Different perspectives

If you attend a class at Insights one of the things you are taught is mindset. And it’s not just the mindset you need to have to be able to do what you have to do to use lethal force to defend innocent life. You learn a little bit about the mindset of the bad guy.

One example from this last weekend was from Greg (paraphrased):

The Green River Killer took great offense when an interviewer mentioned his raping of women. He insisted he did not rape them. They were prostitutes and he always paid them for the sex. “But you took their money, because there was never any money found with their bodies.” His response was, “They were dead. They didn’t have any use for it.”

And, of course, they never said no when he came back and had sex with their bodies for several days. So how could that be considered rape?

This is part of what the Insights trainers call, “removing the paint job”. Criminals may look like ordinary people on the outside but they aren’t what most people really consider human on the inside.

This last Sunday near the end of the Street & Vehicle Tactics class Derek opened up.

The day before we learned Derek grew up on New York City. He and one other member of his family (including cousins) went into law enforcement. Everyone else became criminals. He knew more criminals and saw more criminal acts by the time he was a teenager than I probably will in my entire life.

He went to the funeral of the first person he knew who was murdered when he was eight years old. His dad would tell him to take a particular coat when he went out, because that was the one that had the .38 special revolver in the pocket—he was eleven years old. When he went to college the police told their class to not go to a particular convenience story because they would get robbed. He saw multiple people come back from that corner in their underwear—even when there was snow on the ground. Taking their pants was the easiest way to make sure they got everything in their pockets. When we were practicing avoiding a mugging he showed us how a professional team of muggers would do it. If you stepped into their “kill zone” when a gun discreetly shoved into your ribs and calm, quiet, voice would tell you what to do and you would be on your way in half a minute without you wallet, phone, watch, etc. They then would reset to their start positions and wait for their next victim to enter their box. He told us of his cousins telling him of stories about how they jacked someone for their wallet in a parking lot and details of other crimes.

That was Saturday. On Sunday he said he wanted to share some things he had never shared with a class before.

He said he had a realization from watching our reactions to his stories the day before. He asked, “Before you were 25, how many of you went hunting? Went fishing? Hiked in the forest? Swam in a lake?” Nearly all of us were able to answer most of the questions with a yes. Then he said, “I didn’t do any of those things. I never even dreamed I might be able to do any of those things when I was growing up.”

His lesson rambled some. He obviously had not practiced it. His lesson was that our world view is dramatically different from many criminals. It is so different that we can’t really comprehend how different it is. There are a lot of similarities in some respect. Some of them have families they are supporting, most of them have families that love them.

But we don’t just have a different tribal label. We are so different in so many way that we probably cannot think like them.

Frequently they are firmly committed to a life of crime. Just like a drug addict or alcoholic, counseling doesn’t work unless they made the choice to seek it out. And he is now a counselor!

He found a path away from that life when he was young and can now socially blend in to either world. He wanted to share that insight about both worlds with us. We, almost for certain cannot and should not expect our standards of behavior and belief in a specific social contract to be shared by them. They have a much different social contract.

While many of us may be ignorant of their culture and beliefs to the point of extreme denial and extreme conviction that they must be like us, they know, sometimes with great passion, that we are not like them. Frequently, they do not want outsiders in their territory. If you do tread on their territory be on the lookout for signs of hostility and heed the warnings.

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11 thoughts on “Different perspectives

  1. Spent the first 15 years of my career in healthcare in South Central, East LA etc. etc. And MANY of the people that come through the ER’s in those regions are career criminals. It doesn’t take long for anyone working in those places to quickly figure out that while they may walk on two legs and speak English they are NOT THE SAME SPECIES as the rest of us.

  2. Peter Grant’s ‘Walls, Wire, Bars, and Souls’ touches on this mindset as well.

    There’s an abrogation of personal responsibility, coupled with a sense of entitlement, in many criminals’ minds. It’s never their fault, you see — people just need to leave them alone and let them do what they want. Of course, there’s the small matter of what they want being your stuff…

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  4. “If you do tread on their territory be on the lookout for signs of hostility and heed the warnings.”

    I liken it to being around large dogs that you don’t know. Pay attention to what they are doing, but DON’T stare at them. In fact, don’t really look at them directly, as that is taken as a challenge, just like dogs do. Give them space, be polite, and be ready to leave instantly if/when you see a change that makes your neck hair rustle. Basically, if you suddenly feel uncomfortable, even if you don’t understand why, LEAVE NOW.

    My father worked in the auto repair industry in the Philly suburbs for about 25 years before moving away. I spent enough time around him at his shop, and in his tow truck, and listening to him chat with others in the business, to get a good view of the criminal overlap of the auto industry. It was a bit of an eye-opener to get that perspective on an area of life that most people only hear about on the news reports.
    There is a broad spectrum of players on the illegal side of life. What I did notice was that it is somewhat corrosive, in that the more you see, and the more people you know that are involved to any degree, the more comfortable you become with it, and your acceptance broadens. It’s an insidious process, and eventually you find yourself associating with people that you can see are looking at life from the other side of that line that most people draw between good and bad.

  5. If certain people from New York think that differently from me, just imagine how different the people from the Middle East or Africa might be from the typical American. Their sense of morality is different. Their sense of property ownership is different. Their sense of duty to society is different. Their sense of personal responsibility and personal freedoms is different. Importing them by the hundreds of thousands without understanding this is cultural suicide.

    • ” Importing them by the hundreds of thousands without understanding this is cultural suicide.”

      Frankly, if people did understand this, and the eventual ramifications of it, there would be little, if any, immigration allowed. Most anywhere in the world, for that matter.

  6. We only see little hints of this different tribal POV, when someone shoots a burglar or armed robber, and we hear the family ‘s indignation that anyone would dare resist the violent criminal acts of their now well deceased POS family member.

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  8. That explains the reason why gunners can’t understand anti-gunners. Anti gunners consider all people to be equal. Not with equal rights, but equal in a mathematical sense: A+B= B+C sort of thing.

    What this results in is logic that gunners and self defense advocates cannot possibly understand. Let me explain by considering two crimes:
    An rapist kills someone while raping them.
    That rapist murderer is shot and killed by his intended victim.

    Both of these are the same to the anti gunner, because both lives are equal, and in each case a life was ended. Since all people are equal and interchangeable, there can never be any such thing as a self defense killing. There is only killing, the reason doesn’t matter. Since the reason doesn’t matter, eliminating the means of self defense is a good thing, because killings have been prevented.
    This type of thinking is so foreign to most gun people that they cannot wrap their head around it.

  9. “We, almost for certain cannot and should not expect our standards of behavior and belief in a specific social contract to be shared by them. They have a much different social contract.”

    Sounds like leftists of all stripes. That’s why the extreme, almost universal, corruption in the democrat party and the RINO establishment.
    In their minds, they are special, and the rules don’t apply to them, only to us serfs. They are sociopaths. It’s as simple as that.

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