Guilt-stricken victims blame themselves for being robbed at gunpoint

This is the kind of thinking that can get you killed. Worse, it’s the kind of thinking that can get people killed.

Victims of an armed robbery in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park neighborhood have done a lot of reflecting about what happened to them last year, when a man held them at gunpoint at a café and stole their laptops.

What they’ve learned from the experience is that it’s not the robber’s fault — in an indirect way, it’s theirs. Privileged, fortunate, they had what he did not have, and he was desperate to have some of the stuff they had. In context, the victims made room in their minds to understand, and to empathize with, their assailant.

“In a long rumination on the incident, [victim Chaya] Babu writes that she and her writer friends ‘felt angry and violated, but not in a way that necessarily placed blame on the person who did it,’” recounts the New York Post.

“It seems that if they blame anyone, it’s themselves — for existing and choosing to live in Ditmas Park in the first place.”

In the weeks following the robbery, she [Babu] and her friends worked on “finding space to take into consideration the broader social and economic circumstances surrounding the incident” and “cultivated our sense of compassion toward the robber, whom we imagined must have been acting out of dire need.”

… The kicker comes when Babu notes that “many of us in the group agreed that in some respects we identified more with our robber than with the characters we were portrayed to be” in media stories about the crime.

The most remarkable line in the whole piece comes from another of the victims:

Babu quotes another writer who was robbed that night as saying, “I didn’t ultimately think that person posed a threat. I didn’t feel afraid of the person; I felt more just afraid of the weapon.”

While they were busy finding space to rationalize the perpetrator’s actions, these robbery victims went ahead and made sure to project his motive and intent onto the one thing that lacked any agency or motive in the incident: the gun.

“No one made excuses for the criminals when I was a kid,” writes the Post’s Karol Markowicz, who grew up in Ditmas Park before the area gentrified, and when crime there was far worse. “When a friend’s grandmother had her handbag ripped off her arm at the subway station, when a friend was mugged of his jacket in the middle of winter, when bicycles were stolen, no one thought much about the thieves’ feelings.”

But with gentrification comes sophistication, and with sophistication comes circumspection — circumspection so boundless that it ceases to serve the best interests of the open-minded people who exercise it and, in fact, begins instead to work against their best interests.

How committed can the progressive mind be to this line of thinking? What if one of these people had actually been shot that night? Would a robbery-turned-murder victim’s dying thought be one of self-blame and of ill will only toward the inert tool that did as its malicious wielder instructed? “Guns don’t kill people,” and all that trashy NRA rhetoric, has no place in these robbery victims’ thought process.

This is the same cognitive dissonance you get from the left about any of its pet “control” issues. As it is with firearms, so it is with anything else that can be used as a flashpoint issue to shape and control people’s behavior. It’s the same with climate change, equality between the sexes and race … to name only three.

Here’s a great juxtaposition of one climate ardent’s fever-pitch fantasy of prosecuting climate skeptics at a “climate Nuremberg” with his own unsteady, equivocal feelings about the accuracy of predicting how the climate will actually behave in the future (H/T: Mark Steyn at SteynOnline):

Nine years ago self-proclaimed “climate hawk” David Roberts was contemplating Nuremberg trials for deniers:

When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.

But in his latest piece, at Vox.com, he’s singing a rather different tune:

Basically, it’s difficult to predict anything, especially regarding sprawling systems like the global economy and atmosphere, because everything depends on everything else. There’s no fixed point of reference.

Now he tells us.

What’s clear in both these instances — for both the sensitive robbery victims and the climate change evangelist — is that the progressive mind will bend to accept any change in circumstances, or in the facts, in order to preserve and protect the ideology that underpins its beliefs.

Unless and until they reach the point at which new information has the power to shape their inviolate ideas, progressives cannot describe their views as rational — but they can describe them as fanatical.

But then, they’d have to be thinking rationally to do even that.

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