Preparedness: When the State Fails, Protection Is Not a Crime
What's So Bad About Being a Vigilante?
What’s So Bad About Being a Vigilante?
(Brian Wilson) - The state’s most sacred claim is that it alone may wield legitimate force. Only its agents may arrest, judge, and punish. Only its institutions may decide when violence is justice and when it is crime. Everything else is “vigilantism,” a word carefully chosen to evoke chaos and bloodlust rather than the simple reality that people will defend themselves and their children when the official monopoly fails.
Recent events make the claim look more like a protection racket than a moral principle.
In 1984, Gary Plauché walked into a Baton Rouge airport and shot Jeffrey Doucet, the man who had kidnapped and raped his eleven-year-old son. The killing was captured on television. Plauché served no prison time. The public understood what the courts eventually formalized: the state had already failed. The predator was in custody only after the damage was done. A father acted where the system had not.
Four decades later, Aaron Spencer of Lonoke County, Arkansas, found his thirteen-year-old daughter in the vehicle of Michael Fosler—the same man already charged with dozens of sexual offenses against her and free on bond. Spencer forced the vehicle off the road and shot Fosler. He did not deny it. He said he protected his child. In 2026 a judge dismissed the…
