Three young men and a 17-year-old have been arrested in a string of attacks and burglaries against the Amish in northeastern Ohio after bragging about what they did, authorities said Monday.
The four were involved in a string of break-ins targeting mostly Amish-owned businesses beginning in May, said Chief Deputy Scott Hildenbrand of the Geauga County sheriff’s office.
But they came away with just change in the break-ins because the cash registers were empty, so they decided to rob Amish residents in the county east of Cleveland, Hildenbrand said.
Just over a week ago, a group of masked men chased an Amish man and his girlfriend riding in a buggy before they were able to get away. That same night, two Amish men in a buggy said they were attacked by masked men swinging baseball bats.
Now this story at it’s heart is very pedestrian. A band of feral children have been committing crimes in a community. Nothing new here, but personally I have some stuff to talk about.
I personally abhor violence. I don’t like it at all. As a teen I got into a few fights as my dumbshit teen hormones were raging. Some I won, some I lost, some were draws. They weren’t many, and they generally stopped when I started to get my adult feet under me, as did the people I hung out with. Still every fight I got into made me feel horrible, win lose or draw. Most steamed from arguments or male pissing contests on who was the cock-of-the so-called rock. I have never actually been in a situation where I was justified in laying a hand on another person.
So fights over dumb crap is just that, dumb crap. It solves nothing, and it generally hurts everybody. That’s the case with these little beasts. That’s also the general case with gang culture in America. It’s the worst of the worst and I condemn it with all my heart.
On the other hand, I carry a gun. Why do I carry a gun if I hate violence so much? Because if somebody is going to use violence against me, or somebody close to me, and I can’t avoid it with sensible means, the only reasonable solution to a violent attack is swift and ruthless violence until the attack is stopped, and then I can go back to my non-violent ways.
You see one thing I hate almost as much as violence is pacifism. The Amish are pacifists and generally preach pacifism even when attacked by violent outsiders. I simply don’t see this philosophy as reducing violence, just making sure the people who are violent and aggressive will essentially be REWARDED for their behavior.
I doubt you would see much of this crap if Old Jedidiah pulled an axe handled out of his buggy and beat the monkey-piss out of these goons. The Amish are an agrarian culture that doesn’t use much or any automated systems, this means even the older ones are strong like oxen, which would be awesome if they weren’t pacifists.
Oh yeah if they’re anything like the Amish here in PA, then those old farmers and craftsmen would be able to beat the tar out of a bunch of kids easily. In some respects I admire their pacifism, since it can’t be easy staying that calm in the face of a threat. But ultimately I agree with you that it doesn’t solve anything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o07ecRzkLuM
Yup, northern Trumbull County, mentioned in the article, was where I was yesterday. The Amish are great people, hard workers, physically tough SOBs, but, yup, pacifist by conviction. There was a reported case of Amish-against-Amish violence a year or so ago, but I’m not sure if the victims offered a defense (fists? whip?). I’ll take a wild guess pacifism works where the Amish are few, their “English” farming neighbors even fewer, and citified ex-urbanites non-existent.
Compare convenience store owners thirty miles away in Warren and Youngstown. Many are of Mideast descent. I’ll over-generalize–they will lawfully shoot (and sometimes kill) robbers to protect themselves and customers. Ohio has “felony murder”, so accomplices to robbery have been prosecuted for murder when one of their own was killed lawfully by a defender. The theory, I think, is that if you engage in bad conduct with others that a reasonable person would think could lead to a killing, you’re responsible for that killing, even though you didn’t fire the shot.
Long story short: the gun is a tool of civilization among those store owners. I don’t know how you can say anything else. The anti-gunners seem so full of cocktail-party criminology they can’t see how the lawful use of firearms is a good thing that allows other good things to happen, like buying groceries at a nearby store. Keep on rockin’, bro’.
BTW-can anyone imagine compulsory pacifism and mandatory civil disarmament as a good, workable idea with no unintended consequences? (I have a shrewd neighbor who calls Prohibition, another whacky utopian idea, the Mafia Empowerment Act of 1919.)
One comment:
The Amish aren’t pacifists because they think it will reduce violence. Quite a few of them will tell you that while a pacifist response might cause the odd hoolligan to rethink his ways due to the power of example, most violent hooligans will simply see that as weakness.
They are pacifists because they think anger and hurting other people (even in self defense) is a sin. And committing that sin is (to them) a worse outcome than a beating.