ALAN writes:

On a night in November 1923, an ex-con pulled an armed robbery at a confectionary in north St. Louis. Or he tried to. But he encountered a little resistance. It made the front page of next day’s newspaper.

A married couple owned the store. The wife and her mother and two boys from the neighborhood were inside the store when the bandit walked in with his revolver and ordered the women to reach. “The boys, terrified, fled from the store,” a news account reported.

Then he began shooting. Provoked to anger, the wife pulled a revolver from beneath the counter and fired three shots. Her husband was in the back of the store. He heard everything, grabbed a revolver from a dresser, and waited quietly for the bandit to enter the room.  Then he opened fire at the ex-con and nailed him with three bullets. The bandit fled. The husband chased him up the street and gave him a merciless beating about the head and ears.

The police arrived within moments and took the thug to City Hospital, where he died several hours later. He had been a very busy man, with a rap sheet that included dozens of arrests. But he was a poor learner:  A year earlier, his brother tried an armed robbery, and for his trouble he got shot dead on the spot.

The bandit chose his course of action and deserved what he got. The husband had no regrets about shooting and beating the thug. “He can’t shoot at my wife and get away with it.  He tried to kill my wife and mother-in-law and was coming after me when I let him have it,” he said.

A police captain said of the man who disabled the thug and ended his career of crime:

“He should be awarded a medal for what he did”. 

[“Man and Wife Kill Robber in Revolver Fight”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Nov. 8, 1923, p. 1]

I second that judgment.

Men would never have apologized then for being men, for being right, for enforcing laws, for speaking plainly, or for hurting the feelings of armed robbers or other thugs, parasites, and predators. Observe what was not there in 1923:

No sob stories for the thug.

No press accounts expressing sympathy for the thug.

No yammering about “poverty causes crime”.

No feminist/communist agitation for “gun control”.

No shyster-lawyers crawling out of the woodwork to express regret over the thug’s death because it deprives them of a chance to sue the couple for violating a thug’s “civil rights”.

No attempt to erase the vocabulary of law and morality and replace it with a pseudo-scientific, pseudo-medical vocabulary of “behavioral issues” or “mental issues” or equally nebulous and baseless inanities fabricated on request by shyster-doctors.

“We hope that every robber with a gun is caught in the act and shot very dead by a policeman,” Capt. Will Judy wrote in 1953.

[“Justice for the Gun Robber”, The Spectator: A Quarterly Magazine for Thinking People, Vol. 12, No. 3, Third Quarter, 1953, p. 13]

I agree with Capt. Judy. But Americans today would apologize for thinking such thoughts and writing such words. That is one proof of their moral-philosophical bankruptcy. They will not begin to recover from such degeneracy until they consign pretentious buzzwords like “behavioral issues” and “mental issues” to the metaphysical trash bin of lies, fallacies, and evasions. Unfortunately, that day is not imminent.

A great deal could be learned from how Americans dealt with rule-breaking and lawbreaking in the 1920s-‘30s.  But hip Americans today will not learn any of it because they think they are “enlightened”, “sophisticated”, and “scientific”, and therefore superior to their ancestors.

— Comments —

Dianne writes:

A huge Amen.

You might like this by C.S. Lewis on the “Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.”

“Those who hold it think that it is mild and merciful. In this I believe they are seriously mistaken. I believe that the humanity which it claims is a dangerous illusion and disguises the possibility of cruelty and injustice without end.”

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