The Duty to Protect

A few days ago I wrote:

I believe that I am not responsible for your safety. The police are not responsible for your safety. That's your job. You have no "right to feel safe." Such a right would put an obligation upon others that cannot be fulfilled. You have a duty (should you choose to accept it) to protect yourself and a duty to help protect the society in which you live, but those duties carry with them a certain amount of unavoidable risk. Dealing with risk is one thing adults do.

And:

I believe that as members of a society founded on the concept of defending the rights of individuals, we yield certain rights that are unquestionably ours "in a state of nature," but the right of self-defense isn't among them. Self-defense and the tools of that defense are, as Oleg Volk points out, a human right - another corollary of the right to ones own life. I believe that instead of yielding our right to self-defense to the State, we extend to the State the power necessary to assist in our defense, while recognizing the State's inherent limitations in exercising that power. Again, in belonging to a society that defends our individual rights, the corresponding individual duties that go with those rights expands to include the protection of the society in which we live, best expressed by Sir Robert Peel's Seventh Principle of Modern Policing:

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

Incumbent or not, however, I believe that duty must be voluntarily accepted, and cannot be forced on any individual.

Well, one person who accepted that duty voluntarily is Ramon Castillo, who defended himself and his wife from three men who attempted an armed robbery of his Houston jewelry store. Mr. Castillo was hit four times and survived. The robbers didn't.

SayUncle advises that Mr. Castillo doesn't have health insurance. I doubt that workman's comp would cover this, anyway. So his family has set up an account to help the family pay his medical bills. I'm a little short this year with Christmas shopping and all, but I'm going to throw $100 in. Please see if you can help, too.

And I'm sure that the three Hondurans who were preying on Hispanic businesses in the area were only doing it because they lived in poverty.