Imagine you live in a small town somewhere – anywhere. And in that town live a bunch of bad guys, Call them mafia or drug cartels or gangs. A group of powerful bad guys get caught – sometimes on camera – doing bad stuff. Stealing, drug dealing, and violence.
This has been going on for as long as you can remember.
And one day, you see a group of very cocky bad guys from that group, who appear to be looking for a target. You step out on your porch and just look at them. No signs, no words, no posturing – just YOU letting them know that a man lives in this house. They look at you like you are a moron. They feel provoked, but we all know that they were just spoken to with body language. Defiance, in their view and no matter how subtle, is the same as a threat.
The next morning your car is gone. Just like that. You never had this problem in this area before. What the hell!
So you go to your neighbor, who happens to have a doorbell camera. Great person, awesome neighbor, they gladly download and send you the video. So you check it and it is indeed the clowns who walked by yesterday.
What to do?
You go directly to the police department and show them the video.
They ask if you can send it to them, so of course you submit the evidence.
They say “Thank you sir. We will have our detectives look into this.”
So you shake hands and leave.
The next day, the great neighbor who gave you the footage sees you and runs. A day later, you see that person and they scowl at you like you did something wrong to them. You don’t get it…. Until you realize.
Yeah. That.
What to do?
After about two months, and rejected insurance claims, you get pissed. REALLY pissed. You know the sort of feeling. We have all had it a time or two. And the feeling was something like “If I had a flamethrower RIGHT NOW!”
So you decide to start talking to the men in your community. One or two at a time. Your goal is to build a gang to retaliate. Most people in that area have been harmed in one way or the other by these gangs. So you spend about two years gathering a small cohort of like-minded individuals. YOUR gang.
You do some planning and training and your only goal is self-preservation.
One spring evening, one of your crew shoots out a group text- NEED HELP
So you run down the street and around the corner. Armed with a pistol. You arrive and see a gang of the bad guys surrounding your crew member. You show up, and in less than two minutes there’s about six men on your team at the scene.
The bad guys seem stunned. They turn to the threat – YOU – and things escalate. One of them, on camera, pulls a pistol and shoots. He misses, fortunately, but four of your crew shoot him dead.
Police. Cameras. Crowds.
They all immediately chant death threats at you. Police have to hold back the crowd.
One person with a bullhorn (I know, why does somebody at this random scene have a bullhorn?Good question next time you see this).
“Nazi!” Why did you kill him?
Sound familiar?