I Move That we Shoot the Burglar

Here’s a new edict for you. Please pass it on to the liberal press.

Henceforth, news organizations are to stop referring to people who defend themselves as “vigilantes.”

Here is Merriam-Webster’s definition of “vigilante”: “a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate); broadly : a self-appointed doer of justice.”

Okay, let’s think this through. If you break in my house, am I a member of a volunteer committee? ‘Fraid not. Unless you consider me a committee. I’m not that fat yet. Now let’s consider the broad definition. Am I “self-appointed”? Again, no. Under common law and, in my case, statutes, the government grants me the right to defend myself. In other words, the government appointed me.

I’ll tell you a funny consequence of the misuse of the term “vigilante.” It’s starting to give the word a positive sound. If shooting a rapist or burglar and saving someone from harm makes you a vigilante, then a vigilante is a person to admire.

I just saw a Drudge-linked story about storeowners defending their business from armed thieves. “Vigilante Justice,” the headline says. No, Northeastern wuss journalist. The correct term is “legal self-defense.”

So much of the friction between Red and Blue states comes from provincial city dwellers on the coasts, trying to impose their culturally inappropriate rules and values on the rest of us. Remember the 55 speed limit? Not much of a hardship if you live in New York, you’re 50 years old, and you’ve never had a driver’s license. What if you live in Montana and commute 75 miles to work? Quite a bit different.

The other day I saw Dagen McDowell, who works in Manhattan, preaching almost hysterically about how we needed eleven-dollar gasoline. I wonder how she’d feel about that if a) she wasn’t rich, and b) she lived sixty or eighty miles from her office. In a place where you can’t just jump on a commuter train.

It ought to be pretty obvious that we need one sort of laws in Manhattan and another in “Jesusland.”

Anyway, I have forbidden the inappropriate use of the term “vigilante,” and I would appreciate it if everyone in the world would begin complying immediately.