Armed Society is a Polite Society
by C.S.
by C.S.
We closed the loan on our home here on August 12, 1996. The neighborhood, we knew, wasn't exactly "Beverly Hills" but we didn't know exactly what kind of experience we were in for.
We moved in shortly after closing and as it was summertime, we spent a few nights with the windows open. One night late, a sound woke me up.
*CRACK!!!*
I sat up.
"What was that?" I asked my husband.
"You know what that was" he mumbled. "A gunshot".
That sound and more was to be heard many times in the days (and nights) ahead.
We didn't have a fenced back yard, but we did put one up later. We found several things in our back yard as people crossed through in the middle of the night.
One day when I came home from work, my husband was in the back yard with my youngest son, Michael shooting his BB gun. They had put up some targets and were doing a pretty good job of knocking them down. I pulled up in the driveway and my husband said,
"Honey, I got you something for your birthday".
"What's that?" I asked. My birthday was in a couple of days.
He said, "Mike and I found this behind the bushes"
It was a 3-CD stereo and double tape deck. It even had a CD in it of Barry White.
Probably that shotgun blast I had heard he other night, I thought. Some ya-hoo was fleeing the scene and dropped his goods behind our bushes....just great. We live in da hood.
I kept it. Still have the CD. I like Barry White.
Another time we found a shotgun in the bushes. It was badly rusted and non-operable. No telling how long it had been there. The "Stereo Fairy" has turned into the "Shotgun Fairy". We called the police who came out and took a report. We also told him of the shot gun blasts we had been hearing and about the visit from the Stereo Fairy. We told him we kept that "gift". He didn't say anything.
We were aware of 8 gang members moving into the rent house across the street from us and we were not excited about it.
One afternoon, our teenage daughter Betsy was sitting on the front porch with one of her friends. A few gang members were out in their front yard and a couple of them came over, they said, to borrow our phone. Betsy said as they were standing at the front door, they kept trying to see into our front door presumably checking us out; see what kind of goodies we had they might like to get later on. This was before we got our dogs.
We had made more than a few phone calls to the police about noises coming from the little house across the street, loud music and such. Fighting in the front yard at all hours etc. The police would send a car our, but because they had police scanners, they all would bug out before the cops arrived. We had even seen drug deals going down in broad daylight. We'd call the cops, they'd show up, but nobody would be there when they showed up.
Then it finally happened.
One day my husband was home because of a migraine. He was lying down when two of the gang members knocked on the front door.
"Wonderful" he thought. He went to the door.
They stated they knew we were new in the neighborhood, and we didn't know how things went, but that they were there to let us know who ran things " 'roun' here".
"Is that right?" my husband asked.
They answered in the affirmative.
Further, they stated, it would go well with us if we were to cooperate with them and they would make sure nothing happened to us.
"Really?" he said.
Now you have to know something about my husband. He is a Navy veteran. He doesn't take threats very well, and has a very low threshold for BS.
Assuming they wanted money, my husband asked them to wait right there on the porch. Their eyes lit up.
He took a few steps to the bedroom, reached in the top nightstand drawer for the Ruger Blackhawk .357 magnum and poked it in waistband of his pants behind his back and grabbed the checkbook off the dresser. He went back to the door.
Taking the checkbook and the pen, he asked "How much were you thinking?"
Before they could say anything to him, he dropped the checkbook, grabbed the gun with one hand and one of the punks with the other, and shoved him against the side of the house, pinning him there. The other one started backing down off the porch making his way to the sidewalk.
The eyes of the one he grabbed were as big as saucers as my husband stuck the barrel of the gun under his chin, pointing upwards.
Coolly, he said, "Now I'm new in this neighborhood, and you don't know me. You don't know how I am or what I'll do. And when you start making the payments at (our address) you can start running things " 'roun' here". Get it?"
He indicated he got it.
The other one of them had reached the sidewalk by this time.
Not turning loose of him and keeping the gun where it was, my husband continued.
"Now if any of you guys over there get any bright ideas of doing anything to any one of us, our house or cars, or property, then I'm coming to find YOU. Not anyone else... just YOU. And you know I can find you too, because of where I work. You understand?"
He nodded.
"Now you tell your buddies over there exactly what I said, all right?"
He nodded again.
He turned him loose and he started backing as well until he reached the middle of the street.
It was pretty quiet around our neighborhood for about a month. We had a couple more noisy nights, but nothing major and didn't make any calls to the police. What was the use now? After two more months, they all moved out and we never heard or saw them again.
Who was it that said, "An armed society is a polite society"? They were right.
An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.C. S.
Robert A. Heinlein
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/robertahe100989.html
Arkansas
Not long ago, a friend of mine and I were making a pit stop at a local convenience store. A bunch of illegals were hanging about the place (we jokingly refer to them as "the Mexican Army") and a couple of them were in an obstreperous mood.
ReplyDeleteAs I passed by one of these folks with an attitude, he called me a "gabacho," which if you're not familiar with south-of-the-border epithets means roughly "nasty Yankee white boy."
I looked at him, and smiled and said "Si." Hooking my thumb over my shoulder toward my buddy out by the car, I said "Los gabachos con armas." He took off, muttering, and so did his buddies. All of sudden there wasn't a line in front of me and the cashier asked me what I'd said to drive off his customers. I told him, "Oh, I just spoke to him in a language he understood."
"Los gabachos con armas" means "Dirty Yankee white boys WITH GUNS."
Mike Vanderboegh
Try the .357 remedy in most if not all of the occupied states and make ready for a new address. Courtesy of the government. Guaranteed that one of the punks will tell a family member about the bad neighbor with a nasty gun and that's all she wrote. When the jackboots arrive at the door one either fesses up or lies about it. It'd probably wash here in Florida, but certainly never in my home town but thats why we moved.
ReplyDeleteWe lived there for 8 years afterwards with no fallout. We have friends who are policemen and they know what the neighborhood is like. It's good to know people. ; )
ReplyDeletemwptMy wife and I moved into a racially (black-white) rural area in north Louisiana.
ReplyDeleteOur seven acres was abutted by another seven acres of trees, swamp and undergrowth, but for some reason, the folks that lived in the high crime a mere 14 acres away liked to use our backyard as a shortcut.
After watching a group of four gang-bangers moseying down our driveway one afternoon, I told my wife to plug her ears.
I took my ranch rifle (.223) with two 20-shot clips and my 9 mm with two 13 shot clips, went out the back door and fired 66 rounds into the ground of my back yard.
Needless to say the stray dogs left our property alone and found another shortcut.