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When Fall Friday nights come around, I feel sympathy for the high school football teams that lose by enormous margins. As I wrote in “High School Football as-Bullying?” size, strength and ability matter. When an opposing high school football team gets off the bus looking like an NFL starting lineup, and the home team’s biggest player is 6’2” and 200 pounds, the only question is how big the final score is going to be and will the home team score a single point? . . .

The high school where I’m fortunate to teach has this problem. Our kids are, at best, of average size for their age, but forced to play in a class of schools, that while similar in the number of students, are very, very different in terms of the size of students available for football, which is, as the saying goes, not a religion in Texas. It’s much more important than that.

Watching opposing teams take the field, they appear to have been hatched from test tubes, cloned as genetic super-teenagers. Many don’t look like teenagers, more like college juniors about to drop out of college to leap into the NFL draft. Bigger—much, much bigger, heavier, taller, stronger, faster, they’re the six-million dollar men facing off against earnest and determined teenagers. The results are known before the football moves an inch.

In boxing, wrestling, mixed martial arts and similar sports, weight—and gender—are supremely important. Allowing a 200-pound fighter to take on a 175-pound fighter is unthinkable, the outcome inevitable before the first punch or kick is thrown. Allowing a female fighter, no matter how skilled, to take on a male fighter, is also unthinkable. The differences in musculature, overall strength, bone size and density, weight and aggression are simply overwhelming.

We accept all of this without conscious thought. We accept it because experience teaches the truth of the thing. We accept it because we see sports as a metaphor for life. Bigger, stronger, faster people have a very real advantage in any confrontation with smaller, weaker, slower people. There are occasionally smaller people with extraordinary abilities that might prove the exception to the rule, but there was only one Bruce Lee.

To be sure, TV and the movies do their best to muddle our thinking about fighting and the use of force. Heroes take on and defeat multiple attackers with swords and bare hands. Combatants trade blows that would fell an elephant and shrug them off to continue the beautifully choreographed, slow motion martial ballet. Men are supposed to fight it out, hand to hand, in battles of honor, consequences be damned.

Reality, of course, is very different. In the real world, fights usually end up on the ground with desperate grappling and blows being thrown without precision or particular skill. Single blows can cause grievous injury, even death.

But one thing remains: size and strength matter.

There are, however, powerful forces in American society — and in the world, for that matter — that would ignore this particular lesson of common sense and history. Rationality teaches that women, being in general the smaller and physically less able sex, are particularly vulnerable. They’re at a real and potentially deadly disadvantage in any physical confrontation with a man. In such confrontations, men need not be armed with weapons, their natural physical advantages are more than enough to injure, even kill.

In such confrontations, time and distance are of great importance. Hand to hand, the advantage is with the bigger and stronger only if they can close the distance necessary to use that size and strength. If forced to remain at a distance, if there is a means to neutralize their size and strength advantage, there is deterrence, and women may remain unmolested.

If we think for even a few minutes, we know this. The lessons of history are plain enough. Yet again, some would deny them, because more than anything, they wish to disarm the honest and law abiding. They wish to take away the most efficient and effective means of self-defense, the small devices that make the smallest woman more than a match for the largest man: firearms.

Their arguments are superficially plausible. Guns are dangerous! They’re “X” times more likely to kill children than an intruder! They’re “X” times more likely to cause people to commit suicide! An attacker will just take it away and use it on you! They imply it’s somehow unfeminist to own or use firearms, a betrayal of the sisterhood. Guns are a symbol of the male oppressor, because war on women!

Just as a 5’7” 150 pound high school lineman facing a 6’6”, 250-pound monster finds himself on the wrong side of the disparity of force equation, so does a 5’4” 135 pound women facing a 6’ 190 pound criminal. But the police will protect women! That’s their job; leave it to the professionals. No they won’t. They can’t, and they have no legal obligation to protect any individual.

The Supreme Court in Castlerock v. Gonzales (2005) affirmed many lower court decisions. The police have a responsibility only to investigate and deter crime for the general public at large; they owe no duty of protection to any individual. This is a rational, necessary decision. The police are few, the public many, and so are criminals. Not only is it impossible for the police to prevent harm to any individual, if they could be sued for such failure, what city could possibly afford a police force?

Even so, the police work hard to respond to emergency calls, and here is where the problem of time and distance becomes important. A woman walking through a park at night finds herself being pursued by a man in dark clothing. As she quickens her pace, so does he. Soon, she is running as fast as she can, and he is gaining on her. Will she be able to dial 911 on her cell phone before she is overtaken? Will the 911 call be connected quickly enough? Will the 911 dispatcher be able to understand what she is saying and figure out where she is? And if so, that only begins the process of dispatching an officer to the call.

What if an officer isn’t available? In our current economy, many law enforcement agencies are not replacing retirees, and are actually laying officers off. In Detroit, average emergency response time is 58 minutes, when officers are available. In many parts of the country, response time is little better. Even in the best circumstances, a response time of five minutes is blazingly fast and quite unusual. Will our fleeing woman still be alive even if the police can respond within five minutes of receiving the radio call? Consider it will probably take at least two more minutes for her phone call to connect, for her to transfer the necessary information and for the dispatcher to make the radio call—if she is able to make the call in the first place.

This reality was clearly illustrated last week in Oklahoma when an apparent jihadist attacked two women with a knife, beheading one. He was stopped, and the second women retained her head and survived though seriously wounded, only because someone on the premises had a firearm and used it.

The lesson is simplicity in itself, and is deeply based in human nature, common sense and history: only firearms allow women to protect themselves against men, to take advantage of time and distance and to rebalance the disparity of force equation in their favor.

The advantage firearms–usually handguns–provide doesn’t apply only to women. Modern predators often commit crimes in groups. An armed victim of any size or sex may deter a group of overcome them if necessary. The elderly, or people disabled for any reason, even temporary injury or sickness, also need the advantage of arms.

In this election season, it’s time to take the rhetorical offensive. It’s time to demand to know why anti-gun, anti-liberty groups and politicians want to disarm women, the elderly, the disabled and the trouble-avoiding law-abiding. It’s long past time to demand to know why they’re willing to ignore the lessons of history and why they want to make life easy for terrorists and other violent scum. Why exactly do they want such people to have every advantage?  Why are they making real war on women?

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25 COMMENTS

  1. Guns are evil. Guns go off on their own. Guns cause suicides. Guns provoke people to commit crimes. Everybody knows these are uncontestable facts. If you are unaware of this-allow MDA, the Brady folk and Bloomberg to enlighten you or continue compensating for a puny pecker with a DiFi non-approved Assault Rifle(TM)./sarc

  2. A girl that can fight and kick ass is SO sexy. Like Angelina Jolie in Salt, and Arya Stark.
    Also, there was David.

  4. Life isn’t always fair and sometimes you have to man up and maybe take a few lumps so if you don’t like having to play against bigger players then I guess soccer is the game for you.

    • Glad to see I’m not the only one with a problem regarding the football analogy. I fully agree with the theme and tone, but you simply cannot parallel football to the disparity of force in male on female attacks.

      In football, pure size is one small part of the picture. The numbers listed in the program do not take into account how hard they work in the weight room. Back in my coaching days I’d take an undersized kid squatting 400+ on sheer work ethic over a large lazy bum who was bigger than his peers in middle school and never put in the work to push himself. Outside of that, you also have technique and leverage which the well coached player will take advantage of. Then throw in conditioning which becomes a factor in the 4th quarter. Top that all off with smart playcalling like taking advantage of an overly aggressive D- line with traps, reverses, and screens. Football is a mental game, much like chess. It is not simply a dog fight.

      Those variables in football act as equalizers, much like firearms in the hands of women. Taking them into account beforehand (owning a gun), knowing how to employ them to your advantage (training/proficiency), and having the mental fortitude to accept that fact that you control your destiny in the mere appearance of a physical mismatch (shoot when in fear of your life) are the keys to coming out on top.

    • …and sometimes you have to man up and maybe take a few lumps…

      Except that, in real life (as opposed to sports), it is immoral to require someone to “take a few lumps” just to go about living their lives, or to “take a few lumps” before using force – up to and including deadly force – to defend themselves.

      I would offer that such was the underlying point of Mike’s post.

        • tdiinva, your clip from “Zulu” proves the point. When you are outnumbered or face a stronger opponent it is good to have guns or be a projectilist like David. David didn’t even get a scratch on himself and he killed Goliath and cut off his head with Goliath’s own sword. The British fought off a more numerous army because they had the force multiplier called a rifle. When you are in a battle for your life or to avoid death or grave bodily harm a gun is good to have. As for football, when there is a disparity in quality of the athletes favoring one team they usually win. It occurs at any level of football including the pros. Occasionally, the smaller, weaker, and slower team wins but not often. And a football game is not a fight to the death. And I have never seen one team quit from being afraid to “take their lumps.” In a football game everyone agrees to play by the rules. In a fight on the street, not so much. In real life there are many people incapable of taking lumps. That is why it is up to the rest of us to protect them. The reason I got interested in guns was so that I could protect my family. I don’t go out looking for fights but I will defend my family, myself and any innocents in my vicinity. I would hope that you would do the same.

          Cordially,

          David

  5. Disarming Americans is the most anti-woman thing any politician can do. When women actually understand this, the civilian disarmament industry is dead, over, done, finito.

    I’m not holding my breath.

  6. Great story which reminds me of a 3 ring pugil stick fight in the Marines. Our TBS class where the first female officers to live with males throughout training. 3 ring is where a fresh fighter starts at one end and opposing a fighter made it through two fights and nearly exhausted. Every time a male Marine encounter a female, even on his third fight, he kicked the females ass every time. It was sobering for both females, knowing a physical fight was a losing proposition and males, knowing unless females were armed, females just could not defend themselves or their male peers.

    • In a fight between a female Marine and a typical male metrosexual hothouse plant of a twit, my money would be on the BAM.

  8. Interesting read. 6’2″ and 200? Man I was 6′ and 220 at 17. That’s apretty scrawy team…but chicks and guns. A good combo.

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