"What Would You Do If ..."

Connie Shultz, wife of Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and real journalist writes about a woman who was carjacked and did everything right:

In this story, Ms Yee did almost everything exactly right, and she did do everything that needed to be done. The only thing she could have done better would have been to hit the "panic button" on her car key. Hard to think of everything ...

It's interesting to consider a case like this in the context of the current gun debate. What would have happened if Ms Yee had had a gun? Best case, it would have played out exactly like it did. Problem is, she had a gun pointed at her. She had no time to get her own (theoretical!) gun into action. Grabbing for it would probably have caused the attacker to shoot. If somehow she did manage to get her own gun out, she'd be in a gun battle at zero range, inside a car. Bad, bad, bad.

Problem with the pro-gun types is that they talk in terms of imaginary scenarios. It's far more useful to look at real-life situations like this one. The main problem with the scenarios that the pro-gun types use is that they ignore the time it takes to get a defensive gun into action -- a dead-flat minimum of two seconds. On the street, a heck of a lot can happen in that two seconds, and experienced robbers know how to keep a situation ambiguous until the last possible instant.

Another problem with the pro-gun types is that they assume that they will always be able to identify a situation requiring deadly force. Cops have trouble with this one. Harmless street person panhandling or robber? Life is ambiguous. Deal with it.

I may do a post later with my views on self-defense and martial arts. I have a lot of experience with American style wrestling, Judo, and Aikido. I have taught (as an assistant, not a primary) women's self defense. My opinions on the subject are pretty much The Common Wisdom, with some additions from experience, plus some things that are probably so "common wisdom" that they never get mentioned.

Graveyard Spiral

There's a nasty situation that small plane pilots can get into called a "graveyard spiral". The plane is losing altitude, so the pilot tries to pull up. But it's not in a dive, it's in a spiral. Pulling the nose up just tightens the spiral. This continues until the plane hits the ground or the spiral gets so tight the wings come off. This is, according to the best guess, what killed JFK Jr.

To get out of a graveyard spiral, the pilot has to ignore the seat of his pants, which is telling him he's headed straight for the ground, and get the wings level. At this point, the plane is no longer in a spiral and the pilot can pull out of the dive.

Try to do it backwards and you're dead.

We're in the economic equivalent of a graveyard spiral. Unemployment is high, so consumer demand is low. With low demand, businesses lay off more people, which reduces demand. Unemployed people don't pay income tax, so tax revenues go down. Spending doesn't, so deficits go up. And because there's a Democrat in the White House, the Republicans get all bent out of shape over "the Deficit". (Funny, deficits weren't important under Reagan or either Bush.)

Trying to "fix the deficit" by cutting Government spending is like trying to pull the nose up in a graveyard spiral. It won't work and will only cause a serious crash. Cut Government spending, we lose more jobs, which reduces tax revenues, which increases the deficit ... Economically, this is called "Hooverism". It's what Herbert Hoover did to try and fix the Great Depression. Didn't work, bigtime. It won't work any better now than it did then.

To break out of the spiral, we need to put folks back to work. We have the questionable advantage that we've been deferring infrastructure maintenence for far too long, so there's a lot of work to do. We also have the real advantage that folks ::cough::China::cough:: are willing to lend us money at, effectively, negative interest rates.

Once we get people back to work, we can go back and look at the deficit again. Ideally, all we'll have to do is sit back and watch it shrink as the economy picks up.