Robert wrote: ↑Fri Nov 19, 2021 9:57 pm
Ken wrote: ↑Fri Nov 19, 2021 6:46 pm
How so? I come from families of farmers on all sides and spent much of my life on farms. How are we all vigilantes?
Also neighborhood watch groups would fit within this term.
Many a farmer and rancher had to use a weapon to defend themselves over the years from human and vermin. Just because you grew up in a Mennonite bubble doesn't mean others did not see to their own protection with guns.
I've participated in neighborhood watches. Around here the local police come out and help organize them and provide training, guidelines, and instructions for reporting crimes. It is the opposite of vigilante which is, by definition, taking law enforcement actions
without legal authority. Now days everyone has Ring cameras or Google Nest web cams and they send any suspicious video straight to the local police. I have 3 of them on my house. That isn't being vigilantes. That is cooperating with law enforcement.
I lived 10 years in rural Texas nowhere near any Menno bubbles. Everyone had guns including us. I didn't know any vigilantes. In rare instances that there was crime you called the Sheriff, same as anyplace else. If it was a big crime, maybe the state police showed up. No one formed posses to hunt down criminals.
My grandparents farm houses had rifles and shotguns in the kitchen cabinet. The worst I ever heard of was depression era hobos who passed through and stole chickens. No one ever went vigilante.
I think you are confusing John Wayne movies with real life. What percentage of farmers in this country do you think have had gun battles with criminals? I bet the percentage is astronomically small.
There are indeed rural lawless zones in this country like the Klamath County tableland in rural southern Oregon. Where vigilante justice happens.
https://magazine.atavist.com/outlaw-cou ... ns-murder/ But that is a tiny fraction of rural America.