DC Metro Stabbing: Cause and Effect vs. Courage

I wrote about this story and its attendant considerations here, but in light of a recent article by R. Douglas Fields purporting to explain why so many able-bodied people abandoned their duties as members of civilization, I thought I would return to the well this one last time.

Predictably, the author sets his and everybody else's default to coward:

"It may be comforting to indulge in speculation about how you would have responded to the deadly attack on Sutherland, but the fact is that it is difficult to know how anyone will react to a sudden threat."

Pre-determining that in a dangerous situation you'll act to save another human being's life isn't an indulgence, nor is it comforting to do so.  It's an acknowledgment of our shared burden as members of society.  Just because it's difficult to know how you'll react, it doesn't mean that you can't react courageously, or that you shouldn't do it, or that you shouldn't prepare yourself to do it.

"The multiple factors and uncertainties mean that there is rarely one correct response to a sudden threat."

This is where we get caught up in minutiae to justify inaction.  Hick's Law notwithstanding, there really is one correct response to the threat that has led me to write two articles: stop the guy stabbing someone else to death.  This response can take many forms, of course, but all of them are correct if you're stopping the killer.

"Bystander apathy is a psychological phenomenon in which witnesses to a person being harmed are less likely to intervene the more people there are present. This is thought to be a consequence of the herding instinct of human beings to do as they see others do. But when many people are present it is a much more complex situation. This leads to confusion. Is the person being attacked a victim or another criminal involved in, say, a gang fight? The Metro riders who saw the assault on Sutherland experienced neither apathy nor confusion, however. They experienced terror."

Your worth as a person is measured, in part, by doing the right thing despite what you see others doing.  The number of people present in the subway car didn't create confusion or even lead to it, unless they were engaged in mass telepathy and were all thinking the same thing.  This was obviously not a gang fight.  Experiencing terror does not excuse you from acting properly.  Courage is determined by how you act despite your terror.  Ask any soldier, firefighter, or cop.

"I cannot know what those witnesses lived through on that train, but I am confident from my knowledge of neuroscience that they did exactly the right thing. Their response was not a matter of bravery or cowardice or apathy—it was a matter of mortal strategy. Engaging the homicidal robber physically could have resulted in mass casualties. From all the situational information those people rapidly assimilated, that was their collective conclusion. So the passengers tried to appease the robber with cash instead and no one else lost their life."

C.S. Lewis must have known R. Douglas Fields, because he described him perfectly in his Abolition of Man: "We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst."  The witnesses on that train did not do exactly the right thing: Kevin Joseph Sunderland, were he able, would likely agree.  Neither a scientific explanation of cowardice nor a redefining of the term bravery excuse the shameful inaction of the passengers on that train.  Your mortal strategy needs to be flexible enough to take monsters like Jasper Spires into account.

Spires was one man with one knife.  Against numerous assailants ready, willing, and able to subdue him, he would not have prevailed, and mass casualties need not have been the result.  Appeasing monsters never works in the long term: they'll always come back to eat you.  If not now, later.

"Honed by eons of evolution in a dangerous world of survival of the fittest, the reaction these neural circuits trigger is usually correct; otherwise our species would have gone the way of dinosaurs. This is why rational Monday morning quarterbacking about the passengers’ response on the Metro is misguided. No fault should be leveled against any individuals on that train. They did as their brain and evolution equipped them to do."

Thousands and thousands and thousands of human beings have overcome what their brains and evolution equipped them to do over the course of civilization, from the Vigiles of ancient Rome to the modern United States soldier, from the blue-painted Pict to the grandfather punching out a would-be mugger.  Scientists like R. Douglas Fields would simply distill us into mere products of brain chemistry, despite the overwhelming evidence that we, as thinking people, transcend that every day.  We're not products of cause and effect.  There's more to us than evolution.

White House Intruder's Got a Knife: Part Two

Part one is available here.

There are two elements to the White House intruder story that have recently come to light, and each of them bears some examination.

First, we now know that the deranged individual who had broken into the White House had gotten farther into the actual residence than we'd originally learned.  The reason why is very simple:

[Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah)] said two people inside the agency told him that [alarm] boxes were silenced because the White House usher staff, whose office is near the front door, complained that they were noisy. A Secret Service official told The Post that the usher’s office was concerned the boxes were frequently malfunctioning and unnecessarily sounding off.

Let's unpack that: the Secret Service is blaming the security breach on the White House staff, claiming that vital alarm boxes had been silenced because of complaints.

Complaints.

The White House staff complained about a security measure, and rather than saying "tough titty," the Secret Service moved to address the complaints in a way that compromised security.  That's inexcusable.  That's ludicrous.  Remember, the nature of personal security is that it's inconvenient.  That these so-called security professionals forgot or ignored that is unconscionable.

On his Facebook page, former Secret Service agent Daniel Bongino said:

"The jurisdictional mess around the White House has to be cleaned up. Between the Secret Service, the US Park Police, DC Metro PD, the National Park Service, and others such as the White House staff and the White House Historical Association, too many cooks have their hands in the security-soup. Also, the Secret Service role in the decision-making chain at the White House has to be at least co-equal with the White House staff. Any manager within the Secret Service who insists on kneeling at the feet of an 18-year-old White House staff member, while throwing his agents under the bus, in order to maintain his 'network', needs to move on ASAP. This is too important of a mission for sycophants."

I couldn't agree more, though I think he doesn't go far enough.  There needs to be massive housecleaning at the Secret Service.  Many, many people need to be fired.

The other element to this story is how it was portrayed in the Washington Post.  In the article I linked at the top of the page, the Post says:

After barreling past the guard immediately inside the door, Gonzalez, who was carrying a knife, dashed past the stairway leading a half-flight up to the first family’s living quarters.

The knife Gonzalez was "carrying" was a folding knife (also called a folder).  What we don't know is if Gonzalez had actually opened the knife and had it in his hand when he "barreled" past the guard.  The term "carried" here suggests that he did indeed have it in his hand.  And if he had it in his hand, he meant to use it, right?

Well, we don't know.  We know he was nuts.

From the way the White House situation has been presented, it can be safely said that I entered my son's preschool today, carrying a knife.  It was folded and clipped to the inside of my pocket, under my shirt, but I did indeed carry it.  Horror of horrors, I was carrying a knife.  With children right there!

The rhetoric our sloppy, biased news media has used is imprecise at best, and inaccurate at worst.  To be fair, the Post isn't the only news outlet to use this sort of language; check everyone from the AP to the New York Times and you'll see the same thing.

Whenever you read a news story, you always have to ask yourself two questions: what are they trying to make me feel?  And what aren't they telling me? 

White House Intruder's Got a Knife: Six Things to Think About

Much is being made of the fact that the deranged person who unfortunately succeeded in breaking into the White House was carrying a knife. Without context, this becomes a frightening notion: if he was carrying a knife, it means he intended to stab somebody, likely the President of the United States.

I'm not going to try to unpack Gonzalez's insanity; that's for his doctors to sort out.  But, we should talk about knives a little bit.  People carry knives all the time and they're not insane.  It's a legal tool of personal defense where I live, and if you believe, as I do, that you have a moral duty to protect yourself, then it's actually foolish to not carry a knife.  Especially if you can't or won't carry a firearm.

1. Building on the concept that personal security is by its very nature inconvenient, you also have to consider that when you're attacked, it will happen when conditions most favor your attacker and least favor you.  A criminal isn't interested in a fight: he wants an ambush.  So you're already going to be at a disadvantage.  With that in mind, you're legally and morally correct in using a force multiplier to defend yourself.  A knife, properly placed, can end a physical threat more effectively than a fist.
2. Just because you carry a knife, it doesn't mean you intend violence.  Again, it's clear that Gonzalez was crazy.  The vast majority of the knife-carrying public isn't.  It's a tool, nothing more.  
3. Before Muslim extremists flew American airplanes into American buildings, it was perfectly legal to carry a knife with a blade length of under 3.5" onto a plane.  That was a factor in the carry knife choice I made fifteen years ago.
4. It takes a great deal of practice and frequent maintenance training to access, open, and deploy a folding knife under the circumstances laid out in Point 1.  You're not going to be able to do it if you've already been hit in the back of the head with a chunk of pavement.  
5. As in all self-defense situations, you have to be aware of potential threats, avoid them when possible, and de-escalate (or run) if you can.  If you find yourself opening your knife for any other reason than to cut an inanimate object, everything else has gone wrong for you that day.
6. There are plenty of people who geek out over knives.  They own many, they carry multiple knives, they talk about them ad nauseam, they lionize knife makers.  Barring some notable psychopaths, they're no different from Apple fans, Tim Burton fans, or fanatics of Game of Thrones.  Don't let someone else's embarrassing gushing get in the way of your legal choice to carry a knife.  

Like firearms, knives don't act on their own, and ownership of one doesn't imply eagerness to use it on another human being.  As in all things, media representation of knives and knife owners reflects a distorted mirror of reality.  Learn about these things for yourself, rather than unquestioningly consuming the pap from the news media.

Celebrity Selfie Hack: Eight Things You Need to Think About

Over the years, I worked closely with many police officers, combat veterans, martial artists, and self-defense experts, learning about what they did to put food on the table.  When discussing violent encounters, the prevailing attitude was, "It's awful that X happened, but it's worse if we don't learn from it."

It's a self-evident form of pragmatism that can be applied to anything that went wrong.

With that in mind, let's take a look at the commentary on the recent celebrity selfie hack.  Not the story itself, because the facts are already out there, but the commentary on it, which demonstrates a lack of willingness to address real-life concerns.

1. There's no need to burnish one's moral bona fides by declaring that anyone should be allowed to take any picture of oneself of any kind without fear of the picture being stolen.  It takes no moral courage at all to insist that theft is wrong.
2. There's nothing wrong in saying that, for security's sake, you shouldn't put your nude selfies anywhere you don't directly control, like the cloud.  By saying so, it doesn't mean that you condone the hackers' actions in stealing those selfies.  It also doesn't mean that you think the people whose privacy was violated deserved it.  Pointing out an error is a way of ensuring that the error isn't repeated.
3. The very nature of personal security is that it's inconvenient.  If it wasn't inconvenient, it wouldn't be security.  Real security, the kind that comes before house keys and passwords, involves a mindset that acknowledges this inconvenience and works with it.  It requires a decision-making process that doesn't include putting nude photos of oneself on a server that can potentially be hacked (which is all servers).
4. Celebrities, due to many factors that don't need to be discussed, are at greater risk than the rest of us.  Failure to acknowledge this is ludicrous.  They were profiled, targeted, and hit.  
5. There are significant differences between being physically assaulted and robbed vs having one's naked selfies stolen.  Moral preening about both being terrible so we can conflate them is just that: preening.  
6. This wasn't rape.  Every comparison of having one's nude selfies stolen to forcible penetration demeans those individuals who have actually been raped.  Just as every terrible thing that has happened isn't the Holocaust, every theft of nude selfies isn't rape.
7. Discussing what someone did to put him or herself at risk isn't blaming the victim.  Refusal to learn from others' actions is a childish way of viewing the world.
8. There's nothing wrong with deciding that of all the things we're supposed to be outraged by, this case isn't a priority.  It doesn't make you evil.  If learning that Jennifer Lawrence's personal privacy was violated by hackers doesn't peg your Outrage Meter, fine.  Don't let anyone tell you how you should feel.

If nothing else, you should consider pulling your nude selfies out of the cloud and transferring them to Polaroids that can be safely hidden under the mattress.