Reply #35: precisely [View All]

[iverglas]

Your experiences are beyond my comprehension
I can't imagine such a terrible violation of my body. I don't feel qualified to respond.

It actually had little to do with "violation of my body". It had to do with experiencing the almost certain probability of death.

And my whole point is that NO ONE is qualified to speak FOR ME, or for others like me who live with the after-effects of that kind of trauma, or of many other kinds of trauma.

And that anyone who proposes the carrying of arms as a way of dealing with those after-effects -- as a way of feeling secure against future harm -- is doing everything I said in that post: exploiting others' experiences and problems for his/her own ends, manipulating those to whom s/he is addressing that exploitation, manipulating the people being exploited, expropriating the voice of people whose own voices need to be heard and many whom have difficulty speaking or making themselves heard, and substituting his/her own words for theirs.

"I will never be a victim again" IS NOT an appropriate response to victimization.

We DO NOT and CANNOT control everything that happens to us -- and adopting the belief that we can, and acting on that belief, can put us and others in more danger than learning to live and deal with the risks of life again in a healthy and appropriate way.

People who have not learned to respond to their experiences in ways that are likely to reduce rather than exacerbate both their stress and the dangerousness of their reactions to it are NOT people whom you want walking around with guns.

And "self-defence" courses are NOT where people learn to deal with their stress and develop appropriate responses to it.

And people who market, and proselytize for, this response to victimization do not have the interests of either the victims or the public at heart.

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