Do We Shoot the Looter, or the Tiger?

As violent mobs of Muslims and nihilist leftist youth menace the cathedral in Milan and the Louvre in Paris, torch historic buildings, and threaten revolution, I wonder if we are thinking clearly about the morality of using deadly force in defense of public order, private property, and our civilizational heritage.

Put bluntly, would European police open fire on a mob if it were the only way to stop the destruction of the palace of Versailles or St. Peter’s Basilica? Should they? And if they did, would American Christians wring their hands about it, tut-tutting that “human life has infinite value.” Perhaps Catholics would wave around the “Seamless Garment” theology that leftist bishops invented in the late ’70s to smother the pro-life movement? What would Pope Leo XIV say?

I must say, I’m not encouraged by the response of so many otherwise sane Christians to a recent incident in the UK. An unhinged man jumped into a tiger enclosure to take an Instagram picture—and was immediately mauled to death. Many people asked why the zoo did not shoot the tiger to save the intruder. (As it turns out, there was no time for anyone to intervene before the man was dead.)

Online opinion immediately split between misanthropic environmentalists who said, essentially, that such tigers are gravely endangered, while there are too many human beings. Thus, they argued, human beings are a dime a dozen while Christians were eager to insist on human exceptionalism. “Of course we should save a human life, with an immortal soul, over any lower animal, however magnificent and rare,” I read over and over, with slightly different phrasings.

I couldn’t decide which group infuriated me more as I remembered how the tempter in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters boasted of his skill at manufacturing equal and opposite heresies. If we say that human life is only a relative value, to be weighed against the interests of other species—from chimps down to shrimp, as the “effective altruists” do—then we’re giving aid and comfort to the abortionists and euthanasia enthusiasts, who’ll gladly take human life if it means saving one woman’s law school career, or spares the Canadian taxpayer the cost of caring for clinically depressed veterans.

But if we swallow whole the “infinite value” of human life, we’re saying that every other value in the world ought to be sacrificed to extend the limited lifespan of any one human, and in every circumstance. In theory, then, if one could prove that it would extend the lifespan of the whole population of Pakistan if it were allowed to move to Texas, the “pro-life” position would demand open borders. Certainly, one couldn’t justify shooting an arsonist carrying a flamethrower into Florence’s Uffizi art galleries; his life should be worth far more than some daubings of paint on a dusty canvas.

But is it? If so, then anyone who breaks into your home to steal your property is equally sacrosanct and should not be challenged. What’s more, it’s hard to justify sending armed police to arrest, on pain of deadly force, nonviolent offenders for property crimes.

Obviously, capital punishment is taken off the table, as the Vatican has tried to insist over the course of John Paul II’s, Francis’s, and now Leo XIV’s pontificates. It’s now the position of the papacy that capital punishment is “inadmissible,” because it violates “human dignity,” which logically implies it was always morally wrong, even when God demanded it for murder in the Covenant of Noah, and when Pius XII urged the prompt execution of Nazi war criminals after Nuremburg. We’ve progressed so far since then, and learned so much, you see.

I addressed the issue of using deadly force in defense of property back during the George Floyd riots, when race huckster Democrats were demanding massive cuts to the police, and cheering as “mostly peaceful” demonstrations trashed entire American cities. I wrote a piece for The Stream, “Do Looters Deserve Shooters,” in which I argued that private property rights, themselves, are grounded in our God-given human dignity:

Violence against property is violence against people. Let’s say you spent a year’s salary on your car. And I came up to it with a sledgehammer and smashed it. I would be stealing every hour you worked to buy it, turning that time into slave labor. Burn a cathedral, as just happened in Nantes, France, that took hundreds of years to build. You’re erasing the lives of the people who sweated blood to build it, just as surely as if you smashed the headstones on their graves.

Just the same if a mob trashes the shop, restaurant, or other small business some hard-working family built from the ground up. People who try that kind of violence deserve to be met with proportionate force. We have an absolute human right to defend ourselves against being pillaged, raped, beaten or robbed.

That’s what Christianity teaches us, and why every Christian who’s actually sincere ought to be a hardcore supporter of the Second Amendment. Christians gave us that amendment, in fact. It was modeled on the English Bill of Rights, enacted to protect the religious freedom of Puritans, who’d been persecuted by the Stuarts. If you don’t think religious freedom and self-defense are connected, you should go tell that to the Yazidis in Iraq. Or the Uyghurs in China. Or the Christians in Nigeria.

If I were running a zoo, and an adult evaded the safeguards to break into a predator’s enclosure, I absolutely would not shoot that animal down—especially if the animal were a rare and almost irreplaceable one—any more than I’d expect cops to let some looters burn down the Louvre. If a person falls into a tiger cage by accident, or a child finds his way there, of course I’d reluctantly take the shot—not just to save not any old human life, but because it is an innocent one. That’s a crucial difference. Unborn babies’ lives have greater value than those of Nazi war criminals or violent rioters because those people who forfeited their rights to their lives by their own conscious decisions. To say otherwise is to turn the pro-life position into a vitalistic fetish, which torches every valuable aspect of human life itself, in the name of lamely affirming it.

If an adult climbs into a tiger’s cage then they deserve whatever happens to them. The same for arsonists trying to burn something down.

Traditionally, looters get shot.
Look at how people support the Korean rooftop merchants defending their stores from the mob of looters.
Technically, socialists and DSA types are no different than common looters and should be treated the same.

Bringing words to a gunfight, to use the analogy.

We never win by carefully and diligently dissecting the inane-evil schemes of the left and congratulating ourselves of our extreme cleverness.

They’re using raw emotion and intentional dissonance, laugh at our logic, and keep on marching to kill us.

They’re very idea that the leftist is some that needs to be argued is a defeat.

“These truths are self-evident” or we’ve already given up.

As for the tiger and lion, they’ll be deployed only when they’ve got us hiding in catacombs and dragged in arenas to die for their sport.

If you enter my home you surrender your right to life. If you threaten my family I will resort to any means necessary to repel you. Any means.

Any gov’mt unwilling to protect its citizenry needs to be overthrown. This is how Pinochet came to power.

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