Deadly Force Authorized

You'll want to carefully consult your local laws to be sure how this works for you, but in most parts of America it would be considered reasonable to shoot someone if they tried to hit you with a crowbar or tire-iron. It would be less reasonable to shoot someone for throwing a milkshake at you, except if it became sufficiently commonplace that milkshakes were really chemical weapons.

Powerline wonders about how long this sort of thing will be allowed to go on. My guess is that it will go on for a while, until someone's patience wears out. Then, when the cost of this sort of behavior suddenly becomes much higher -- and especially if juries refuse to convict people for defending themselves, lowering the probable cost of defensive action -- suddenly it won't be necessary to worry about it that much.

UPDATE: Wretchard makes sense like always.

It's not surprising that the French Terror began with the purge of the moderates and the urgency of virtue. As Robespierre put it, virtuous men have no choice but to employ any means necessary:

If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie.

He also says "the combativeness of the last few days alarmed those accustomed to regarding themselves as civilized." Well. Oddly once I thought of myself that way; I wrote that the essence of a gentlemen was "to bear arms, in defense of country and civilization." Surely I still think that, somewhere in my heart. I've spent many years becoming educated, if not precisely civilized; I pursued and gained advanced degrees in both history and philosophy. Whatever it means to have a civilization, history and philosophy are at the core of it.

More and more, though, I think of the Conan quote from last week, and find that my eyes linger on my axe.