Personal safety

Here’s an article from Forbes Life magazine about armored cars. One important point:

The first lesson you learn on entering the market for an armored car is that you’re not buying a tank. You’re buying time on the clock, a second chance to escape, a delay switch on death.

An armored car gives you (or your driver) a few extra seconds to save your own life. 

What I found interesting in this article was this passage, dealing with why someone might be interested in buying an armored car in the first place.

This is where you say: But I’m not road-tripping to Bogotá or planning a Sunday drive around Tikrit anytime soon. I don’t need an armored car.

But could your company be extorted if something happened to you? Or could you be extorted if something happened to your family? Unpleasant questions, but instructive. Here’s another lesson from the world of personal security: You’re more targetable than you think.

“Your readership benefits from a society built upon a rule of law,” says Andrew Griffey, a bearish, jovial instructor at ArmorGroup (who nevertheless can do a convincing carjacker impersonation at a moment’s notice). “That’s what makes Americans among the best victims in the world. Our perception that everything is okay is our single biggest vulnerability.”

(Emphasis added)

The average American is spoiled. We’ve grown up in a culture where a rule of law has been in existence, and under continued development, for centuries.  (Since at least the time of the Magna Carta, and probably for quite some time before that.)  Western culture is more special than people know. It arose essentially once, in one or a very few parts of the world, over a relatively brief span of human history. 

Arnold Kling has an article at Tech Central Station where he examines a couple of papers.  They make the case that the natural state of society is much closer to a dictatorship than to a republic.

NWW claim that there are three types of societies. Primitive orders are small bands of hunter-gatherers, and they are of little concern here. Limited-access orders are societies that provide meaningful political and economic rights only to narrow elites. Open-access orders are capitalist democracies that give political and economic rights to most citizens. NWW argue that limited-access orders are the “natural state:” they are stable, they resist economic progress, and they only rarely make the transition to open-access orders.

Our free society is a rare thing.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. | 1 views | Trackback | Print this page |

| More from Karl Lembke