Safer Streets 101: Who is the first responder, really?

October 10, 10:10 AMLA Gun Rights ExaminerJohn Longenecker

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As a former Los Angeles Paramedic, I worked with Police and Sheriff for years long before the concept ‘first responder’ was formed around 1995 by the Department of Transportation as an intermediate level volunteer program. They were called Certified First Responders. The term did not exist in the seventies, and it did not apply to professional career personnel. Even today, EMS and Law Enforcement describe the layman who first intervenes in an emergency as the original first responder, whether a first-aider, layman CPR, or even armed citizen stopping a crime in progress. Professionals often mention that it is the layman who is the first responder and the professional career Police or EMS their backup.

Not a bad perspective. If the citizen elects to help. The instillment of futility in resisting violence is on the increase, and it is counter intuitive. It can be lethal, because it surrenders all possibility of prevailing, and prevailing translates into survival.

Let me again praise those students at UCLA who found the secret second half of violence prevention: mitigating the consequences of a criminal act which broke through prevention measures.

October 8, 2009, a 20-year-old chemistry student stabbed and slashed another student in the neck, severely injuring her. From remarks of historians on scene, immediate action is what saved her life.

Gun owners and liberty purists have been extolling lay intervention for decades in how resistance adds to the first half of the total concept of physical safety: preventing violence by authority and superior force before it can complete its violence. One of the concepts that has been missing from violence prevention seminars and other programs has been student awareness of their own citizen authority to act in de-escalating a crime of violence. Just where the student elects to take that understanding in learning more is up to them; many elect to learn more about their real choices; others don’t.

As I said in my past piece on this, the actually stopping violence is a spirit, a willingness to play the even more active role in your own safety. This begins with the understanding that no one else is responsible for your safety; not legally, not practically, not really at all. You are. Sometimes it doesn’t work optimally, and sometimes it works exquisitely, and it is this which must be encouraged.

The problem liberty purists have with violence prevention centers is that they discourage serious resistance. Instead of encouraging the spirit of resistance when feasible, too many centers discourage it and delegate it entirely. Don’t forget that a majority of states affirms the use of lethal force in the hands of the citizen. What they are affirming is official recognition that the citizen is supreme authority in this nation and that public servants are servants. Forty-eight states believe this. Major cities and some colleges deny this.

Naturally, with the freedom to use lethal force, you need to be very careful and have good judgment, but nearly any good citizen can seek and obtain training in this and obtain experience and skill. You may not be good at this on Day One when you elect to refuse to be a victim, but you plan to get good at it. It is infinitely preferable to have this option and not in the public interest to hide it from citizens or even to discourage it as if resistance contributes to violence. That is to sell futility and it encourages violence.

Herbert George Wells imagined a great deal of the future, reflected well in his 1895 novella, The Time Machine. H. G. Wells was a British Fabian socialist, and his hopes for humanity were socialist in nature. You can find his biography in older encyclopedias, and it is now erased and rewritten to exclude much of his political beliefs. Wells died in 1945 after a lifetime of socialist vision and then his ultimate disappointment in mankind. Biographers have been overly kind to him when they write that Wells was brokenhearted over his loss of faith in humanity toward the end of his life. As with many socialists, Wells got it backwards, and was perhaps disappointed in humanity who rejected his socialism when he should have been delighted in their love of freedom. Humanity rejects slavery on the whole, especially its own enslavement, and socialism is just that with a different package in every generation. Wells made socialism tempting as a solution to the human condition --- his idea of it backed with force — but still, people saw through it as a solution to a problem which does not exist except as a fact of life. Wells suggested in his novella that the race of humanity at the mercy of the masters was a natural breeding of futility in survival. The story ends that futility was not the answer.

Only, survival does not come from surrender, survival comes from will. Hiding the real options in preventing violence — citizen authority to act and the successes of armed adults – is similar in how we deal with facts of life, life’s realities. Violence will always be with us, and seeing it coming, as in profiling, is only the first half; the second half is in what we do about it once it has arrived. Do we stop it, or do we let it come to do what it came to do? Do we teach futility or refusal? In the absence of police, citizens already have some of what they need to stop it, legal authority; they must have all they need to stop it, the willingness, the awareness of their authority, and the means to meaningfully resist it.

When the Time Traveler returned to the future with three books, as narrated by his friend Filby, it is because the Time Traveler saw a glimmer of love of freedom and independence from the predatory society of the Morlocks. Funny how Wells included this ending in the story more than forty-five years before his death, and before his ‘disappointment’ with humanity and its never-ending rejection of dependency on masters.

The UCLA students had only seconds of warning of immediate danger, if that. But, by golly, they made sure that immediate first-aid did not permit the assailant’s violence to stand. They made sure that the wounded student was not going to go quietly (or wait for help), and instead acted to refuse to be a victim. She’s expected to make a great recovery.

In short, sometimes it just takes plain old guts. Futility is not an option. Futility may seem true when it applies to what you don’t know today, but futility is utterly discredited by what you are willing to learn for tomorrow.

And that’s how it starts in both preventing violence and in refusing masters.

Be sure to register for my Safer Streets Newsletter.

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The second amendment is the primary indicator of the overall health --- and mental health --- of the nation. Hear John Longenecker’s interview with Lou Dobbs as a free bonus when you buy the e-book edition of Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns, and get free Bonus #2, an essay on gun control and college violence prevention centers.