It was a single essay that got us to label Straight Forward in a Crooked World as our Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week. It was an essay explaining why it’s a moral ever ever too deep into the motivations of criminals. Bottom line, they chose to be criminals:
So the next time you watch the news and see some horrific crime take place don’t think “what kind of parents did they have?”
That’s a key point that is often overlooked. Which is going to send us on a long digression from the website. Right now, the media, liberals, and friends of criminals — but we three-peat ourselves — are weeping bitter tears over the ugly execution of a monster named Clayton Lockett. To pick just one of these media malefactors, Molly Hennessy-Fiske in the LA Times found the execution “botched,” “violent,” a “horror.” Most of Hennessy-Fiske’s story hinges on an interview with Lockett supporter and anti-death penalty activist Dean Sanderford. Like Sanderford, Hennessy humanizes Lockett and dehumanizes his victim. She minimizes the crime, writing that “Lockett, 38, was convicted of shooting a 19-year-old woman in 1999 and burying her alive.” Compare her antiseptic description of the crime with what Lockett actually did:
Clayton Lockett and two accomplices decided to pull a home invasion robbery…. [Teenager Stephanie] Neiman fought Lockett when he tried to take the keys to her truck.
The men beat her and used duct tape to bind her hands and cover her mouth. Even after being kidnapped and driven to a dusty country road, Neiman didn’t back down when Lockett asked if she planned to contact police.
The men had also beaten and kidnapped Neiman’s friend along with Bobby Bornt, who lived in the residence, and Bornt’s 9-month-old baby.
Lockett later told police “he decided to kill Stephanie because she would not agree to keep quiet,” court records state.
Neiman was forced to watch as Lockett’s accomplice, Shawn Mathis, spent 20 minutes digging a shallow grave in a ditch beside the road. Her friends saw Neiman standing in the ditch and heard a single shot.
Lockett returned to the truck because the gun had jammed. He later said he could hear Neiman pleading, “Oh God, please, please” as he fixed the shotgun.
The men could be heard “laughing about how tough Stephanie was” before Lockett shot Neiman a second time.
“He ordered Mathis to bury her, despite the fact that Mathis informed him Stephanie was still alive.”
Get that? That’s what Lockett, who supporters like Sanderford and Hennessy-Fiske believe had an absolute right to live, did to Stephanie Neiman, 19, who had just graduated from high school two weeks earlier and, to monsters like Lockett, and Sanderford, and Hennessy-Fiske, deserved to die. That’s why Hennessy-Fiske doesn’t want you to know what Lockett did: she’s on his side.
She similarly minimizes the crime of the next monster cued up for execution in Oklahoma, admitting that he raped and killed an infant. But she does not mention that Charles Frederick Warner was tried, and convicted, of raping the child to death, and was sentenced to die by a jury of his peers; and that murder groupies like Sanderford managed to overturn his trial on technicalities, and that, after an intervening mistrial, a second jury found him guilty of kidnapping and raping the child to death, and sentenced him to die a second time; or that he raped the 11-month-old baby girl named Adriana both vaginally and anally; or that he was also found guilty of raping a five-year-old in an unrelated case; or that:
Medical testimony in his second trial, which began June 16, revealed that Adriana was violently shaken and her skull was fractured in two places.
Her jaw and three of her ribs were broken. Her lungs and her spleen were bruised and her liver was lacerated, according to testimony. The baby’s brain was swollen and hemorrhaging was discovered in her eyes and around her brain.
…Warner was with the baby when she was injured. The baby’s mother, Shonda Waller, was at the grocery store…
Adriana Waller weighed 5 pounds. Molly Hennessy-Fiske doesn’t care to let you know that. The pedophile monster Charles…
“Warner never displayed any remorse for his actions and remained indifferent throughout both trials,”
…and she doesn’t want you to know that, either. Her focus is on sympathy for Lockett and Warner.
To hell with that.
(As an aside, consider “Hennessy-Fiske.” Isn’t a hyphenated name pretty much a red flag of Chronic Intergenerational Clue Deficiency Inbreeding Syndrome in anyone who doesn’t, say, command the 17/21 Lancers, have multiple Knights of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in the family tree, or serve as one of Her Majesty’s Ladies-in-Waiting?).
Straight Forward (yes! this is where the digression returns to earth) tells you how to deal with guys like that:
The crime rate didn’t drop because criminals were being found shot dead in the gutter every morning.
Crime rates dropped because the criminal faced a choice. The choice to try and attack someone who may or may not be able to kill them. When your chosen profession is that of the criminal you look for easy prey. The moment a criminal no longer knows who is and is not easy prey they begin to lose the return in their investment….crime as a job. Getting shot is bad for business since there is no worker-comp insurance.
So the next time you watch the news and see some horrific crime take place don’t think “what kind of parents did they have?” .
You choose to wake up everyday and go to work, or better your life.
You choose this.
Crime is a choice made by the criminal. Give them no inherent excuse for their behavior.
Don’t be Dean Sanderford or Molly Hennessy-Fiske, morally no better than Lockett or Warner (indeed, given their wealth and privilege, that they support these monsters suggests they’re morally worse). Don’t weep for the hardships of that downtrodden minority, Felon-Americans. To Hell with them.
After that single essay, we binge-read the whole thing. Don’t expect a daily post there; instead, there’s only a post from time to time, just a couple a month. (Which makes binge-reading the whole thing a rewarding effort to knock off in a single sitting). But those occasional posts tend to be quite high quality posts.
Matthew Allen is the blogger behind Straight Forward, and he’s a professional bodyguard, a rather unusual profession. In fact we don’t know anyone who’s a professional bodyguard, Except for a lot of former SF, Ranger, and Marine recon guys who now do PSD work for Government clients. None of the stuff he says conflicts with their war stories (unlike, say, the 80s books of supposed bodyguard Leroy Thompson). There’s a degree of common sense in his advice.
We recommend this short interview with Allen in St Louis Magazine; he’d be a fun guy to trade war stories, or tips, with.
Finally, a section of his blog is called “Dark Arts for Good Guys.” It’s hands-on practical advice for people who go to bad places, or perhaps, have the bad place come to them. It’s basically psychological preparedness. Good stuff. A little bit of it is about guns, but most of it is about mindset — and mindset is to gun set as ten is to one, as Napoleon would have said if they said “mindset” in the early 19th Century.
Here’s a one line excerpt from one of those, but you really should read them all:
The reality is people are going to die in the chaos from bad men.That is the unfortunate reality of evil. It doesn’t really ever change its mind, only direction. You have to change their direction.
The next few lines of the same post are some home truths about suicide bombers:
Suicide bombers are often portrayed as martyrs for their cause. The bravest of their sect willing to sacrifice their own lives. As a leader you don’t send your best and brightest off in a vest full of C4 and ball bearings. Rather (like any cult) you look for the poor, the weak, the outsiders who have no purpose (canon fodder). Telling them that their families will be better off financially and they’ll be Valhalla for the sacrifice.
Just to be sure after the vest is strapped on its not uncommon for someone to shoot a needle full of heroin into their arm to keep them calm (and a remote detonator handy in case any thoughts of self preservation kick in).
We’ve personally never seen heroin or other injectables used, but our experience with suicide bombers is the Islamic variety, and while they’re all about killing male, female, and child noncombatants, they’d never ever violate Mohammed’s strictures on drug abuse. The remote detonator, though, is SOP among Arab terrorists and their fellow votaries of Southwest Asia.
Perhaps you are beginning to see why we recommend to you Straight Forward in a Crooked World. It is well written, interesting, and our only disagreement with one of Allen’s points has been a de minimis quibble. One cannot live by WeaponsMan alone; go hither and learn, grasshoppers.
Kevin was a former Special Forces weapons man (MOS 18B, before the 18 series, 11B with Skill Qualification Indicator of S). His focus was on weapons: their history, effects and employment. He started WeaponsMan.com in 2011 and operated it until he passed away in 2017. His work is being preserved here at the request of his family.
9 thoughts on “Wednesday Weapons Website: Straight Forward in a Crooked World”
Great shot at hyphenated surnames.
The concluding paragraph of Allen’s essay is a tour de force, but I’m skeptical of attributing all crime to congenital factors. You bring up two obvious sociopaths in your post. Sociopathy is one of the starkest psychological disorders and more or less clearly mapped by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. My uncle is a prison psychologist who has interviewed or sat in on the interviews of several of them – generally, there’s no hedging or ambiguity about the diagnosis. This isn’t an ADHD-like catchall term. And yet the prevalence of sociopaths in our society is estimated as extremely low, and not all sociopaths are criminals either.
Previously, you have noted that another common criminal defect is the inability to perceive consequences that are obvious to normal people. (Recklessness is one quality of sociopaths and Antisocial Personality Disorder-afflicted persons, but by itself it is not sufficient for diagnosis.) But positing an entirely congenital explanation, which seems to be a fair inference, is somewhat dubious considering the relatively high percentage of black criminals. (Aside, not sure if I can infer the same from Allen’s post.) I’m not bringing race up to call you a racist, just to say that a biological explanation doesn’t seem to be an absolute one. A large factor, to be sure, but not the whole story.
All of the above does not rebut the truth in Allen’s post that normal people carrying guns is the solution to crime.
Graw, how do you see Allen as suggesting that crime is due to congenital factors? In my opinion, he goes entirely the other way, calling it the free choice of the criminal, no more, no less.
I wonder if one of us is using “congenital” backwards of the other. I understand it to mean, for our purposes here, “innate” or “inborn.” And a logical consequence of that would be that it would be pretty immutable, unchangeable.
I think that personality disorders do have a place in causation of crime. Sometimes the criminal’s lack of awareness of the consequences of his actions are a disorder, but sometimes they’re just the characteristic impulsivity of the stupid. Most criminals are pretty impulsive and also pretty stupid, but those traits are strongly correlated according to mountains of psychological and psychometric research.
Yeah, I just realized the beginning of my comment combines both yours and Allen’s post. Later I realized that the implication isn’t in his, and noted it, but I forgot to change the first paragraph. Sorry.
To address his essay specifically: we can all agree that ultimately, each person is responsible for his own choices, so every criminal has indeed made a free choice. The buck stops with him or her. But – of course – submitting free will as the only factor simply submits a blank slate onto which different pet hypotheses can be projected. Everyone makes choices of their own volition, but each person has unique tendencies towards one direction or another that could be spoken of as probabilities. One individual is more likely to make x choice than another. So this explanation can easily fold back into the factors he decries (socioeconomic status, family environment).
The alternative, that each person’s probability of choice is completely unweighted, seems silly. Then the decision to commit crime would be arbitrary.
For my perspective, yes, we are using the same definition of congenital. Mental disorders are a factor – that’s impossible to deny – and a big one, but not sufficient to explain different ratios of crime between different races. To account for that difference, I believe one must take measure of the insidious system and culture that have grown over black people in America’s inner cities.
these psycho-social considerations are profoundly irrelevant. In a “normal”, i.e. Roman-talonic legal system, the point is to severely punish crime and thus deter it. The inner motivation of the criminal (social or psychological) does not matter; in fact, all Freud-in-the-courtroom BS notwithstanding, it is intra-subjective and objectively indeterminate. Under the current kosher crime lobby, all has been inverted: the criminal is a victim (of society), hence to be “understood” and ultimately coddled and released. And all this is purposeful: creation of yettanother gubmint-dependent, gubmint-controlled entitlement group. Murderous urban Blacks are, of course, the prime instance; roughly 5% of the population does >75% of the violent crime in the ‘Kwa. One might almost think that an anti-White army of extermination is being groomed.
Have had this site in the regular reading list for some time. A definite thumb’s up for some topics not often covered.
“Crime rates dropped because the criminal faced a choice. The choice to try and attack someone who may or may not be able to kill them. When your chosen profession is that of the criminal you look for easy prey.”
This was recently reinforced in the Indy area. The fact the NRA convention was in town has nothing to do with the dramatic reduction in crimes during the time the convention was occurring….At least that is how the talking heads will try to spin it. Right before their head’s explode with the effort.
Bad guys don’t want to get hurt.
Unless they are nuts to begin with.
Even the nuts who shoot up gun-free zones immediately off themselves when confronted with the police, or an armed citizen. Too bad the media doesn’t see fit to note that reality.
actually Mr. Holmes, the ex-Obama campaign worker who shot up the Aurora Theatre and killed a dozen people, went out to the parking lot, sat down, and calmly awaited the police. He like Loughner, is currently being petted, coddled, and psychoanalyzed. Both these state-dependents will be supporting whole rafts of apparatchiks for years to come.
Nothing is perfect. Things go wrong with the simplest processes. This S.O.B. got a lot less than he deserved but it is not our place to punish him. It is God’s place to finally judge and pass sentence, it is ours to arrange the meeting. The simplest, quickest way should be used as soon as decently possible. i.e. Jury delivers guilty verdict at 3:PM, execution at 5:PM, in public, for everyone to see.
The screwup in the lethal injection process is just Murphy’s Law asserting itself. Hanging by a rope can fail too. So can a firing squad or Ol’ Sparky (Electric Chair). The heart attack was good in that there will be no law suite on Lockett’s behalf. It’s best to just bury him and step off smartly to continue life.
When OK finally offs Warner, I think I owe a bottle of some suitable adult beverage to that prosecutor.
Humanity certainly owes him.