I think...... and the skimpy skirt analogy is actually right on..... that if one has knowledge that their clothes are going to have a certain effect on some people, they ought not be surprised when they are confronted with that effect. Please understand that I am NOT saying that the reaction is necessarily justified, but human nature is what it is, and some people are jerks. That doesn’t give a jerk the right to act out their jerkiness, but the subject ought not to be naive enough to believe that their provocative choices exist in a vacuum.MechAg94 wrote:Being aware of people's reaction and intentionally provoking a reaction are two completely different things. You are making the assumption that he is a troublemaker going out of his way to bait anti-gun people. I don't think we can assume that solely from that one quoted sentence.Interblog wrote:
Johnston admitted to self-awareness of his own provocation. He was quoted in the news article as such.
Each one of us must claim a healthy degree of ownership in the reactions that we elicit from others. There's another active thread on here titled "Is Deviancy the New Norm?" That thread's OP states, "If you look, act, appear to be a clown of some sort, I'm not going to go along and pretend seeing you and your infantile behavior as normal. I will not ignore you. I'll laugh and afford you zero credibility as a fellow human being." That is an example of what I'm talking about. No doubt many "clowns" consider themselves to be "just going about their business". But they do play a role in how they are perceived. Like it or not, that effect of perception is simple human nature.
And a great deal rests in the eye of the beholder. Soccerdad rebutted the general disavowal of responsibility for this effect far more persuasively than I could have, and using much milder examples.
Now, I personally have strongly held religious and moral reasons for why I believe that skimpy dresses are a bad idea; but that gives me no right to abuse the person wearing a skimpy dress. “Abuse” includes placing the other person at risk in some way, calling the cops on them for instance, simply because I disapprove of their sartorial choices. In my own case, the other person in the skimpy skirt would have no idea about my disapproval, because I don’t act on impulses like that. It’s called having control over one’s self. Even so, there are LOTS of people who have no such self control; and while it is NOT their right to pester a woman in a skimpy skirt, it would certainly be stupid of her to not understand that her clothing might have that effect on some people. After all, why even wear the stupid thing, if the goal wasn’t to expose more of your skin to public view???? There are plenty of other clothing choices that preserve one’s modesty in hot and muggy climates, without putting your goods on display. So, the only rational conclusion is that the goal was to put one’s goods on display. And when one puts one’s goods on display, one is an idiot if one thinks that will happen in a vacuum, and that people who lack self-restraint won’t act on their impulses to be jerks. Again, that doesn’t excuse them for being jerks, but it doesn’t reflect well on the intellect of the subject who acts as if they are totally surprised that jerks were jerks.
In the case of the gentleman who is the subject of this thread, he (A) indicates a complete understanding that some will find the shirt provocative, (B) is not surprised by the fact that the idiot woman did what she did, (C) carried himself well when the police showed up, and (D) makes a public statement that it is important for him to speak about the preservation of his rights, and that t-shirt was one such manner of speech.
I would NOT go so far as to say that open carry is an “in your face” type of provocation. It’s your right under the law if you have an LTC, and lots of perfectly normal decent people open carry with regularity. I myself open carry on occasion. However, even though I do not view open carry as an “in your face” provocation, I’m not stupid enough to deny that there are some people who WILL find it a provocation requiring a response - even though they are in the wrong about that - and those people are going to be the kind who very little self-control, and are a little bit off balance psychologically and emotionally. It hasn’t happened to me yet, but if it ever does, and I am confronted by someone who is freaking out about my OCing, I’ll probably behave exactly as the subject of this thread behaved, except that I would ALSO tell the person to mind their own business, that I am violating no laws, BUT THEY ARE IF THEY CONTINUE TO HARASS ME!!!
