Unarmed Woman Complies with Robber; Gets Shot in the Face Anyway

I'm often asked when debating about gun control, after I have demonstrated that every person has a right to self-defense, whether one should exercise that right against someone who is only out to take your property. The argument usually takes on some form of questioning whether the value of the contents of your wallet or purse are worth more than the life of a human being, even a criminal's. That is one of the more popular "moral" arguments against resistance; the more pragmatic argument, meant to appeal to our sense of utilitarianism, is whether your own life is more important than the contents of what is in your purse or wallet and it's better just to let him have it so you can continue living. This argument relies on the assumption that resisting an aggressor will inevitably lead to your injury and possible death. These two different arguments, however, are actually intertwined and they can be simplified into one with a couple of simple premises.

The first premise is that all human life is valuable, whether it is the life of a criminal or the life of an innocent, law-abiding citizen. However, morally, from the victim's perspective, his or her life is more valuable than the life of his or her aggressor. This is because the victim did not choose to be placed in a life or death situation but rather, was forced into the situation by the aggressor who, by free will, chose to potentially sacrifice his life or the life of his victim in order to gain the victim's property. It is the aggressor himself who has actually willingly cheapened the value of his own life by being willing to sacrifice it for material goods.

The second premise is that it is impossible to know the aggressor's true intention. Many victims are shot, stabbed, or beaten even after they comply. I already wrote about one example of victims being attacked again by the same aggressor after they survived their initial ordeal. On Thursday, January 24, 2013 around 5:30 pm in Miami, FL, a woman with her mother and two children had just picked up some takeout food from a Chinese Restaurant when she was confronted by a gunman who demanded her purse. According to witnesses, she immediately complied, handing it over to him, but the gunman still shot her in the face before jumping into his getaway car and speeding off.

In truth, since there is no way to tell what an aggressor's intentions are, there is no right answer and it really just comes down to whose life is more valuable, yours or your aggressors's (who has already devalued his own). I know that others could find other examples of people who tried to fight back against a robber or burglar and got shot, stabbed, or beaten for it, just as I could find many other examples like the two I've already cited. David Kopel famously said, "When a robbery victim does not defend himself, the robber succeeds 88 percent of the time, and the victim is injured 25 percent of the time. When a victim resists with a gun, the robbery success rate falls to 30 percent, and the victim injury rate falls to 17 percent. No other response to a robbery -- from drawing a knife to shouting for help to fleeing -- produces such low rates of victim injury and robbery success." I'm sure someone could find something to try to refute those statistics as well, but at the end of the day, it still doesn't matter. The one thing that a robber, burglar, or rapist still cannot deprive you of is your personal choice whether to resist or comply. It is still up to each individual victim to weigh the probability that resistance will lead to their injury versus the probability that compliance will lead to their injury anyway and then decide which chances they want to take without regard for the safety or life of their aggressor. No one else can judge the morality of the decision that the victim makes in that circumstance except for the victim. And thus, individual choice continues to prevail.