioned against turning Scarver into a folk hero, saying that Dahmer's death was still murder.[300] On May 15, 1995, Scarver was sentenced to two additional terms of life imprisonment for the murders of Dahmer and Anderson.[313]

Pretty funny. The state imposed on Scarver, for his killings, precisely zero penalties, at least if life imprisonment actually meant imprisonment for life, until they hauled you out of your prison in a coffin. Defenders of this no-penalty penalty argue that the two more life sentences might ensure that Scarver would never be released. But you know what would have guaranteed that outcome? Executing him for his crimes would have done so quite effectively. Just as the families and friends of Dahmer’s victims no doubt breathed sighs of relief at his death, knowing that he would never be released to repeat his crimes - as such types so often do.

Dahmer mounted a legal defense that consisted of “Guilty but insane.” At trial he was not in the end judged to be insane, but normal folks would have said he was “crazy as a craphouse rat,” no matter what the legal decision was. Should such an explanation, if true, absolve him in any way? Perhaps, but absolution is not the point.

Protection of the health of the society and the culture is the point. Robert Heinlein had, as he so often does, something trenchant to say on the matter. In his great novel, Starship Troopers, the protagonist, Rico, muses on this conundrum:

Certainly, it hadn’t been our fault—but our business was to guard little girls, not kill them. Our regiment had been dishonored; we had to clean it. We were disgraced and we felt disgraced.

That night I tried to figure out how such things could be kept from happening. Of course, they hardly ever do nowadays—but even once is ’way too many. I never did reach an answer that satisfied me. This Dillinger—he looked like anybody else, and his behavior and record couldn’t have been too odd or he would never have reached Camp Currie in the first place. I suppose he was one of those pathological personalities you read about—no way to spot them.

Well, if there was no way to keep it from happening once, there was only one sure way to keep it from happening twice. Which we had used.

If Dillinger had understood what he was doing (which seemed incredible) then he got what was coming to him . . . except that it seemed a shame that he hadn’t suffered as much as had little Barbara Anne—he practically hadn’t suffered at all.

But suppose, as seemed more likely, that he was so crazy that he had never been aware that he was doing anything wrong? What then?

Well, we shoot mad dogs, don’t we?

Yes, but being crazy that way is a sickness—

I couldn’t see but two possibilities. Either he couldn’t be made well—in which case he was better dead for his own sake and for the safety of others—or he could be treated and made sane. In which case (it seemed to me) if he ever became sane enough for civilized society . . . and thought over what he had done while he was “sick”—what could be left for him but suicide? How could he live with himself?

And suppose he escaped before he was cured and did the same thing again? And maybe again? How do you explain that to bereaved parents? In view of his record?

I couldn’t see but one answer.

Heinlein, Robert A.. Starship Troopers (pp. 118-119). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“Dillinger” was killed for his crimes by the state, in the form of the military in which he had served…and deserted. But in this case, the state effectively acted in defense of society, and of the culture that supported that society (in our culture, we don’t let you murder little girls and live).

The British once upon a time understood this notion, no matter how debased they may have become since their fall from empire.

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.[To Hindu priests complaining to him about the prohibition of Sati religious funeral practice of burning widows alive on her husband’s funeral pyre.]”

― Charles James Napier

The secondary tag of this Substack is “Everything is downstream from the culture pool. Have you looked at a downside today?”

The hierarchy goes something like this:

The culture determines the nature of your society, which, when both culture and society are healthy, acts to protect, defend, and support the culture, and to generally keep both society and culture healthy.

Your society determines the nature of your social rights, responsibilities, and duties, which are reinforced both by a formal system of laws and regulations, and an informal system of social norms.

At the bottom of this hierarchy, the foundation of it, if you will, you exist, performing your individual role as the guarantor of all of the above. Everything in your life, your family’s life, you nation’s life, your society’s life, and your culture itself, is a function of the hierarchy and all its parts, yourself included, functioning in a seamless manner to promote the survival of this structure.

If any part of this structure fails, it is the responsibility, the duty of the remaining parts to step in and fill the gap. Hence the social immune system. Or, as Rico somewhat innocently puts it, “I couldn’t see but one answer.”

Nor can I. If your culture is so depraved, your society so broken, your formal legal protections so meaningless, your social norms so irrelevant to the real world, well, then, it falls on you, good citizen, to provide the last defensive element of the immune system.

So if someone defies cultural, social, legal, and normative precepts to threaten your survival, then yes, by all means, kill them if you can. Because without your survival, and all the hundreds of millions like you, all the rest becomes meaningless, and will shortly cease to exist.