Thought of the day: Revisiting Heinlein

[unixronin]

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.”

Comments

bah. STUPID 4300-character comment limit.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

What about the suicide-by-cop type? Look at the reports. They don't tend to pick police precincts or gun shops to go die in. They tend to want to take a lot of people with them, and they go places where they expect people to be unarmed. Schools. Churches. Shopping malls that ban weapons. There's been a number of studies lately that have found that "active killers" (the currently-in-vogue term) usually seek out places where they expect to find large numbers of unarmed victims.


I don't want to appear to devalue your personal experiences. But disarming everyone law-abiding won't make it better or make it happen less often. The UK is now, to all practical purposes, totally disarmed except for the police, the military, and some of the aristocracy; and one in four people in the UK becomes a victim of crime in any given year. That's not an improvement.

Being armed won't save everyone. It never will. But having some of the "good guys" armed makes everyone's chances a lot better. Because the "good guys" outnumber the psychos MANY to one.

You have two psycho stories in your life. How many good neighbors have you had in your life?

Re: bah. STUPID 4300-character comment limit.

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

I've had many good neighbors. I've never yet been in a situation where one of them has brandished a gun at a potential bad guy; at least, not that I know of.

It is absolutely true that brandishing a gun can make a somewhat sane, somewhat intelligent would-be mugger change his mind and go away.

It would be an incredible mistake, though, to assume that most criminals are even somewhat sane and/or somewhat intelligent.

From my experience as a volunteer in the Missouri state prison system, I have come to the conclusion that it is no coincidence that the explosive rise in the state prison population came hard on the heels of the closure of most of the state institutions for the mildly mentally retarded and non-certifiable mentally ill. Most of the guys I worked with were of below-average intelligence. Most of them had very poor impulse control. Most had problems with depression, bipolar disorder, schyzo-affective disorder, and/or severe personality disorders.

I can guarantee you that most of them didn't stop to think much about their risks before committing their crimes!

Re: bah. STUPID 4300-character comment limit.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It would be an incredible mistake, though, to assume that most criminals are even somewhat sane and/or somewhat intelligent.

I agree it would be a mistake to assume they are highly so. There are many who aren't rocket scientists. There are few, though, who are sufficiently unintelligent not to understand when the balance of force is against them. In either case, though, it appears to me that the argument you are making is that law-abiding people should not be armed because some criminals will not be deterred by it. I have to point out that the criminals who are not deterred by your, or your neighbors', being armed are most certainly not going to be deterred by your being un-armed. It's somewhat like the analogy of insurance: not buying auto insurance will not keep you from getting in an accident. Neither will buying insurance, but at least if you have the insurance, you're covered. Or perhaps a better analogy: Owning a fire extinguisher won't keep you from having a fire, and neither will not owning one. But if you have an extinguisher, then if you have a small kitchen fire you have a good shot at putting it out right away, rather than having to wait for the fire department to arrive and hope it hasn't spread into the structure of the house by then.

Allowing law-abiding citizens to be armed is not a magic wand that will magically end all crime, as the gun control lobby would like everyone to believe gun-control is. It's a force equalizer which removes the monopoly on force from the violent thugs, and that makes it an effective deterrent even if only a small proportion of the population are armed. But neither being armed, nor being disarmed, will magically stop all crime, or even all violent crime; and the numbers say that crime is dramatically lower when at least the criminals bright enough to consider the fact know that some of their potential victims are armed, but don't know which ones.

It won't deter the psychos or the ones who are stoned out of their skulls, no. But if there does happen to be an armed citizen in the vicinity when it goes down, then even those stand a good chance of being at least stopped before they can kill or maim someone.

It's not an iron-clad guarantee. But what is? It is impossible to remove all risk from life, and frankly, even if it were possible, it very probably wouldn't be a good idea.

(Honestly, I sometimes think that even our existing efforts to protect people from every risk and liability under the sun have led to a generation of adult children with no self-reliance and no ability to judge risk or assess danger.)