Last chance I had to kill somebody I didn't

This probably has no place on your guy's nice Rand Paul forum but I have this highly complex set of feelings about weapons and who should or shouldn't own them or use them or whatever.

See I think I started out as a pacifist but then I got drug into law enforcement through the back door and I ended up being....well technically my title at one point was an Officer but what it really meant was I was a bounty hunter and our agency provided "law enforcement consulting" which means everything from tactical training to directing traffic to picking up dead bodies in the desert and even to "taking down fuges" which is like the guys you see on America's Top Most Wanted and all this crap.

What drug me in was two things: it's easy to get convinced that there's bad guys out there and the only thing between us and them is us. And these guys are bad so we need guns. And hand cuffs and mace and TASERS and batons and tonfas and the super-size kick-your-ass flashlights and all the nasty "hurt you" stuff.

What drug me in was I never met a man like Chief. He was made of steel, he never, ever shrunk from a fight, he always always did what was right even if that meant breaking the rules. He was the toughest man I have ever known but then he was capable of tremendous acts of mercy and compassion. It's hard to describe but my whole concept of what the measure of a man is took this huge step up.

What would you do if you had an opportunity to be an almost perfect warrior? I dedicated heart and soul. And I became a highly effective warrior. And I was already an EMT, I was already a prepper, this was tying it all together. And all the sudden my minivan became "TU2". Tactical Unit 2 and it was tricked out to be the "sled".

The "dead sled". The "stiff skiff". The "bone box". We got all these terms for it cause you need a sense of humor to deal with this stuff sometimes. I tell you what. I have trouble remembering faces of living people but I remember the names of every DB I ever picked up.

DB is insustry shorthand for "dead body" but we have to identify them. Every single one of their names is permanently burned into my memory. So I like the term "last taxi" better than "stiff skiff".

I'm your last taxi ride and you are going in style. And I don't exactly know why this makes a diffrernce but Chief had us give you a pillow. Like when we gather you up and put you on the sled, we put a pillow under your head. It's like the last favor somebody can do for you. And there is this really crazed sense of honor in it. It's so deeper than the honor we get from perfecting martrial arts, it's like it's opposite. We get to bear your body with dignity and we know that you are somebody's son, somebody's mom or pop, somebody who MATTERED.

So that's the way we treat you when you are dead. We extricate you from whatever situation you got yourself into and we put a pillow under your head and we contact your next of kin and hand you over. With dignity and respect. And there is honor in this. Great honor.

It just happens to be pretty nasty because you get dead people juice on you but I was an EMT first and I learned that if it comes out of a human body you will end up wearing it. Blood, puke, poop, jizz, spit, you will end up wearing it. It's gross but you just kinda deal with it because you have a human life to save. So it's not that far a jump to get dead people juice on you.

Are you still with me because I am getting to a point here. Sorry for taking so long to tell this one.

So here I am in all of this and I'm still in tactical training. At this point I'm at "Tac-2" which is applied martial arts with guns and I'm getting good. Really good. When the second gen of Glocks came out, holy cow, I don't even have to look. Holes appear right where I want them.

And now I have become a full-cycle warrior. I can hurt you, I can heal you, I can bear your body with honor to your family and I have assumed almost god like stature. As a warrant officer we have the respect of the law and the courts but we operate with a very wide lattitude and we get to basically do what we want.

But all this time, there was this still, small voice saying "do you remember humility?"

And it was the combo, that voice always says "because I can remind you". And I knew it was coming right? You know sometimes in life when you push the boundaries, you know something is coming but until you find out you keep doing it anyways.

I actually did see calamity coming (pride cometh before a fall and we had an over-abundance of pride) so I tried to turn my guns into blades.

Literally I just stopped carrying guns and I started carrying blades again ON THE PREMISE that blades in Arizona aren't automatically considered to be weapons, it's more like an artisan thing like hey that's a really nice blade, can I check it out?

Like we literally stand on lines in supermarkets and say wow that is a mighty fine blade there, mind if I check it out? and the bearer is like sure man totally. And then we start talking about the handle and the wonderful hand crafted bead work on the sheath and do you see what we just did?

We took the weapon into art and then all the sudden nobody feels threatened. All the sudden we evoke a sense of cowboy romance and history. So now they don't feel alienated, they feel included.

And this is one thing you can do with a blade that we never, ever do with a gun. If somebody asks if they can see our blade we just say yeah sure and hand it to them. They are like wow this is cool and they hand it back. We never ever do that with guns unless we know them right?

OK so thanks for listening so far and here's my final thing. I got into a fight. And it was kinda bad. I did try to walk away, it got rough, I got an escourt back to my residence and then this guy came after me again. In my own home. And I didn't have an escape route, my home was in the corner up against a chain link fence and this guy (never mind his name or motive) is attacking me.

And I have a loaded .40 cal sitting right next to me and I'm wearing a Buck 120 blade. And my short sword is in easy reach. And this guy wants to hurt me.

What would you do?

What I did is not what I would advise most of you to do.  If you were my wife at home alone I'd say pick up the .40 cal and fire as fast as you can pull the trigger. But my math at that moment went completely inverted. What I knew is I have to go out and face this guy because my objective was NOBODY IS GONNA DIE TODAY. So now my job is to get between this guy and the gun.

Along the way out the door I drew my blade and I flung it as far as I could because I don't know a non violent way to use a blade in a fight. So that was two less things to worry about. Now I got a major problem cause I have to face this guy with no gun and no blade and he's bigger than I am.

Fortunately on my path is a wood pile and my hand first closes on this really stout piece of maple and my hand was telegraphing conficence through this maple, I swear this branch sang to me and said PICK ME AND WE WILL KICK THIS GUY'S ASS and I felt it. It would take me a microsecond to lay this guy out. One swing. But I did this calculation and was like no, this will kill him and we know what happens when somebody dies. Only we get to say we're sorry. And we don't like sorry.

So for real, I tell my hands to find a smaller weapon. So my hands found this little branch. It was really more of a fly swatter. So thus armed, I sally forth to meet my aggressor.

Yes, behold the great warrior Old_Creep. So I tried to swat this guy in the face and he returned the favor with just brain-bashing blows but I played a trick I never played before.

I went into a ball and started yelling for help. And I yelled about as hard as I could and I was shouting I'M NOT FIGHTING BACK GET HIM OFF ME. And I had confidence in the neighbors. We done them lots of favors including making sure they have food, getting to school and making it through.

So they all came running up like John Wayne and the caverly and pulled this guy off me.

And hey, he beat me pretty good but we used to literally pay people to try to hurt us in dojo. I had worse from better. I have been TKOd 3 times in fights and this guy hit like a pussy compared to what I was used to. So I just let him hit me. He did get some good shots in.

At one point I couldn't resist tripping him and I actually felt sorry when he face planted into gravel. I almost helped him up but he resumed trying to beat me into a coma.

So I spent a while in jail trying to sort that whole mess out.

I'd say to any one of you just shoot the guy but then life becomes a whole lot more complicated. The fact is you get into a fight these days you already lost.

That's the big one here. If you get into a fight these days you already lost. If there's any value to my story it's how I managed to de-escalate the situation or at least keep weapons out of it. It could have been a lot worse. And there's only one promise I made that day, nobody is gonna die. Not today. Not here.

Promise kept.

Now you decide. Does that make me a wise warrior or a wimpy warrior or just an old creep?