The lesson of the Annie Le murder

(Note: comments begin here.)

Police in New Haven say they have a suspect in the murder of Annie Le (pronounced “Lay,” not “Lee”). Apparently he is an employee in the lab building where she worked who failed a lie detector test.

VFR has had many stories on young women who put themselves in dangerous situations and got themselves killed. But Annie Le was simply at work—working in a secured building that required an ID to enter. What could she have done to avoid what happened to her?

Similarly, Eridania Rodriguez was murdered in July by Joseph Pabon while she was working as a cleaning woman in a Wall Street office building. What could she have done to be safer, other than quitting her job?

Here is a further similarity between the cases. Rodriguez had expressed anxiety about working alone in a deserted office building at night, just as Le had written an article expressing worries about the danger of violent crime in New Haven.

What is the answer? If you have a rational concern that you are in danger, what do you do?

It would appear that the only way a woman can be safe in today’s society is to carry a weapon—even at work, even at work in a secured building, because there are predators everywhere. Joseph Pabon, who in his photos radiated savage malevolence, was an employee in the Wall Street office building where Rodriguez worked. In a society where dangerous thugs are on the payroll, there is no safe place. This applies especially to women whose work or daily routine puts them in situations where they are alone. Women must be able to protect themselves, wherever they are, They must be armed.

Organizations that claim to care about the well-being of women should lobby for concealed carry laws in all fifty states and urge women to own, carry, and be trained in the use of handguns.

Another angle on this. When it comes to white women living in racially diverse urban areas, perhaps a bigger obstacle to their accepting the necessity of self defense than their dislike of guns, would be the fact that in dealing with the threat of personal violence that confronts them, they would also inevitably be dealing with the reality that the threat comes overwhelmingly from black and Hispanic males. This may be a price they are unwilling to pay. As has often been said, liberals would rather be murdered than be thought racist.

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Here are some details picked up from an earlier, September 10 New York Daily News story on the Annie Le case that I just came across.

Le was 4’11” and weighed 90 pounds. (I am a 5’11” man.. I cannot imagine being a 4’11”, 90 pound female walking around in this world filled with hulking males with nothing to protect me.)

She was born of Vietnamese immigrants and raised in Placerville, California.

Contrary to what I wrote earlier, she did not have a job at the lab; she was using it for experiments connected with her studies.

She checked into the lab on 10 a.m. on September 8. When she did not come home, her roommates reported her missing.

There were bloodhounds brought in to look for her.

Are these bloodhounds different from the cadaver-scenting dogs that were brought to the lab building on Saturday, September 12 and found her body that night?

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Kilroy M. writes from Australia:

You ask: “If you have a rational concern that you are in danger, what do you do?”

Simple: Become a liberal and deny the danger. Should anyone remind you of the danger, persecute them, and then celebrate the danger’s pre-conditions as a culturally enriching phenomenon.

Kristor writes:

But the deeper question is, why are these women alone in these buildings, working? Why would a woman ever do that, and why do we set things up so that they have to? I mean, what would Laura W. have to say about that? While I am a big advocate of Valkyries and shield maidens, the real solution for women is, not to pack heat themselves, not to study martial arts or carry mace –most women are averse to the idea, in my experience, because they are not suited for combat except as a last resort in defense of their children—but to be under the protection of men who are willing to kill, and risk death, in their defense.

This need not entail the sort of house arrest common for women in Muslim societies. Chivalry is the traditional Western response to the problem that women need to be defended from men, by men. Chivalry is a way for men to rely upon the prevalent virtue of other men, even of strangers in a strange land (say, France), to defend their women from the vicious. Oh, and capital punishment; that, too. See, here’s the thing: if the social contract says, “Torture and murder our women and children, and we may or may not confine you to watching TV and feeding you 3 square meals a day for a time, then to release you,” why you’re going to get a lot more torture and murder than if your social contract says, “Torture or murder our women and children, and we will certainly, sooner or later, rip you limb from limb.”

I’m sorry if this seems a tad … bloody minded, but then I just dropped my daughter off in Chicago, there to rely for her safety on the overwhelming local prevalence of knightly muscular young mid-western men sprung from her own North European gens, whom I can hope will interfere with anyone giving her trouble (she lives in an extremely Western, extremely civilized neighborhood).

Which leads of course to the question, “Why, Kristor, have you allowed your daughter thus to roam without your purview?” To which I can answer only, “She is a grownup, now, to everyone but me; and especially to herself. I have no authority any more to forbid her.” If it were up to me only, she would be here now in my own house, where I could more conveniently die in her defense.

What then is a woman to do? First, just don’t take a job that requires you to work alone, away from a company of men. Almost any men will do, as a company, even evil men; even evil men will want to protect her whom they understand as their own, as their friend. Indeed, in these days of the emasculated beta male, evil men who feel free to injure and kill when it seems right to them so to do are to be preferred to your standard issue milquetoasts. Second, behave as though you live in a wilderness, with ruthless bandits everywhere lurking. Because you do (thus have I taught my daughter). The women who, insanely, put themselves in these absurdly dangerous situations—i.e., again, any situation where there are no chivalrous muscular dangerous men about—are the female counterpart of the neutered modern male who cannot muster a defense even of his own body, let alone that of a demoiselle.

Let’s face it: we no longer live in 19th century America or Britain, where women could roam at will in confidence of their safety. No. We live in the 8th century, in Gaul or Italy, with everything up for grabs. Our only hope is the sort of thing that saved the Wild West from utter moral chaos: namely, men with six-guns willing to ride out in posse, and women willing to obey when their menfolk tell them to get the hell into the cabin and stay there, weapons free.

LA replies:

Boiling it down, you’re saying: it’s simply unrealistic to expect women to arm themselves as I’m advising. What is needed is two things: (1) for society to protect women (and everyone) by punishing murder (and, I would add, violent rape) with death; and (2) for individual men to be armed or otherwise prepared to protect women. While both of these solutions would represent a big change from our current society, the same is true of all changes in the direction away from liberalism and toward traditionalism.

However, your other advice, that women refuse to work in environments where they may be alone, sounds a lot tougher to achieve. Today’s society is a big, complex place, consisting physically of millions of buildings and many more millions of rooms, corridors, elevators, restrooms, in those buildings. I don’t know how a woman could arrange things so as to assure that she’s never alone. (I have second thoughts on this, below.)

(An interesting question: apart from residences, how many buildings of all types are there in the United States?)

Laura Wood writes:

Most people would agree that if a danger is real and ever-present, the logical thing to do is prepare for it. But Michael Daly, Daily News columnist, uses the opposite argument. If a danger is real and ever-present, the reasonable thing to do is not worry about it. That’s what he told his daughter who is a student at Yale and called him in tears. Precisely because she lives in a world in which predatory men stalk undefended women, she should not worry at all. A woman was stuffed this summer into a wall in a Wall Street office building. See it could happen to anyone. “I love you, Monkey,” he tells his weeping daughter. At least he succeeds in comforting himself.

LA repies:

Laura’s comment about Michael Daly’s disgusting response to the murder was sent before Kilroy’s above comment was posted. Kilroy exactly predicted Michael Daly’s comment to his daughter.

Daly seems a case study of the type of non-male male in liberal society that we often discuss. But to be fair, what can a man in Daly’s position tell his weeping daughter at Yale? Gun control laws prohibit ordinary individuals from carrying handguns. Well, at a minimum he could tell his daughter that she and other students should lobby Yale to rescind Yale’s own regulations prohibiting students from owning guns, that he himself will use his column to argue that Yale’s anti-gun regulations and as well as anti-gun laws in Connecticut and New York be repealed. More immediate and do-able, he should tell her that she should not allow herself to be alone anywhere on campus and in New Haven, as Laura discusses in the next comment.

But for him to tell his daughter just to forget about it, seems utterly contemptible. Daly might as well be the broken-down white South African protaganist in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgraced. (See Carol Iannone’s devastating review of it.)

Laura replies to Kristor:

Most women lack the calm and the aggression to use weapons. It is far better for women to be defended by men. But we live in extraordinary times. Pioneer women had to use guns when their husbands were away from the house. Women need to use guns now too. They are able to do it and they should.

At the same time, it makes no sense even with guns for women to be alone in these cavernous buildings. They should never be alone whether they carry a gun or not. There should always be buddy systems in place so that women, whether they are janitors or lab students, move around in twos or threes.

Laura writes:

What should a man like Daly tell his daughter?

He should tell her emphatically that he is angry about the murder and that he is working with Yale parents to find out how security can be improved, whether guards with guns are plentiful at Yale, and whether the university can work to bring about concealed weapon privileges for students. He should ask his daughter very specific questions about her routine to find out if she is ever in a situation like Annie Le’s and tell her he wants to know immediately by cell phone if she ever feels unsafe. He should order her to keep him regularly apprised of her routine. What he has done instead is leave her to tremble in fear with her girlfriends.

LA replies:

And—so perfect is he in his liberalism—he wasn’t embarrassed to publish a column in which he revealed himself to have let his daughter down like this.

Kathlene M. writes:

“But we live in extraordinary times. Pioneer women had to use guns when their husbands were away from the house. Women need to use guns now too. They are able to do it and they should.”

Laura is right. Women may be alone at their homes without their husbands. And think of the single young women or elderly widows who live all alone. There was a story on “I Survived” a year ago about a young single woman who was viciously raped, shot and left for dead by a brutish black thug who followed her to her apartment and kicked her door in. While she did miraculously survive, if she’d had a gun welcoming the intruder, she may have prevented injury to herself. Women need to learn to use guns and be ready to use them.

The subject of self-defense came up between me and my husband a few months ago vis-a-vis California’s economic crisis. There has been an increase in burglaries being committed in California neighborhoods all over the San Francisco Bay Area. Some young thugs-in-training will ring the doorbell to see if anyone is at home. If someone is there and answers, the young thug may concoct a fundraising story. But what happens if someone with malicious intent appears at one’s door when the husband is away at work, and tries to strong-arm his way in or kick the door down? What happens if American society falls deeper into chaos in coming years due to an economic and social unraveling? My husband has already suggested the idea of buying a gun for our protection. One of our friends (male) has offered to train me and my husband at a local range. I cannot even believe we’re talking about this subject but it’s reality. We live in a very nice, quiet, upscale area but crime has reached us too.

Laura writes:

This guy’s probably so tickled pink that his daughter’s at Yale (and glad for the opportunity to brag about it) that everything else pales in comparison. He genuinely is not concerned about her safety, only her resume. And, to think he’s probably spending $55,000 a year for her to live in fear. If she had called from Podunk U., I doubt he would have been so eager to whitewash the whole thing.

LA replies:

“If she had called from Podunk U., I doubt he would have been so eager to whitewash the whole thing.”

That’s a great insight.

I’ve copied the Daly column here and added this comment to it:

Consider Daly’s inane last sentence,

“I love you,” my Brooklyn Yalie replied.

It’s a column about a MURDER. And his closing point is this sentimental tripe showing how he feels it’s neat that his Brooklyn daughter goes to Yale. (I would guess that he’s of working class Irish background.)

Laura continues:

Also, in terms of safety, what about the old-fashioned idea of men accompanying women in public places? It made sense years ago, but it makes even more sense now. Sick, impulsive men are fed a diet of sexual material today. It is everywhere and free for the taking. It’s hard to believe more women aren’t attacked. To hell with Take Back the Night rallies by co-eds who say rape shouldn’t happen and is only an expression of political rage. As Kristor said, we live in the Wild West now. College students need to get serious and to protect their interests and their lives.

LA replies:

“It’s hard to believe more women aren’t attacked.”

I’ve often had the same thought.

Mike Berman writes:

Mrs. Berman approves of your proposal for addressing the dangers confronted by women and there have been recent examples which illustrate its reasonableness.

See this story, “Pregnant woman holds armed home invader at gunpoint.”

Most states already have concealed carry laws for their adult citizens who don’t have mental or criminal records. Some of the most liberal locations happen to be some of the freest in this regard. When I was visiting Bellingham, WA, I entered a police station and asked someone if I could qualify for a carry license upon moving to the area. I was answered affirmatively and immediately handed an application with instructions. What makes Washington different from NYC or New Haven? Washington is not saddled with an underclass population. If licenses were granted to whites, it follows in our current environment of equality and non-discrimination, they would also have to be granted to blacks. The sad truth is that blacks, as a group, are incapable of handling such a responsibility.

Carol Iannone writes:

How about mace and pepper spray? They can be pretty effective and don’t involve a lethal type weapon that might backfire and of course the difficulty of getting a permit and all.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 15, 2009 01:38 AM | Send