(courtesy Twitter)

David Frum is, well, here’s the columnist’s bio: “I’m a conservative Republican, have been all my adult life. I volunteered for the Reagan campaign in 1980. I’ve attended every Republican convention since 1988. I was president of the Federalist Society chapter at my law school, worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and wrote speeches for President Bush—not the “Read My Lips” Bush, the “Axis of Evil” Bush. I served on the Giuliani campaign in 2008 and voted for John McCain in November. I supported the Iraq War and (although I feel kind of silly about it in retrospect) the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I could go on, but you get the idea.” Actually no, no you don’t. Not unless you know that Frum is a proponent of civilian disarmament. Which you can kinda guess from the Tweet above. If not, here’s an excerpt from the dailymail.co.uk story linked to above . . .

A 76-year-old woman was killed in a shootout as a gang tried to rob her outside her South Carolina home in the early hours of Saturday.

Dorothy Hendrix was shot twice by the gang of two men and a woman, but she managed to shoot one of her assailants in the stomach before dying of her wounds.

Steven Hagood, Tereba Geer, and Bradacious Galloway have all been charged with murder.

‘She fought. She was a fighter. She shot him,’ the victim’s brother, Ronnie Lollis, told WYFF News Channel 4.

So who “deceived” Ms. Hendrix into believing she had a natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms? What, exactly, would Frum have had Ms. Hendrix do: hand her money over to armed robbers and hope for the best?

Frum would have been on safer ground if he’d highlighted the fact that Hendrix was running an illegal gambling operation and “often returned home in the early morning hours with large sums of money.” But gun grabbers don’t have any interest in looking beyond headlines. Not that it would have made any difference. When you’re anti-gun hammer, everything looks like a nail.

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80 COMMENTS

  1. What would he have said if she was unarmed and they shot her anyways? Better to go down in a fight than in a fright.

    • Amen Cyrano. It was just after college I began my interest in self-defense. When I read “In Cold Blood” I decided that I would either go running or fighting, but never trussed up and helpless.

    • I think he is projecting his own values and thereby giving us an insight into them. He disagrees with her choices because he assumes that she (like he) values physical security over natural rights. If she valued her natural rights first (that is to say, she was a decent American) then her choice was correct even if you assume, as From does (and I don’t) that the gun made her less safe.

    • He would have used the guns used by the armed thugs to shoot down a poor defenseless old lady in cold blood as proof of the need for common sense gun laws.

    • Bozo Rino Frum was probably searching for just such a story to weigh in on with his muddled elitist words to the wise, as if he has special insight into what is best for everyone in every circumstance in life. If Hendrix had simply been unarmed, or ambushed and robbed and/or killed without an opportunity to deploy her handgun and defend herself, Frum would have had nothing to say about the results.

      There are no guarantees of any sort in an event such as befell Ms. Hendrix. Clearly having learned from previous experience, she determined she was not going to be a helpless victim again if she had a say in the matter.

      Who is Frum (or anyone else) to deny her or others from having that choice in their destiny? Hendrix took ownership of her self defense needs when she trained and armed up; I doubt she was wearing blinders in doing so.

      At worst Frum’s statements are judgmental, biased and illogical for anyone who decides not to be a helpless victim.
      At best, it’s a lame attempt at Monday morning quarterbacking with 20/20 hindsight.

  2. We need to always remember that statists and the totalitarian elite come in all shapes, sizes, and party affiliations. The unobstructed right to self defense may be the defining difference between supporting totalitarianism or freedom.

        • It’s almost as if they have something very special in store for us, as soon as they can rid us of our guns, knives…..

      • I always thought that free speech was the keystone, but in the past year or so I am coming around to self defense being at top of the archway. The key question for me has become “what matters free speech if you are dead?”

      • And posting a long list of supposedly conservative bona fides doesn’t prove a thing, except he’s still hoping to get work from other RINOs. Even Regan was fooled into buying into some form of infringement during his tenure.

        All of this is like proclaiming, “I am a good, God-fearing Christian! Pay no attention to that naked 13 year old girl in the basement.”

    • It’s simple. The only thing that will tell you if a politician is truly for freedom or tyranny is do they support the unrestricted right to KABA’s or not.

      If they’re not; then no matter what they say; you know they are an enemy of freedom; this man is obviously a Conservative RINO; a ravening wolf in a sheep dogs clothing.

      • “It’s simple. The only thing that will tell you if a politician is truly for freedom or tyranny is do they support the unrestricted right to KABA’s or not.”

        It would be nice if it really were that simple, but dare I point out that POLITICIANS LIE!

        Also, Democrat politicians sometimes proclaim their support of the Second Amendment sufficient to get NRA support, but do they actually support an unrestricted RKBA? Probably not. Also, they being affiliated with the Democrats, they are in no way fully in support of freedom and against tyranny.

        This may rankle the Dem/Lib/Prog readers who come here and love their guns, but it is a demonstrable fact that the Democrat Party platform mirrors, sometimes verbatim, the communist and fascist platforms of the early 20th century. It does not take more than a yellow belt in Google-Fu to find this out.

        • I completely agree with everything you said; the key is to look at their actions, not their words; do they vote for freedom or tyranny; and most politicians don’t support freedom; since most want varied levels of control of our rights; ie, they want the 2nd amendment to be a privilege, not an unrestricted (shall not be infringed) right.

  3. This story makes me kinda sad, for a number of reasons. It’s a bad story because it gives both sides the ability to make completely unsupported arguments, because nobody but the people who were there know exactly what happened, and in what order.

    The anti-gun gets to say, “See? Having a gun doesn’t protect you!” and they might be right in this case. If Dot Hendrix tried to draw against a drawn gun and got herself shot, then that wasn’t real smart. Maybe if she hadn’t done that, the goblins might have taken the money and left her unharmed.

    On the other hand, our side gets to say, “Good for her! At least she tried to fight, instead of just giving up!” And those people are right, too. Because I think you should fight back. Because you don’t know if they’re going to take the money and leave in peace, or if they’re going to shoot you anyway, despite your cooperation.

    The point being, this is no better an example for us than it is for them, because we don’t know the exact timeline of events, and she still ended up dead.

    And sadly, she didn’t manage to take any of these assholes with her.

  4. A gun is not a talisman. No thinking person believes the mere presence of a gun will protect you. But, a gun and the willingness to use it, definitely gives you an advantage. The slain woman did not go quietly into that good night… something, I’m sure, Frum would be hard pressed to understand.

    • except the “i will scare away the intruders by giving away my position by the sound of my shotgun” type of people.

  6. Oooooh . . .

    When I read the story I thought she was fatally shot and that the guy who shot her was at fault. I now understand that it was the (blank out) who convinced her that she should assert her natural rights who is at fault.

    That’s some real nice punditing Dave.

  7. Frum and other conservative elitists like him demonstrate the axes we need to focus on aren’t always accurately left vs right or urban vs rural, etc. His kind are of the same type as liberal elitists, and pretty much all politicians.

    The actual axis that separates the two important world views which are in conflict on every issue is Submissive Authoritarianism vs Independent Egalitarianism. There are droves of both liberals and conservatives that yearn to be submissive to an authority preserve their sense of security through false certainty. They long for authoritarians among them, who are our political elite, to rise up and dominate them. The apparent strength of their dominating authoritarians, and the hierarchy which enables it shaken whenever anyone anywhere demonstrates independence and actual egalitarianism. I think this jarring of their tenuously constructed false certainty causes great mental torment to these submissive authoritarianism people. This is why they predictably lash out with a great energy, comparable to a fight-or-flight response for survival (because it is), to suppress examples of independent egalitarianism.

    • Indeed, it’s statist vs. libertarian. Frum’s a “righty” statist RINO. So’s O’Reilly and a whole bunch of those useless figpuckers.

      RKBA guarantees _ALL_ other rights; it is the font of liberty.

  8. I get the little jab he’s going for, but he’s just wrong. We already know that innumerable, successful DGU’s take place every day, some by the hands of senior citizens. So if he’s going for the “this lady died fighting back when there never was a chance of successfully doing so” angle, then that’s wrong on the facts. If he’s going for the “this lady died taking a risky approach when she could have been guaranteed safety if only she’d complied” tack, well that’s false, too. Armed robbers regularly kill their victims to eliminate the witness, or at least with enough frequency that compliance is no guarantee of safety.

    So that leaves him without any serious point to make. Thanks for stopping by, Frum.

  9. David is right. How many times do we hear about a police officer getting killed in a gun fight. We are deceiving police officers into thinking they are safe when we give them a gun. Disarm the police so that they can be safe!

  10. Like that brave 76 yr old woman, I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.

    Frum’s mileage obviously varies…

  12. The choice is not always to live or to be killed. Too often it is to be killed or to be tortured and then killed. She made the right decision.

  13. The real issue with guns in America? Look at the people that killed her, there is thee number one issue yet nobody, not even the most racist conservative or fearlessly blind progressive has the balls to come out and tell the truth. I don’t even need to say much more. When a group of people that represent only 7% of the overall population are responsible for well over 50% of all gun murders and gun crimes and we don’t even talk about, well we deserve what we get. Same goes for voting two-party, we deserve every ill our political system creates. When we ignore the real issues the truth is never told and nothing is ever fixed. RIP granny, wish you could of got three head shots off before they got you.
    So sick of political correctness and liberal sob fests. Enough is enough. Somebody in Washington needs to grow some balls and get this conversation started.

  14. If you read the article it says she was robbed once before in 2011 and the perps were never caught, which is why she started packing.

    I can see this going both ways. On one hand, its very possible the crooks would have just taken her money and left like they did last time, and that she arguably died over money. The other argument is that they may have killed her anyway, but even if they didn’t they almost certainly would not have been caught since the first robbers (who may have been the same people) were never found either. Compound that with the fact that she was running illegal gambling and you can argue that she did not have much choice. Either keep getting victimized or take a stand and possibly lose your life. They were caught because she fought back, so her struggle was not entirely in vain.

  15. Too often those that carry do think their carry piece is protection. They think that once they have it, they feel that they can be have any situation thrown at them and them be ok. This is not the case.

    Carrying is just the beginning of self defense with a firearm. Training will teach you how to fight and hopefully get out alive. The best case scenario is that the perps are dead and you are unhurt, the worst, you are dead and the perps are unhurt. The goal is the minimize the latter.

      • These “perps” were obviously all too willing to kill someone to get what they wanted. Why exactly is it “best case” that they are arrested, tried and convicted, at great expense to the public treasure, then incarcerated at great additional expense for an unknown number of years while filing appeals, again all at government expense, rather than being gunned down in the street like the pestilent scum they actually are?

        Yes, this woman ran an illegal gambling establishment. Except for the government no collecting taxes on her income, and assuming it was a reasonably honest operation, this was a victimless crime and the money she earned was willingly wagered.

        So the main issue here is, did those three pass their NICS when they bought their pistols and were they carrying their CCW permission slips when this incident occurred? Seems to me that their lawyers could argue that this paranoid old lady drew on them first and they only fired in self defense. They only took the bag of money because they were afraid there might be another gun in there and they didn’t want to leave it on the sidewalk where it might fall into the wrong hands. Their plan was to turn it all over to the police immediately after their friend was treated at the E.R.

  16. Some people… some people just love to use the blood of vitims to grease the wheels of politics.

    • “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” – Thomas Jefferson

      Frum may think he’s a patriot, but deep down he’s just another tyrant.

    • Your right, I mean if it weren’t for the Boehner and McConnell we the Feds wouldn’t be confiscating our guns come January 1st,

      Idiot.

      • President Romney would have gotten grabber legislation passed in the wake of Newtown, such as mag limits and gun show registration requirements, because Team Red wouldn’t have given as much of a shit as they did against Team Blue.

  18. He would not be saying this if she was Black because that would not fit the Progressive Template
    “Conservative’ my ash!
    What a heartless Basturd

  19. I find it disappointing that Frum apparently finds the worst part of the incident isn’t that there were three criminals willing to attack a 76 year old woman and kill her in her home, but rather that she had a gun when she was murdered. The take away should not be on how to disarm elderly ladies, but rather preventing crime and injustice. Perhaps there is more to Frum’s side but it is reasonable to assume that the twitter post accurately captures Frum’s thinking.

    • I’ve seen plenty of Frum’s garbage — there certainly isn’t any more to his stand than heartless ideological adherence (heck, even that gives him too much credit). He calls himself a Republican, but he’s nothing more than a fascist fearmonger and liar for hire.

  21. Frum has stolen a page from the Democrat platform and thinks it’s okay because he’s a Republican? Really?

    Some Republicans seem to think that when the Democrats violate our rights, that’s bad, but when Republican’s do it, that’s good. How Nixonian of them.

    • Yeah, it’s kinda like being anti-war, but only when it’s the opposition party conducting it.

    • At best he’s a RHINO. For all the touting of his Republican resume, he hasn’t stated anything more recent than 2008. That’s enough for me to believe he has converted over and should be granted the status of “Anti”. With that come all the rights and privileges of condemnation that we can muster.

  22. Add to Form 4473
    “Do you understand that owning an carrying a gun is not guaranteed to save your life, it only offers you a fighting chance”

    And then the silly notion that guns are magical items that will solve all our problems should be eliminated.

  23. Frum is a Canuck from Toronto, which when it comes to 2A support may be enough to understand his opinion, eh?

  24. If a semi truck had crossed the centerline and plowed into her killing her would Frum have penned that she was “fatally deceived” into thinking a seat belt would protect her?

    If her house had burned down and she died in the conflagration would Frum opine that she’d beed “fatally deceived” into thinking a fire extinguisher would protect her?

    It’s a classic rhetorical tactic, the fallacy of the perfect solution: if being armed doesn’t 100% guarantee survival then it’s pointless to be armed. Anyone even moderately familiar with debate would spot that a mile away and discard it.

    • If she had dialed “911” and been shot while waiting for the police to respond, would Frum opine that she’d been “fatally deceived” into thinking that a cell phone would protect her?

  26. It might seem to be a minor quibble that 2 men and a woman are not a “gang”. However it goes to show the sensationalizing inherent in the author’s intent.

  27. Look, I’m not going to sugar-coat this:

    Frum is not a “conservative” in the American sense, and never has been. He’s a typical urban Jew from Canada, a country that is, in its eastern provinces, more European than American. As such, his definition of “conservative” hews entirely to two issues: fiscal conservatism (in parts) and blind adherence to a foreign policy of sending non-Jews in our military to fight middle eastern issues for the interests of Israel.

    The brutal truth is that Frum is a man educated beyond the limitations of his intellect – like many east coast Jews, but who is well connected in the media biosphere of the east coast. He is of a milieu that use their academic and who-slept-with-whom credentials to construct an argument appealing to their authority based on said credentials, when in fact they know nothing of what they speak. They have no actual experience in just about anything consequential (and writing speeches for politicians is not consequential, despite what the media mavens would like to believe) and as such, can be safely ignored whenever they open their mouths. Other members of that milieu include such notables as Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, et al. Expanding the circle beyond the Jewish particulars, we find other so-called “conservatives” like Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, George Will, etc. People who are paid to talk, talk and talk. But they never actually produce anything tangible of lasting value. In the Real World[tm], people like to say “talk is cheap.” No one should be paid hard currency for simply flapping their yap, but in the DC/NYC/Boston axis, people are paid lots of good money to flap their yaps about a wide variety of subjects about which they know less than nothing.

    I’ve ceased caring about what these people think. They invariably live snug little lives in their urban enclaves, and sniff haughtily from their intellectual cocoon that we mere plebes aren’t smart enough to know what is best for us. The brutal fact is that none of them would last 10 minutes if put into any situation on any urban street, and they’d likely all lose control of their bodily functions if left stranded by the side of the road in middle America, worried about the next “hayseed with a gun in a pickup” who might pass by.

    Iowahawk had a most excellent piece lampooning these pinheads a few years back, titled “Heart of Redness:”

    http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2005/01/heart_of_rednes.html

    In the past, I’ve taken it upon myself to try to educate Mr. Frum on issues in the real world, particular where physics intersected his wild ideas about Class-VIII truck engine efficiency. I seriously doubt that anything I said made an impression – it rarely does with his ilk. They spout one absurd trope and are off to the next before they can be hit with so much as a random fact.

  29. This woman did not die in vain.

    The fact that she shot one of the low-life scum sends a message to those that would do this again.

    The best message we can send to criminals is not “commit a crime and go to jail”. A far better message is “commit a crime and you’ll be shot”.

  30. With a name like Bradacious, it’s no wonder he turned to a life of crime. He was no doubt mocked and ridiculed his entire childhood.

    • Better than being named Sue, but the ridicule and his tendency to violence probably came from constantly defending insults against his ignorant who mother who could not even learn to spell “Bodacious”.

  31. I don’t know ANYONE who believes that carrying a gun makes you immune to violence. It is a blatant strawman on the anti’s part.

    Most gun-owners will admit that their chances of surviving an ambush shooting (like the Aurora) or a 3 on one attack is slim, even with a fully loaded gun-of-your-choice at your side. The whole point is that your chances of defending yourself are next to nil if you DON’T carry.

    Though some of this comes from the way gun advocates frame their arguments, when we say things like “Aurora wouldn’t have happened if the theater had concealed carry” lend themselves to this kind of misinterpretation.

  32. One point that seems to be avoided in this is the possible cause of this robbery: illegal gambling. While some of the article I read about this incident identified the victim as a volunteer, another pointed out this unfortunate fact:

    “Anderson County deputies said they believe an elderly woman killed during an armed robbery and shootout was targeted because of the amount of cash she had from her involvement in a gambling business.

    Deputies said after speaking with Dorothy Hendrix’s family, they learned she returned to her
    Rayben Lane home often early in the morning with large sums of money after leaving her job.

    On Saturday, deputies said Hendrix, 76, came home to find three armed men at her house. The coroner said Hendrix pulled out a gun and fired at the suspects, and one of them returned fire, hitting her twice.

    Deputies said Hendrix worked at 3454 Cinema Center in Anderson and after searching the
    location Tuesday, they found 15 illegal gambling machines.”

    Looks like this might be criminal-on-criminal violence, and I have often read on this site that it is okay if the criminals cull themselves from our society.

    • Another straw man argument. There is no report of what gambling machines were discovered or what, exactly made them illegal. There is no report that this was her major source of income or that she was solely responsible for the presence of those machines. There is also no report as to what about these machines made them illegal. It could be as minor as not having a government stamp saying the necessary taxes had been paid or an inspector had come by to test them for compliance.

      Be that as it may, a person operating “illegal” gambling machines into which other people voluntarily insert their money, is hardly in the same class as a group of violent armed robbers. Should we then classify a woman jaywalker shot in a road rage argument with a driver as criminal on criminal violence that must be “shrugged off”?

      However she got the money in question, she earned it through her own labor, whether or not the State approved of that labor. The criminals were parasites willing to deprive her of that money and that portion of her life that went into producing it. They were apparently more than willing to deprive her of her entire life, if necessary. Apples and oranges.

      • Cliff, this is hardly a straw man argument. In fact, you might want to look at your own post to see a true straw man argument. A straw man is refuting an argument that someone else has not actually put forward–then knocking that argument down and claiming victory in the debate.
        1. I never claimed what made the machines illegal.
        2. I never claimed that this was the victim’s major source of income.
        2a. I never accused the victim of being “solely responsible for the presence of those machines,” (and even if I had, I am not sure how that enters into the argument).
        3. The point that the machines’ illegality “could be as minor as not having a government stamp saying the necessary taxes had been paid or an inspector had come by to test them for compliance” is sort of the definition of illegal gambling machine, so is not a minor point.
        4. You create a false equivalency in your analogy between making profits from illegal gambling and jaywalking. Voluntary participation in two different illegal activities does not make them equivalent.
        5. The argument that “she earned (the money) through her own labor, whether or not the State approved of that labor” opens up all sorts of profitable, though illegal, activities to being defended for no arguable reason. I am not sure what the woman’s “labors” were, but this is worded in a way that would be laughable if used to describe other illegal activities. I absolutely agree that this woman did not deserve to be killed, even if it turns out that she was a criminal–I simply pointed out that many people have stated that we should not be too concerned when criminals kill other criminals.
        5. You are absolutely correct that the three who conspired to rob and kill her are “parasites willing to deprive her of that money and that portion of her life that went into producing it,” but she too was willing to deprive others of their money through illegal activity. Clearly, she was not violent, but no matter how one feels about governmental regulation, what she might have been involved in is against the law and parasitic.

        I think that the point I was making, evidently rather poorly, was that she broke one of the cardinal rules of survival–Avoid Stupid People Doing Stupid Things. If it turns out that she was involved in illegal activities, then she intentionally placed herself in a stupid/dangerous situation. Did she deserve to dies because of that? No. Did she know that there were risks? It seems so since she had suffered through at least one other violent situation because of her career. One of her options, other than getting a gun and a CC permit, would have been to get into another line of work.

        • If she’d been a prostitute, and the money had been the fees for her services, would that have made it OK? I don’t care how she got the money (as long as she didn’t steal it from someone else), the fact that it came from a quasi-illegal activity does not change the fact that it’s her money and she’s well within her rights to defend it from theft.

    • I’m rapidly rejecting the notion that illegal behavior equals criminal behavior. It seems to me that “criminal” should be reserved for violating another’s rights. Streaking, assaulting, murdering, etc… and that our laws have an obligation to trekked reality. They often fail at this, if course, but there’s no reason not to hold an ideal to aim for. Selling drugs on the corner isn’t criminal, but murdering your competition, or extorting them is.

      It reminds me of the state legislature that tried to redefine pi to be equal to 3

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