"Should I wait for him to shoot me?"

Manila:

"Pablo Hernandez held a 9mm handgun with his right hand, steadied it with his left, sighted on a target 30 feet away and fired. Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Spent shells dropped away, and the acrid smell of gunpowder filled the air.

The target was cardboard, but one day it could be a real person. Hernandez, a columnist for a Philippines tabloid, evaded an assassin's bullets last month. He is among a group of reporters, columnists and broadcasters who are campaigning to arm journalists in response to violence against them."

Of course, the Philippines have their anti-self-defense goofballs, too:

"Other journalists and advocates for press freedom expressed alarm, saying that carrying guns would not offer protection but instead create more violence and bloodshed. They fear a culture of vigilantism in a society where the rule of law is tenuous.

'Guns and journalists are a pretty deadly mix,' said Inday Espina-Varona, chairwoman of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines. 'We live in a pressure-cooker world, always tense, always on the run, terribly overworked and terribly underpaid, especially in the Philippines. When you're hot, in a temper, a weapon of self-defense can inadvertently be turned into a weapon against innocent people.'"

Why is it that some people think responsible citizens automatically become bloodthirsty killers when they touch a gun? I'll never understand it. Protecting oneself against murderers is not vigilantism. If anyone there is a vigilante, it is the corrupt officials who are hunting down and killing these journalists for reporting on their corruption. They are only defending themselves and yes, protecting their right to free speech.

"'We're not waiting for the policemen. We ourselves can now shoot back,' said Joel Syegco, a police reporter for the Manila Standard Today newspaper and the group's founder. He wore a black T-shirt with the message: 'Stop Killing Journalists.'

'If somebody should come at me, point a gun at me, should I wait for him to shoot me?' he asked.

Check out the captioned photo, too.