Time to Re-Examine: Should Lethal Force be Acceptable for Stealing Time?

Neither replacement nor substitute exists

As the usual suspects continue their assault on personal property, as they did, yet again, over the weekend in Chicago, as they are all across France, trashing houses, cars, belongings, libraries, etc., the notion that personal property cannot be defended with lethal force must be re-examined.

Personal property is time, instantiated.

What is personal property but a tangible result of time spent? Time spent creating, finding, buying, transporting, displaying, using. Time not spent doing anything else. To say nothing of the time of others spent extracting the raw material, refining it, and manufacturing and selling the object, home or car, or writing and publishing books.

Who has the right to steal, or to destroy the results of my time? No one.

Substitute property (objects) usually can be found, but the time personal objects represent cannot.

Destroying property is destroying time, something completely irreplaceable; lethal force defending that time is entirely reasonable. In fact, it is required because of the refusal of cops & courts to protect it.

I can make or buy new stuff. I can even make a new child (who any mature society agrees lethal force can be used to defend).

I cannot make more time. Time is not a “thing” for which a substitute exists.

With government refusing to deploy and assign the requisite number of cops and refusing those too-few deployed the ROE necessary to stop thugs destroying the fruits and results of society’s - irreplaceable - time, and to lock-up those outlaws, it must be recognized that, when government fails its security role, the people will take it up.

And we, entirely logically, will defend our time with lethal force, for what else have we against younger, bigger, stronger, more aggressive outlaws and gangs of outlaws intending harm to us and steal our time?

To rephrase an old saying, the Supreme Court may have just stated that God and the law made men equal; but Colonel Colt gave us the tools to enforce that equality.

This is both logical and necessary in any free society.

Government failure is seen across various academic papers on vigilantism as a moral reason for that vigilantism. As I have argued before, in a self-governing country - essentially all of Western Civilization - it is the people who are responsible for their government. Policing is part of government. If our hirelings in government reject the authority we delegate to them to protect ourselves and our property, the responsibility - which cannot be delegated - remains with us: the people.

This, incorrectly, may be seen as vigilantism. It is not. It is people acting when the government refuses the role for which the people created it. The role still exists. The refusal of government to fill it does not alter that role. It just alters who steps up to fill it.

If government performed the role for which it was created this entire discussion would be unnecessary, but government has chosen not to fulfill that role. The result of their choice only can be more thuggish violence and less freedom, or the people doing the job the government refuses.

One’s home, family, and  possessions will, and must, be defended for society to remain free. If those attacking same are not deterred by laws, are released because “too many” are incarcerated, then lethal force against them by the citizens of a self-governing nation must be recognized as reasonable and necessary in defense of that nation and its people and their freedom … and their time.

Our defense of our time will enhance the freedom for which our nation was formed, while reducing the costs to society of criminal behavior and recidivism while deterring future misbehavior in a way that the increasingly unlikely “three hots and a cot” of prison time (a better life than most thugs have on the streets) is apt to.

It’s our country to defend. Cops & courts refusing that job does not change that.

Shooting outlaws stops them. Something the government we created seems entirely uninterested in doing.