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Turning to some good news:
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This is a WSJ article about the rise in justified homicides in the US in recent years. Much of it is about "Stand Your Ground Laws." I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of the more lawyer-brained Mottizens on those kind of laws and their proliferation over the past decade or so.
On the culture war angle, this article is maybe the starkest example of "erosion of trust in society" that I've come across. A few of the anecdotes are pretty hair raising. They're cherry picked, I know, but the idea that a kid loses his father over an argument about a a fence and a property line made me sad. The "road range" incident they cover in detail seems like it was unfortunate but when one guy levels a gun at another, there's only one reasonable reaction.
Violence must be tightly controlled for a society to function. This is something that's bone deep in humans. We've developed methods of conflict resolution that fall short of violence for our entire existence as a species. Even within the context of violence, there are various ways of controlling it. Duels and so forth. Even informal ones; basic Bro code dictates that when one guy falls down in a fight, the other one backs off.
But this article hints at the idea that people are zooming past any of that to full lethality. It's impossible to compile the stats to determine if that's actually the case or not, but the larger point remains; in a society with plunging basic trust, you're going to see levels of interpersonal violence spike. How should state laws governing violence respond to this? Stand Your Ground is something I generally still support, but my mind could be changed if simple Bad Neigbor fights end up with more orphans.
I'm pro second amendment and pro self defense, but the one thing that makes me pause is the attitude evinced by a lot of pro-SYG arguments that any physical attack justifies lethal retaliation. I strongly believe that we, the men of today's America, don't do enough mutual combat, and that mutual combat exceptions to law should be expanded rather than retracted.
The historical norm was that boys and men got into fights. No normal male got to adulthood without getting into a scrap, and this might be punished lightly by parents or other authority figures, but the law ignored it unless it reached an extreme. It was understood as a normative value that there was a difference between punching and deadly force or the use of a firearm, and that boys should get into a few scraps in their lives. Instead today we have an attitude that ever getting into a physical fight is rare, and where it does happen it is acceptable to persecute any party to the fight.
In old cowboy movies, which set the moral tone for America from the 20s to the 70s, it was standard that two cowboys would get into a fistfight while wearing guns on their hips, and the one that went for his gun first was the bad guy, who would be prosecuted for murder if he killed the guy punching him. This is corroborated in well researched books and first hand historical accounts as the standard in the old west. A SYG standard that allows you to kill someone for punching is antithetical to the cowboy code.
Instead we've replaced traditional ethics with a feminized world where all physical contact is treated as a deadly threat, where boundaries are set such that all fighting is illegal and both morally and physically dangerous because of that boundary. We're raising our boys to act like scared old women.
Boys getting into fights in school has seen an unprecedented decline in the past thirty years
This is an entire human experience, universal to males in the past, now rare. Symptom or cause of the feminization of society, you decide, I lean towards both. Zero tolerance policies towards violence have been a disaster.
There's always somebody in these conversations who talks about weird edge cases. You could get pushed and fall over and crack your skull open, you could get killed by one punch because there was some blood clot in your brain waiting to burst onto the scene. I ask these people: how did our ancestors ever manage to live? They must have been dying left and right from unlucky punches. That doesn't seem to be the case, it's an almost unattested to phenomenon before modernity.
The rare possibility of physical violence is a good thing for social regulation. So much of obnoxious behavior we see today is the result of its lack. Over expansive definitions of self defense that effectively make any form of physical violence a justification for homicide will make this worse, not better.
"So get back in there and keep boxing with that mugger, and don't worry, I'll make sure your health insurance provider knows you were just upholding the cowboy code."
Its important to note that there is a very real difference between mutual combat and sucker punching or mugging. The former is a thing almost solely practiced by co-ethnics of equal class. The latter is typically engaged in by the underclass, and is often cross-racial and cross-class.
It demonstrates the issue with an over-formalized legal system where common sense is basically banned. Imagine the following argument at an appellate court:
"So on July 9, 2025 two white boys started brawling in Jim's pub and Johnny was winning, then Tommy pulled a gun and shot him. You charged Tommy with Murder. But then outside Jim's Tommy's brother Timmy got punched in the face by Jaron and he shot Jaron right in the heart killing him. And you didn't charge Timmy with nothing?"
"Yes. Those are totally different"
"How."
"Common sense."
You see how this isn't going to fly when like 8/10 law grads are progressives and have been for decades.
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Who mugs somebody by punching them? I guess it's not impossible, and maybe if by mugging we mean something more like purse snatching, but every mugger I've ever heard of had a knife at least. At which point we're out of the universe of stuff I was even remotely talking about, if someone pulls a knife on you that's an obvious deadly threat.
Literally everyone if you had your way.
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Strong-arm robbery is the most common sort according to the FBI.
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Any real fight, even with no weapons, is a fight for your life. That doesn't mean that all physical violence is a fight like that though, but the attacker needs to signal somehow that real bodily harm is not the intention. For example a catfight with slapping, nail scratching, and biting is unlikely to be truly dangerous, but getting ganged up on or attacked out of the blue is extremely dangerous.
Showing you have a weapon conspicuously and not using it is a good signal of your intentions.
This definitely isn't true. Under the law physical contact doesn't automatically justify self defense, and there are many cases where a physical attack was made and the retaliation was not found to be self defense in court.
I'm smashing the doubt button extremely hard.
I don't believe there is actual evidence that getting into fights leads to better outcomes for the kids in any measurable way, while there is strong evidence it leads to troublesome discussions, accidental injuries, and scrutiny. So there's all the incentive to push people not to cause problems.
gestures broadly The proof of the pudding is in the eating. We're in the middle of a society wide experiment in kids not getting into fights, and we sit on the internet and bemoan the effeminacy of our world.
What discussions, what scrutiny? As for accidental injuries, you can't live your life never taking a risk of anything.
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As @FtttG said, those deaths are mostly from people falling and hitting their head on concrete after getting punched, so it makes sense it was more uncommon in pre-modern, more rural times.
But regardless, I think you're romanticising the past. Even if they couldn't easily slip and die from slipping on asphalt, our ancestors absolutely died left and right from stupid, violent deaths. Just look at the homicide rate over the last 750 years. Or further back, how 21% of men in Amazon hunter-gathered tribes died violent deaths.
Getting in a fight (outside of the well-regulated environment of combat sports, although even then some like boxing are needlessly dangerous), has absolutely no benefit and is associated with impulsive, low-IQ criminals, drug addicts and drunks for a reason. What do you get from escalating it to a violent fight that words couldn't express? And you have no guarantee, especially if it's a stranger, that your opponent won't suddenly pull a knife (or a gun) and kill you.
What obnoxious behavior do we see today that would be fixable by violence from random citizens? If you're talking about say, mental ill or drugged addicted homeless people roaming many western urban centers, if the government's solution is to let anybody punch them as opposed to putting them in mental hospitals or homeless shelters, that would be to me an abject failure of government and I would not feel the least bit safer. Vigilantism is never a good thing and is a sign the police and authorities are a failure.
Is declining rates of violent death adjusted for 1) rising average ages and 2) improved medical care?
I don't think that adjustion should be done. 1. Rising average ages means people live longer, and that longer life means more opportunities to encounter violence. An old man might be less likely do get into violence, but before he was old, he was a young man for as long as his ancestors were, so all else being equal, he should get into more violence over his longer lifespan.
If there's a positive effect, it's probably from the effects on society from having more older people around too cool down and dilute young hotheads - but why would you control away social structure?
Also, people who didn't die violently live longer, so there's causality in the other direction (declining rates of violence cause rising average ages) and you're controlling away what you're testing for.
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Street harassment generally, but all forms of obnoxious public behavior which are performed with the full knowledge that if a citizen hits you, it's a huge headache even if everyone ultimately agrees you were at fault.
It used to be well understood that a bum or a vagrant or a drunk catcalling your wife or girlfriend or daughter or sister was ample justification for you, as a man of honor, to smack him good and hard. Bums and vagrants and drunks learned to keep their mouths shut. Now they feel no need to restrain themselves, no citizen is going to risk a felony arrest, becoming a felon over it. Or a civil lawsuit that will drain their bank account.
The problem with this being that if one is already a felon, or broke, the threat is much less, so you are free to act. We live in a society where a huge number of punishments used to keep people in line, things like credit scores and bankruptcy and even felony convictions, matter far more to one tier of citizens than they do to another. The result is to enable the worst parts of society while restraining the best parts.
This goes back to so many things that we talk about on themotte. Why do women feel no need of a man for protection? Because it's not like the average PMC male offers much protection anyway. Why do men feel so helpless? Because they are forced to endure obnoxious behavior without helping themselves.
How can we bemoan the loss of honor, while this thread is full of criticism of honor cultures and the violence they lead to?
Because honor cultures are objectively awful. The states where honor culture dominates, like the Middle East, tend to be poor, violent and oppressive places to live. I personally have no desire to live in a society where men are quick to resort to physical violence when their feel their honor threatened, and I'm happy blood feuds, honor killings, and even schoolyard fights are no longer accepted or commonplace.
The reason why "respectable" men don't beat up street harassers isn't just because of the legal risk, but because you might very well end up losing. Even if you're in peak physical condition and a trained martial artist, what if the vagrant pulls a knife? What if you win this time, but he comes back with 5 of his buddies? What's the point of risking potentially a life-changing, even fatal injury, because of what, a comment? The risk of escalation is too great compared to just walking on, ignoring the catcall, or just sticking to more middle-class areas.
And what if a woman is walking alone? Needing a male chaperone seems like social regression, it's a good thing that women don't need to rely on an individual man for protection. I'd much rather have a well-trained police force and justice/health system that is allowed to do its job.
I mean, I don't engage with street harassers for many reasons, but the chance that I would lose is very low on that totem pole. In a fair fight, I have approximately 0.1% chance of losing a fight to the average street harasser in an objective way. However, even if I win, in modern America, I lose. I am banned from using the proper tools to take care of this fellow, a billy club or a gun, so I would have to fight him hand to hand. That means I am going to, at the very least, get very stinky fighting him. I might also be out some expensive clothing. I mostly am wearing suits when I see street harassers, after all. The legal risk, is of course very high. George Floyd and Ahmad Arbery are good examples of this.
I am a bit confused by your mental model here where you think normal men confronting homeless creepers is not a thing because they fear to lose the fight. Its not a thing for me. Its not a thing for my brother or anyone else who was on the wrestling team at our high school. The fear is the legal shit, and the fact that its not worth it because they smell so bad. And also they prolly give you AIDS or some shit if they successfully bite you.
Thus, the gentleman's billy club is the solution.
Depends what you mean by harassers don't it? Someone who's homeless and severely ill isn't who I'd worry about. I'd be more concerned about the gangs of predators who will go for anything but a fair fight.
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What’s the likelihood that it will be a fair fight though?
I’ll admit I’ve never lived in a city where I’ve encountered the kind of aggressive, mental ill homeless mentioned here. Maybe that population is sufficiently malnourished that you can easily beat them with little effort, but the street harassment I’ve seen has mostly been from young men who looked in normal physical shape, often in groups.
Well we come from different backgrounds I suppose, my high school did not have a wrestling team and the men I know are middle class guys working office jobs who have never been in a real physical fight.
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This is true, but have you ever seen a small bird chasing a red tailed hawk out in the woods? It happens all the time. Why? Surely, in a Pokemon style fight to the death, the hawk would win nine times out of ten, right? But, the hawk has to do this every day, probably a couple times a day, the smaller bird only once. If the hawk gets into fights every time it wants to eat, he will eventually lose. The same with the street harasser. If he wants to spend all day harassing, if there's no risk of violence he's fine. If there is any risk of violence against him, it becomes untenable, because he will get unlucky eventually.
How is it any different than if she walks alone now?
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Say, if you were a single white woman riding alone at the back of the bus, and it happened
A) in the 1930s, she'd get some looks: the bus driver would pull her to the front, and if a psychotic vagrant drew a knife on her every man aboard would jump him
B) in the 2020s, she'd be left alone, and die alone as everyone else walked away
Which society feels healthier?
Is that actually true? There's a reason that statistics are better than anecdotes. And if you were, say, 10 years old in 1939 you'd be 96 years old today. It's unlikely you've experienced this yourself even as a statistical anomaly.
I'm pretty sure that for survival of the community reasons the african american community did not like their fellows harassing white women.
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That's only a part of it. The problem is if you lose you go to the hospital, but if you win you go to jail. Lots of respectable men have a breaking point at which they'll suffer the risk of losing.... but a much higher breaking point if they lose either way.
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We're talking about interactions that take half a minute at most. What good is a police force supposed to do? Are you gonna assign a cop to every unchaperoned woman? Flood police departments with complaints about "that man on the street who catcalled me"? How do you actually visualize effective deterrence of lowlifes from harassing people?
Honor culture has its flaws, but its benefits are that low-inhibition lowlifes are going to have their own "what-ifs" to consider when they think of marring someone's day with comments or worse. In my opinion, it's not the respectable men who must stick to middle-class areas. It's the disrespectable men who must stick to low-class areas, and if they do wander outside, they should behave properly.
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Yeah the current Western system has very little ability to corral somebody who's already committed to pressing the defect button.
Most deterrents require some level of capitulation and the worst case is generally prison which in an absolute historical human welfare standard isn't really that bad.
And yet fewer people with IQs above room temperature press the defect button than "ever" before. (Crime has fallen a lot from the Days of Lead but isn't quite back down to the 1950's low)
In the current year, crime isn't a problem of insufficient deterrence. It is a problem of people so stupid and impulsive that they require a different kind of deterrence - like immediate corrective violence by the nearest available Good Ol'Boy or a Iain M Banks style slap drone.
Phase 1 of modern crime control is to minimise the number of such people:
Phase 2 is to make co-operate the socially normal default (this is the "broken windows" concept) Phase 3 is to make the deterrents we do have sufficiently swift and certain enough that at the margin the IQ needed for them to work on you is lower.
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The honorable fistfight is best suited for an environment like school. It includes a level of trust and familiarity. There is some authority figure nearby who can keep things from getting out of hand. Most of this is not replicated in the real world. Most physical altercations occur between strangers in a bar, a traffic dispute, or a misunderstanding in the street. Sometimes in those places, like a bar, there's a mutual understanding, but more often there is not.
What part of it do you consider expansive now?
Exactly. Like, if you try to kick my ass because you missed a turn, you might wind up dead. When I don't know anything about you except you are incapable of regulating yourself after you've fucked up a traffic signal, there's not even a partial desire to test my strength or your honor. I don't trust you. The people committing 4 million simple batteries a year don't deserve the benefit of the doubt from me.
Let me kick your ass a little, it'll be good for ya might be convincing from a Certified Mottezan. I suspect you're not going to break my ribs if you've managed to knock me out. The real world is not made up of Mottezans. In my experience, people that escalate petty disputes to physical confrontation are exactly the kind of people you cannot trust to regulate themselves or use appropriate judgment.
We're long past the point where you can or should trust a stranger to know when you're beat-- if such a world ever did really exist. The situations where a fistfight is good for you are rather limited. The situations where encouraging fistfights ends up as a good thing for society even more limited. Are fistfights more justifiable in some cases of lethal self-defense? Sure, you shouldn't whip out a pistol when Jack, your roommate in college, finds out you've been sleeping with his girlfriend. How many of those circumstances actually occur in one's life? What kind of demographics most frequently escalate fistfights to homicide?
I don't think boys should be expelled from school for getting into a fistfight. Zero tolerance policies are dumb. Encouraging physical violence is not going to improve our society, at least not in any way that a well-armed society can't.
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To quote myself:
Punching someone when they're standing on a concrete footpath presents a vastly higher risk of death than punching someone when they're standing in a field or on a dirt track.
...You're basing your entire argument on surface hardness? The fields in our area are full of rocks, if you hit your head on one of those it's much worse (sharper) than concrete.
I think the fact that more people live in built-up environments now than they used to has a major impact on how they behave, yes.
Okay, but if you fall over in one of those fields, what is the likelihood of you hitting your head on a rock vs. if you fall over on a footpath?
What's the likelihood of serious injury if you fall on concrete?
This doesn't pass the smell test. Fistfights declined in barrooms, and in cities as well as in the newly urbanized areas.
I'm not saying it's the only contributing factor: all kinds of violence have declined over time. But I think it's one of many, and it's an important consideration to bear in mind before touting the virtues of "renormalising" (for want of a better word) casual fistfights, which is the context in which I was originally discussing this. Fistfights on concrete are more likely to be lethal than fistfights on grass or dirt tracks; a higher proportion of people live in built-up areas now than in the past; ergo, all things being equal, an unarmed fistfight in 2025 is more likely to end with one participant dead than an unarmed fistfight in 1925.
Does anyone have even a bad study or effort showing this to be true, or are we just operating off intuition? People fall on concrete all the time, it is very rarely fatal. At what level of fatal risk are we comfortable considering a shove or a haymaker a deadly attack?
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Only mostly in jest: "The ADA and its consequences..." (the ADA has driven a lot of paving of previously-dirt walking paths).
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This was a very ritualized combat. It was between peers. The greatest age/strength difference was between a young braggart/fool and a tough grizzled man -- anyone throwing a punch at e.g. an elderly gimpy bartender was a bad guy, unless it was an accident for comic relief. It was obvious a fistfight was going to start, and very often the men would remove their gunbelts first. I seriously doubt it was that formal in the real Old West, but the movie version doesn't resemble what gun rights advocates call something worthy of lethal self defense today. None of the stories in the article resemble that; they all involved the offender having a lethal weapon, and in the only case it wasn't a gun, the defender was elderly. The protest guy also doesn't resemble that.
I think few gun rights advocates think you should be able to engage in mutual unarmed combat and then lawfully pull a gun and shoot the other guy because you're losing. But while self-defense opponents like to bring up that scenario, first of all they don't want the mutual unarmed combat to be lawful at all. And second, I think it's pretty rare. Less rare with a knife (because as @BreakerofHorsesandMen noted, a lot of people aren't very honorable), but it's the gun cases which tend to make the news. The cases brought up here are all easily distinguishable from that.
I'm not discussing any particular case here, I'm not interested in playing games with fact patterns. What concerns me is the cultural message sent. I think we need to enable and encourage more physical confrontation with less fear of legal consequences as a result. We need to encourage more scenarios where punching someone is legally justified. We can't do that if we also say, any punch is a deadly assault proportional to a gunshot. Those two theories are incompatible.
What I'm pointing to is a general attitude we're inculcating in our society, in our young men, that physical violence is completely outlawed and impossible. Quotes from throughout this thread, posters untagged I'm (ironically) not trying to start something with anyone:
And the problem with inculcating this kind of "punching someone is a deadly assault, is never the answer, it is totally verboten on pain of being shot legally" is that it enables all manner of obnoxious behavior that can't be solved otherwise.
There's a lot of talk throughout this thread by pro-gun folks that it's important for citizens to be able to defend themselves from deadly assaults. I agree. I also think that citizens need to be able to defend themselves from obnoxious behavior, not with a gun, but with a fist. A world in which I can slug someone for harassing me in the street is a world with less harassment in the streets, a world in which I can't slug someone for any reason unless they punch me first is one with more harassment in the streets.
This seems like it should be totally justified to me. If we say that a punch is a deadly assault, and that if the punched fall down they're justified in opening fire, is one where running up to someone and being obnoxious is legalized.
And you're ignoring shared social norms.
I'll be the first person to admit I think people need to get punched in the face more, or atleast know what physical combat, be it fisticuffs or whatnot, actually feels like and be capable of such.
That said, one of the first things my dojo drilled in my head, with the potential for sparring against people that might not even be able to speak the same language I have, is, when disengaging from sparring, always step back. The answer should be pretty obvious - you're keyed up, blood pumping, riding an adrenaline high, and stepping into someone's space is basically an aggressive maneuver that could result in a broken nose without them even intending to do so.
Reflexes are a hell of a drug.
So. Mutual combat? Fine. But it has to be ritualized, it needs to be strict, and it needs to be understood, by both parties, there are lines you do not cross.
And we definitely don't have that, and likely will never have that, given the current social situation in America as a whole.
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Then you're basically just blowing smoke.
Discouraging self-defense by gun does not get you to "more scenarios where punching someone is legally justified". You can tell because those who discourage self-defense don't want punching anyone to be legally justified; instead, what they want is for people to submit to being attacked and then call the police (who will typically do little to nothing). This does not get you nearer to your desired state.
Encouraging self-defense by gun doesn't interfere with getting to "more scenarios where punching someone is legally justified" either. Unless the law can't be made to support the complexities I referred to in my previous post. Which is quite possible -- but in that case, we're forced to choose between "law-abiding people must accept victimization by physically-tougher criminals" and "one can defend oneself with lethal force against criminals".
I'm not sure we are. Currently, I'm already victimized by both the physically tougher and the physically weaker miscreants, until they cross the line where I can shoot them I don't really have any right to defend myself from obnoxious behavior.
I should be clear: I'm all for self defense, I have a permit to carry (though I rarely carry), and I strongly believe in SYG against deadly threats. The only argument I'm having here is whether a punch or other light physical assault is automatically a deadly threat which justifies deadly self defense. The answer is no, and it's not just no, it's no and saying yes deeply undermines the fundamental basis of human civilization.
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