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I came to the conclusion that the odds of any given DUer losing a fight (unarmed combat -- firearms are another story) to a Freeper type are lower than you'd expect from a group falsely characterized as consisting of nothing but 'bleeding-heart' wimps and pacifists. I say this not because of the innate belief that we're better human beings than they are -- this is a given -- or that our club's better than theirs, but because of one very good reason.
Well, maybe more than one very good reason. An ancillary good reason is that many of us have been through military or law-enforcement training that included self-defense and unarmed combat (or have trained in various martial arts for long enough for them to be actually useful)...the very nature of the Freeper, seemingly most often a chickenhawk with few powers of critical thinking, suggests to me that, for all their swagger and alleged facility and expertise with firearms, fewer have been through either military or police training than they'd like you to think. Chickenhawks don't like to put themselves in harm's way -- there're poor people and black and brown people to do that for them.
The main reason that occurred to me, though, is that Freepers and their ilk are essentially bullies. Not just bullies in the classic, schoolyard sense, but bullies in a broader sense -- just like the neocons and their corporate fascist cronies are bullies, in a way, when they declare economic and social war on the disadvantaged or the soon-to-be-disadvantaged so as to further their own greedy agenda. The irony here, of course, is that the Freepers are likely to be among the victims of the neocon agenda, but that's another story.
Anyway, it's been my experience -- and I doubt anyone would dispute this -- that bullies are invariably cowards. And one thing I know about cowardly bullies is that once their bluff is hurt and their defenses bypassed, they're hurt and they're running scared. Few things are more pathetic than a vanquished bully. You can almost feel sorry for them. Almost.
On the other hand, I've seen and heard of some pretty meek and timid people, not blessed with tremendous physiques nor training in the art of putting a hurtin' on another human's body, rise to the occasion in self-defense and sometimes inflict some quite stunning injuries. The martial arts teachers that I've had, too, have by their own example proven to me the danger in assuming harmlessness from a seemingly harmless exterior -- that short, or rather overwight-looking, or kinda goofy looking dude might just be a martial arts expert (or a special forces veteran) of many years standing. Not all martial-arts experts look like the dudes in the kung-fu films or Jean Fraud Van Dumme, and not all special forces vets look like Rambo (of the few that I know, that actually were special-ops people, exactly none of them fit the movie stereotypes). Sometimes there's a whole lotta potential to inflict pain lurking within the least likely people, judgign the book by its cover, but the only ones who'll ever kinow that are the ones who unleash it through their own aggression. But you can bet that that belligerent loudmouth who's obnoxiously threatening all sorts of harm is probably, no matter how big his biceps (bigger muscles means bigger targets...not that your average Freeper is likely to be mistaken for the likes of Dolph Lundgren), about as much a real danger, when things really get going, as the average wet tissue paper.
Things are not always thus, but very often are. I'd just love to one day see a willowy blonde 'hippie-girl,' who's been training in tai chi since she was a teenager, throw some redfaced 'patriot' a good dozen feet down the sidewalk...you can bet he'd land heavy, too.
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