Sunday Sermon: On Being a Dangerous Person

“Kick it out,” said the voice from behind me; I waved back over my shoulder, not looking – this was another of the pan-handlers that worked Saint Paul Street in Baltimore. It was fall, 1993, and I was walking home from Harborplace downtown, with thenwife. The Saint Paul Street bridge over the Jones Falls Expressway, where we were, was usually whipped with wind and we had our hands jammed each in the pockets of our motorcycle jackets and were walking along, hunched over, probably talking about something.

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Perspective on the Self-Defense Defense

The topic of self-defense in this ridiculously over-armed culture is a fraught one, with many contradictions. On one hand, there are the people who insist that “good guys with guns are needed to stop bad guys with guns” and on the other they implicitly assume that the police cannot be relied upon to be the “good guys” – thereby supporting the notion of armed vigilantism, e.g.: Bernie Goetz or (maybe) Kyle Rittenhouse, George Zimmerman, and many others.

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The Strange Thing About The Strange Thing That Maybe Wasn’t So Strange

I’m going to be a bit waffly in this posting, because it’s about something where some facts appear to be in dispute, leading to disputable conclusions. Also: psychologists are involved, which I believe increases a level of epistemological background noise, without adding much, if anything, in the way of things we can treat as facts.

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Very Tactical

The tactical needs of Americans continue to boggle my mind. Given the way many of us buy tactical gear, you’d get the impression that we are in a constant state of being attacked.

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