I'm going to touch on a touchy subject--the subject of race.
Larry Auster links and discusses a horrifying recent story of a young mother, out shopping with her baby, who was kidnapped at gunpoint and raped. She did not take precautions against her attacker because she "didn't want to seem racist." Ponder that. Anti-racism is now a religion, and people think that they must risk suffering and death for it. This woman could easily have been killed. As it was, she was "only" kidnapped and raped and lived to identify her evil attacker.
Don't let this be you or one of your beloved female relatives or friends. Whatever you may think of the religion of anti-racism, don't be a martyr to it. This woman saw a black man loitering in the parking lot of (of all places) Babies "R" Us, wearing a tattered coat. She felt uneasy and suspicious about him, but she simply walked to her car as usual, past him, because she "didn't want to seem racist." He came up behind her with a gun and threatened to kill her baby if she didn't drive away with him to wherever he directed her.
What else could she have done besides stifling her misgivings and going to the car? She could have gone back into the store and shopped more, checking from time to time to see if the suspicious man was still in the parking lot. She could have used the cell phone that almost everyone has to call her husband or a friend and ask to be met at the store. Best of all, she could have gone back into the store, told the manager about a loiterer who made her feel uneasy, and requested a male escort to her car. She could have done many things. But instead, she walked straight into the trap. And this is by no means the only incident of this kind that has occurred.
Use your brains, your knowledge, and your instincts. Don't stifle them as wrongthought. Better safe than sorry.
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9 comments:
"This woman saw a black man loitering in the parking lot of (of all places) Babies "R" Us."
Parking lots are one of the more notorious "Fringe Areas"--a place that can be remote enough for a criminal to work, but with enough traffic for him to pick weak targets burdened with children and baggage. Marc Mac Young also has a page on Carjacking. Throw your keys one way, you go the other.
He seems to be assuming (in the page on carjacking) that most criminals in these cases want the car. Unfortunately, I've read of more horrifying cases than I want to think about where what the criminal wants is a human victim.
Thinking about it some more, though, if the guy is trying to get you to drive him somewhere, and you throw the keys away from yourself, he can no longer ask you to drive him somewhere unless he reconnects you and your keys. That could give you some opportunity to distract him and escape. This woman had her baby with her, evidently, which made it even harder to run away. (Probably in a car seat or in the cart.) I can't imagine facing a situation like this with a child.
I was browsing some of those pages. He has some good stuff. And he talks on the "robbery avoidance" page (which he also directs you to for avoiding being kidnaped, etc.) about this woman's very situation.
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/robbery_avoidance.html
"Another reason people fail to remove themselves from danger is almost exclusive to women, and that is they don't want to hurt the criminal's feelings. They don't wish to insult him by indicating that they don't trust him. This is just one of the many downsides of Politically Correct thinking. People who subscribe to this kind of thinking do not wish to offer insult or imply to the criminal that they do not trust him because of racial issues.
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It makes perfect sense to walk wide of a potentially violent person...and to hell with his feelings. He doesn't care about your feelings as he is robbing you, raping you or assaulting you."
I should bookmark some of these pages, esp. this one on robbery avoidance, for Eldest Daughter in a few years when she's going to be driving places by herself.
The stuff you quote is pretty spot on. I've been through it with my daughters. They don't like it when I judge by appearances. Sometimes those appearances are very subtle, not so obvious behavioral tics, for example, that experience has taught me to look out for. But the young are fatally afflicted with the belief that the world can't be as evil as I describe, nor that it is likely to come after them.
In situations with strangers in public, you have to go by appearances. By the time the person gets up close and you get a chance to know more about him, it could be too late.
It's always obvious to me in situations like the one I described in the main post (and others I've read about) that there are many more clues that there is a danger than race. For example, in the case in the Babies R Us parking lot, the guy was loitering and wearing tattered clothes. Loitering in a parking lot _is_ suspicious behavior. Parking lots are places for getting to and from your car. Or in another case I read about, a career criminal showed up at a condo complex and pretended to want to buy condos for sale. The security guard asked a woman who was going to show him her condo whether he should show the guy up. She literally said to the guard, "No, I'll go. We don't want him to think we don't trust him." And those were the last words anybody but her murderer ever heard her say. Now there _had_ to be some clues, there. I imagine his manner and clothing gave away the fact that he was unlikely to be a serious buyer for the condo.
So I think that in all of these cases there are things _besides_ race going into the mix. But the potential (female) victim may sense that her feelings are extra-worried or extra-strong because of the race of the person--i.e., that race is _one factor_. Then she feels guilty for possibly being "racist" and suppresses all her feelings about the situation and walks into a trap.
You are spot on Lydia.
I am not sure of the stats in the US but in NZ offenders of violent crimes tend to be disproportionatly represented by particular races. Given this, having a slightly racist attitude towards suspicious loiterers is probably a better precaution than merely stifling the urge to go the other way.
So if I see a suspicious loiterer and they are of the particular race that is over-represented in the sorts of crimes loiterers in carparks might commit then I am going to be more suspicious than if the person is of a different, less criminally-represented race.
This does not mean that I will treat all people of a particular race as criminals, to do so would be unjust but, given the facts and stats it seems the most sensible direction to tip precaution in.
And I would say (as does the guy at the self-defense site Scott linked) that if someone is acting suspiciously in a parking lot--and loitering watching the store or passersby _is_ acting suspiciously--you should go back into the building, period. This applies to white loiterers, too. The thing is, I think we have a kind of weird "affirmative action for possible criminals," where people who worry about these things (and evidently a lot of people do) are _more_ likely to take seriously the signs of trouble if the person is white. Actually, they should take those signs seriously in both cases.
This site appears to be a gathering place for nutjobs. This thread is silly and insane.
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