Re: The difference between being coerced and coercing
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To wit, someone raising a gun and pointing it at you is not an attack; it is a threat (whose severity can range from none, as when you know the gun is empty and it is wielded by a friend who is simply fooling around, to extremely grave, as when your wife flicks the gun back and forth between your chest and her own head, immediately after finding you in bed with her sister). However, grave though the threat may be in the second case, and much as you might be *willing* to employ force to extract yourself from the amazingly bad situation, until she pulls the trigger, she has not initiated an attack against you.
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So when does the attack start?
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When she initiates violence against you. In this instance, it would be the moment she squeezes the trigger (while pointing the gun at you, not her own head).
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When the gun is fired? Or when the bullet reaches my body? What if the gun isn't loaded, or has blanks? What if the gun has real bullets, but they don't work properly? What if, when he pulls the gun out, I think he's swinging it at me--is it an attack now?
We are all human beings in the world, faced with dilemmas and such--some of them don't have clear-cut answers.
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Perhaps, but none of the questions you raised illustrates your point.
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If a stramger pulled a gun on me, I'd break his/her arm if I had to to end the "threat"--I would feel a little bad about it, but I certainly wouldn't consider it a violation of his/her right of self-ownership (I don't think any sensible person would).
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Me either: rational people preempt threats. Hence, rational people disregard the empty claim that one must never initiate a force transaction against another person. It doesn't surprise me that you'd take this position... but it does, a little, that you'd do so while self-identifying as an ACist.
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So how you could think that using force to stop someone who has pulled a gun on you could possibly justify widespread institutionalized violence and theft (ie, government) is beyond me.
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Preemption of threats is what government is (properly) about.
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