The Changing of the Guard

The sheepdogs are emerging.

A reader sent this news story from the UK. I post it in its entirety:

Police fear a decision by the British National Party to put patrols on the streets of Calne will add to the town’s problem with yobs.

The BNP claims it will have patrols working by the end of the week and they will help to stamp out problems with gangs and attacks.

But Inspector Gavin Williams of Calne Police Station said “What people don’t realise is that we will have to police the patrols to make sure nothing untoward is happening.

This will distract us from other jobs meaning we won’t be able to do what we should be getting on with.”

The BNP move comes two weeks after town councillor Dave Bland was injured when teenagers got out of control and just over a week after a 35-year-old man was beaten with a hammer while his girlfriend was held at gunpoint during the violent robbery at the home in The Green.

The 20-year-old female occupant of the flat was pinned to the floor by one of the men while her boyfriend was repeatedly hit around the head and arms with the hammer.

The victims, who were both injured, managed to escape and ran into the street to raise the alarm.

BNP member Robert Baggs says the success of similar patrols in Corsham means there is also hope for Calne.

He said complaints from locals about antisocial behaviour have been instrumental in organising the patrols.

Wiltshire BNP chairman Mike Howson sparked controversy last month when he set up patrols in Corsham.

Mr Howson claims the vigilante patrols were a response to concern by Corsham residents about thugs in the town.

Mr Baggs says the most recent attack illustrates the need for regular patrols.

He said: “Of course the patrols are set to combat anti-social behaviour in the town mostly but we can’t let people worry about stepping out into their own street.

“The only way we can prevent things like this happening is with regular patrols on the street and as the police are not providing that service, we will.

“We tend to ask ex-service personnel to volunteer because they already have the discipline to do the job well.”

See what happens when you disarm the populace? The yobs start using knives against the law abiding. And if you take away the knives? Well, there is already legislation in the works to make legal knives smaller, but let’s just pretend we skip that step and those purportedly in charge move on to eliminate knife-carrying entirely. What then? What will they outlaw after the knives are gone?

How about bricks and baseball bats? Shovels? Will householders have to dig their gardens with teaspoons? Oh, no — can’t have that. As any felon can tell you, teaspoons can be sharpened into lethal weapons. And glass bottles can be broken to use the jagged edge.

The PC legislation against weapons will never, ever work. For a criminal, any given item can be a weapon. Back when the world made more sense, the bad guys who broke into your house were hit over the head in a lethal manner with a handy fireplace poker. But those will be outlawed soon, too. Besides, such violent behavior is already against the law. Let ’em take your stuff, say those who make such laws whilst living in guarded enclaves.

This kind of thinking reminds me of one of my liberal friends who, on giving birth to her son, legislated a total ban on military toys in her homes. It was the ultimate gun control and the ultimate futility. On one occasion, while minding one friend’s toddler, we put away all the usual WMDs that the future Baron was accustomed to use against the bad guys. Along with his toy soldiers and other references to anything military, the cap pistols and water squirters and laser swords went into hiding. They remained there for the interim of peace, love, and understanding that would reign while this young boy was in our care. So what did he do? He used part of his lunch — the fingers of toast — to hold as a gun and proceeded to “shoot” the fB while making bang-bang noises. Of course, a mighty battle across the lunch table ensued. They fell off their chairs in the throes of death agonies several times until admonished to finish their food before someone got hurt.

Thus did a little boy manage to subvert the good intentions of his pacifist mother. Years later, when the fB went to the boy’s house to play, reality had intervened and they played with guns in the woods. In fact, I think this child had a BB gun and a real archery bow before the fB managed to acquire these instruments of destruction.
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Meanwhile, scared parents in London are having their children fitted for knife-proof vests. Bloomberg News carries the story:

Ashgar Jilow used to sell stab-proof vests to nightclub bouncers and security guards at his London military surplus store. Now his clients are kids as young as 10 who fear they’re going to be knifed at school or on the street.

“Some of them are so tiny the vests don’t even fit under their school uniforms,” said Jilow, 55, who sells about three of the 120-pound ($230) vests a week. “Parents don’t know what to do to keep their kids safe.”

Every week in London 52 teenagers are victims of knife crime, according to the Metropolitan Police. A child is stabbed to death in Britain every two weeks and knife killings outnumber gun homicides three to one, said Norman Brennan, a police officer and director of the Victims of Crime Trust.

“Knife crime is out of control and kids carry them like fashion accessories,” Brennan said. The youngest child to be suspended from school for brandishing a blade was just five.

Last week two teenagers were knifed to death in London. Adam Regis, 15, was attacked March 17 on his way home from the movies in Newham, an east London borough that is being regenerated by the 2012 Olympics. He called his girlfriend for help as he bled to death, police said.

Three days earlier, Kodjo Yenga, 16, was stabbed to death as a gang of boys and girls chanted “Kill him, kill him” in Hammersmith, west London, where homes sell for more than 1 million pounds, eyewitnesses said.

Some students have brought machetes, combat knives, swords and sharpened screwdrivers at school, police say. Girls have been caught with blades hidden in lipstick and mascara tubes.

[Note: this kind of weapon-carrying by girls and women is a clear and distinct sign that the culture is in the toilet. No, we don’t want helpless women, but any brain researcher can tell you that lacking testosterone, women simply are not as aggressive as men. Except for the radical feminists. I do believe they eat testicles for breakfast — which explains the rise of a phenomenon known as “mean girls”.]

The Bloomberg story carries some disturbing statistics about knife violence among the young — in London, especially. They don’t mention race, however.

The Wiltshire Gazetteaccount is laughable because the police have had some essential body parts removed and replaced by bureaucratic prostheses. They will have to do more patrolling because of the patrols. That sounds just like our citizen efforts at our border with Mexico. The comments section in the Gazette is long. I didn’t scroll through all 198 responses, but of those I read, there was on one side a strong sense of relief that the BNP was doing something practical, and on the other side the belief that the BNP is hopelessly racist. Only time will tell which view wins out.

The BNP appears to be helping those who cannot help themselves against the anti-social behavior of gang-like “youths.” At least from the descriptions I’ve read by Theodore Dalrymple, this is not about race, nationality or sex. It is about depraved behavior on weekends by adolescents and young men and women who’ve been raised on the dole and have little sense of self or of meaning.

The question becomes why it is that other young men and women cannot protect themselves when set upon by thugs? Or why they go about alone, or in pairs, when they know the statistics of violence in the areas they visit? The thugs create violence because they can. The police are useless and private citizens are impotent. It seems a win/win situation for the bad guys, doesn’t it?

One of our faithful readers mentioned in an email of condolence about my son’s beating a method of self-defence developed by… you guessed it: the always outnumbered Israelis, the ones who say “never again” and mean it. Until he told me about this form of martial arts, I’d never heard of it. Have you?

Here’s the scoop from Wikipedia:

The beginning of the system that would become Krav Maga in Israel was developed in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1930s by Imi Lichtenfeld…

…He first taught his fighting system in Bratislava in order to help protect the Jewish community from Nazi militias. Upon arriving in the British Mandate of Palestine prior to the establishment of the Jewish state, Imi began teaching hand-to-hand combat to the Haganah, the Jewish underground army. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Imi became the Chief Instructor of Physical Fitness and Krav Maga at the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) School of Combat Fitness.

[…]

Prior to 1980, all experts in Krav Maga lived in Israel. That year marks the beginning of contact between Israeli Krav Maga experts and interested students in the United States. In 1981, a group of six Krav Maga instructors traveled to the US to offer demonstrations of the system, primarily at local Jewish Community Centers. This, in turn, led to demonstrations at the New York Field Office of the FBI and the FBI’s Main Training Center. The result was a visit by 22 people from the US to Israel in the summer of 1981 to attend a basic Krav Maga instructor course. The graduates from this course returned to the US and began to establish training facilities in their local areas. Additional students traveled to Israel in 1984 and again in 1986 to become instructors. At the same time, instructors from Israel continued to visit the US. Law Enforcement training in the US began in 1985.

Now this system has spread and there are many classes all over the US. What intrigues me is the fact I’d never even heard of the technique. These people certainly aren’t seeking headlines, though one group has a page for kids. Looking at their methods, you can see why the survival of Israel has continued:

In Krav Maga, there are no hard-and-fast rules. It is not a sport, and there are no competitions. All the techniques focus on maximum efficiency in real-life conditions. Krav Maga generally assumes a no quarter situation; the attacks and defenses are intended to inflict the most pain possible on the opponent in the least amount of time. Groin strikes, headbutts, and other efficient and potentially brutal attacks are emphasized.

The guiding principles for those performing Krav Maga techniques are:

• neutralize the threat
  
• avoid injury
  
• go from defending to attacking as quickly as possible
  
• use the body’s natural reflexes
  
• strike at any vulnerable point
  
• use any tool or object nearby

The emphasis is put on taking the initiative from the attacker as soon as possible.

[…]

It stresses fighting under worst-case conditions or from disadvantaged positions (for example, against several opponents, when protecting someone else, with one arm unusable, when dizzy, or against armed opponents).

It makes sense that this technique would arise from a people that others strive to obliterate. We in America are so soft and protected that we don’t even leave room in the day for physical fitness in our schools anymore.

That may be the case for Europe also, given the rate of unsolved knifings and other violent mayhem. Our young — except for those few who volunteer for military training or take martial arts classes “for fun” — are unique in history for their soft underbellies.

Perhaps a rearrangement in our thinking about the preparation of our children to live in this cowardly new world is now in order. In fact, such thinking is past due if we want them to survive. In the Bloomberg article, one woman had this observation about knife-proof vests for children:

“I wouldn’t blame any parent for giving their child a stab vest if it makes them feel a bit more secure,” said Nancy Odunewu, a pastor whose son Emmanuel, 19, was stabbed to death in Lewisham, southeast London, in November 2006. “If I could have done anything to save my son then I would have.”

A universal sentiment. Meanwhile, our frequent reader told me that as soon as his tiny granddaughter is big enough, she is going to begin Krav Maga classes. Evidently they are readily available in the American southwest, and to judge by the site I found on Google — from which I took the illustration — they have Krav Maga in the UK, too.

Maybe this idea will spread. It would certainly take care of public mayhem and the needless maimings and deaths of children. Come to think of it, maybe it would put an end to the phenomenon of mean girls, too.

What do you think? Would a strong and physically fit citizenry make any difference in our voting patterns?