> One can defend oneself and others in a myriad of ways that do not involve murder.

As we used to say in the military, "the enemy gets a vote, too". You may find that your non-lethal methods of self defense come up short when the enemy is equipped with a knife or gun. Or at the state level, perhaps a ballistic missile. There have been plenty of victims of those in the media recently. What non-lethal methods would you recommend they use to protect themselves?

If you want your society (and by extension your belief system) to survive, there must be a segment of that society that is at least willing to engage in lethal violence, if only as a last resort. You do not get to hide behind others who are willing to do your moral dirty work and declare yourself morally superior to them. That's like a meat eater looking down on slaughterhouse workers because he bought his meat at the store (I say this as a meat eater myself).

> One can defend oneself and others in a myriad of ways

What methods are you referring to? Pepper spray? Aiming for the leg?

> that do not involve murder.

By definition if one is defending oneself, one is not committing murder.

laurent_du: What if they are going to kill your child? I have zero respect for this kind of conviction.

specproc: I have to say I'm fortunate enough never to have found myself in that situation. Is this something that happens regularly in America?

We all know it's not common in any industrialized society for a parent to have to kill to protect their child's life. And asking laurent_du about the American experience may not be productive as he or she may never have been to America.

Regardless, the frequency of a situation is not relevant to a discussion of what a person would or should do in that situation.

> Is this something that happens regularly in America?

Murder and manslaughter occurs in every country. Violence is hyperlocal and can be entirely stochastic. There are simply broken humans everywhere.

>One can defend oneself and others in a myriad of ways that do not involve murder.

Too much fiction, not enough fighting experience. There are myriad ways in which you cannot effectively defend yourself and cannot flee in these lose-lose scenarios. There largely wouldn't be victims, if this were true.

>There are nonlethal ways of defending oneself or others, too, btw. Learn martial arts, knock them out, use a taser if you have too, then grab your kid and run. None of that requires shooting them.

Agree with the general sentiments of your post. A lot of pro self-defense talks online read like thinly veiled "bad ass" fan fiction where someone salivates over the idea of killing someone in a legal manner that they face no consequences for.

But I don't think this last part is very realistic and possibly even very dangerous. Martial arts aren't anywhere near as effective as people make them out to be if you are not highly trained and essentially useless if the other person is armed even with a knife. They are better for training confidence/athleticism than self-defense. Tasers are frequently shrugged off by aggressors (no shortage of videos online showing this) and if you miss you just escalated the situation with no other way out. A gun is really the only thing that puts even the weakest victim on par with the strongest aggressor. But situational awareness for where you are and who is around you is 100x more important.

For me, the inherent problem is that people have a right to self defence (and I'd argue to self defence by proxy of a states army), but states have no such right.

A lot of the more horrific acts of war seem designed not to defend the people who happen to live in a state, but the state apparatus (or the interests of that states stakeholders) itself.

Many of these ways are promoted by people without any experience fighting, struggling, or even being competent in exercising, in my experience.

Were it so simple, police forces would simply act out Hollywood-esque movie moves. But in reality, individual officers must often resort to firearms to stop assailants, or in some countries, mass unarmed officers must swarm a single assailant.

In regards to states' self-defense claims, they have every incentive to claim it as a casus belli. It's too powerful and righteous to not try to get it to 'stick', and big lies do sometimes work. That doesn't obviate there being actual cases of self-defense, it's just not something that can be taken for granted, and when information is a battlespace all its own, I guess we shouldn't be surprised.