This post by Steven Den Beste has a well thought-out response to a misguided fool who thinks that it's wrong to kill an armed robber. It's long, but well worth the time.
These are issues which have long been of interest to me, given my own decision to refuse to be a victim. The commenter who emailed Den Beste appeared to be from Europe (big surprise!), and Den Beste naturally extended the self-reliance of American individuals to our response to terrorism:
Europe wants us to act as a passive and fearful citizen of the world, and to wait for the world's policemen to save us. They want us to absorb our damage and not fight back, and we aren't doing so. America is self-reliant. As individuals and as a group we won't stand passively and let others attack us. We'll defend ourselves; we won't sit and hope someone else takes care of it.That last line says it all for me. Not only my own life, but more importantly, the lives of my friends and family are important and worth defending. Others may disagree, but I will not allow them to make the decision for me. Posted by Aubrey at January 12, 2003 03:51 PM
Adams represents the finest strain of America in his act yesterday, and I'm deeply proud of him. For all I know he may well be vile in other ways, but at the deepest level he demonstrated a nobility I'm glad to see. I feel not the slightest twinge of shame in saying that.
Yesterday I said this:Our overseas friends would do well to contemplate this example. What's remarkable about Adams is that he isn't remarkable. There are millions of Americans who would do exactly the same thing in the same circumstances. We don't give up what's ours just because someone else demands it, whether at gunpoint, or via crashed jetliners, or through diplomatic denunciations and accusations of unilateralism.I want to emphasize this. If you don't understand why Americans are willing to act like this, and why we're proud to act like this, and why we are not going to stop acting like this, then you'll never understand anything we do and your international rhetoric will continue to be ineffective. This taps into the deepest strain of our character.
You're not going to get anywhere by treating this as cultural pathology. We think it's healthy, and quite frankly we've got good reason to believe that. You had better learn about this, and accept it as an essential part of the American character, and deal with it in your diplomacy. The only thing you're going to accomplish by trying to shame us about this is to alienate us, because we're not going to change.
Which has been the actual result since September of 2001, as the politicians and chattering heads of Europe have indeed been attempting to make us ashamed of this attitude. Americans are not interested in hearing "Let the attackers beat you up and kill you; sit passively and let the police take care of it." We're also not interested in hearing "Let the terrorists kill you; sit passively and let the UN take care of it." The only thing this has done is to increasingly convince us that Europe's chatterers are effete cowards.
Everything which is truly important is worth fighting to defend.