Robert Anson Heinlein said, “An armed society is a polite society.”
This assertion has been widely disputed by many, and perhaps justly so. Those who disagree raise such examples as Somalia, Zaire, Rwanda, or Ulster during the Troubles, none of which are what Heinlein would have considered “polite societies”.
The validity of this counter-argument cannot be disputed. Their applicability is another matter; but I have realized that the fault of applicability lies in a failure to adequately specify the terms.
You see, the examples above — or any of many others, such as Cambodia or Kosovo — really are not what Heinlein had in mind. In all the places we’ve named as counter-examples, a largely or completely unarmed population live, or lived, under the rule or threat of a much smaller minority of violent, heavily-armed, often homicidal thugs. The thugs, possessed of a nearly absolute monopoly on the use of lethal force, used it freely whenever the whim took them ... exactly the situation Heinlein was envisioning would not happen in an armed society.
But Heinlein made an important implicit assumption, which he felt was too obvious to need to be explicitly spelled out. When one reads his writings, it’s clear that when he said “an armed society”, what he meant was “a uniformly armed society.” And that one word makes all the difference.
You see, one violent thug — in Somalia, or Zaire, or wherever — with an automatic weapon can intimidate a crowd of forty or fifty unarmed people most of the time, because nobody wants to be among the first ten or a dozen who die before his weapon runs dry or he gets overpowered. But if twenty, or ten, or five of those people are also armed ... well, that dramatically changed the odds, and not in the thug’s favor. And the thug knows it.
That same armed thug, in a city full of unarmed people, can mug ten or a dozen people a day with impunity, and get away with it unless caught by the police. As long as he chooses his times and places, and robs when the police aren’t there, he’s pretty safe. But if one in ten of those people is armed, then roughly once per day he’s going to try to rob someone who’s armed, and the odds are good that within a few days at most, one of them is going to kill him. That’s not nearly so enticing a prospect.
This is the crucial factor: In a uniformly armed society, the violent thugs do not have the effective monopoly on force that makes their way of life sustainable. And that’s what makes a society polite — when its violent thugs have to realize that they cannot live in it as violent thugs, but are going to have to either play by the rules, die, or find somewhere else to live.
So let’s slightly restate Heinlein:
“A uniformly armed society is a polite society.”