Benjamin–your story brought a smile to me. I, too, once lived in an abusive situation and have been beaten and nearly killed by a spouse. (Not Zak, just so everyone knows–he helped get mw away from the abuser.) And I only wish that I had been able to flee to someone who had as much gumption as your grandmother. Actually, my Gram did have that much gumption–she’d have done the same thing had my husband had the temerity to seek me out at her house, but he didn’t. And besides, by the time I did flee, she had become too frail for pan-slinging.

But the story of your grandmother made me smile–thank you so much for sharing.

And better late than never!

He never bothered my aunt or grandmother ever again.

I would amend that to say, predators favor targets who will not defend themselves. It’s helpful to try and put yourself in the shoes of a psychopathic predator (and psychopaths are at a generally constant percentage of the population): they have no empathy, are physiologically incapable of empathy, and truly enjoy watching you suffer. That’s difficult for people like us who feel others’ pain without having to think about it, but it’s the only way we can come about finding a solution to this very personal problem.

The “submission position” was extremely popular in the 90s among liberal intellectuals who believed that owning of a handgun was the hallmark of brutal barbarism in American culture. If an individual is well trained and ready to use a handgun in her self-defense, then might she be able to use it to preserve her life in the event of a violent attack? If her would-be predatory murderers feared that she might have killed them, might they have moved on to a target that they thought was less likely to fight back?

(If a man wants to violently rape a woman, is it okay for her to shoot him, or should she submit to his demands?)

This is a lesson that more liberals are learning every day. (Google John Henderson — atlantanstogether.org) The lesson is: your life and your livelihood are worth defending. Violence ceases to be a “social problem” when you’re looking down the barrel of the wrong end of a gun. At that point, it’s personal, not social, and it’s about you, an individual whose life and livelihood are inherently worth saving from psychopathic predators.

It was the “submit, be weak, don’t fight back” position that kept me from being a liberal in the 90s. From the people that always claimed to be enlightened and superior, it was, to me, an obvious effort to be militantly stupid from a position of safety and prestige, from people whose greatest fear was the possibility of being humiliated among his peers. I think their position was incredibly out-of-touch and elite, something the liberal class always claimed they were not.

Barbara, you clearly get it, and I laud you for it. The liberals who don’t get it tell me that I, a gay man, should submit and be weak to conservative rednecks who might want to kill me. (pinkpistols.org) Maybe that may help some liberals see why I don’t see them as “enlightened” at all.

Sad we sometimes think like this…I am alone most of the time….