The Un-Peaceful Society

Actually, I have one more thing to say about the recent massacre in Colorado, or more specifically the "debate" about guns that's played out in its aftermath. The right-wing's line whenever somebody gets shot is that the way to avoid gun violence is not to try and get rid of guns, but to make sure that guns are everywhere, that all the Good Guys have guns, too, and can therefore shoot the Bad Guys when they come around with their guns trying to kill people. There are lots of problems with this argument, some of which involve the idea that it doesn't work, and some of which involve the idea of this approach plunging the country gleefully into the war of all against all, in which, as a rather famous political philosopher once said, the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. I suppose my current point is related to that second basic argument, in particular riffing on the "nasty" and "brutish" parts.

Because, in this world of universal armament the conservatives envision, the life of man, or woman, is inevitably violent. There is absolutely no room for anyone to live a peaceable life in it. The message sent by that social structure to every single person living in it would be, the only thing keeping you safe from violent death is your ability to inflict violent death on those people hoping to inflict it on you. Everyone very literally has a gun to their heads, and must perforce learn to point a gun back, credibly, if they want to live. Now, I personally do not want to know how to shoot a gun. Many people may not share my tastes in that regard; some of them might even find my not wanting to know how to shoot a gun morally objectionable. Obviously, I disagree with them. But the point is, a world in which I am not given the choice to recuse myself from the world of firearms is an extremely coercive world, a world in which I am being forced against my will to learn the craft of violence and to be prepared to become a killer. A killer in self-defense, maybe, but a killer nonetheless, and I'd rather like to go through my whole life without doing that. Maybe it'll happen to work out that I can't, but I'd like to be given the opportunity to try. And in the conservative vision of guns everywhere, I'm not allowed to. I have to be ready, willing, and able to kill someone, because I have to anticipate that someone will try to kill me.

That, to my mind, would be a horrible society to live in.


(Of course, some might say that the liberal approach to gun violence, namely to try and get rid of guns [yes, of course, few liberal politicians these days actually favor that approach, but it's still the genuinely left-wing approach to this problem] prevents those who do want to learn the craft of violence, though not against their fellow human beings, from doing so. This is, of course, a correct observation, but not a problematic one: prohibiting violence is the very most basic thing that society is allowed to do by way of coercion, and I'm not terribly inclined to grant an exemption for violence against non-humans. I admit that's a minority view, but it's still true that the only thing guns ever do is destroy, and there is no general right to destroy things. I like to think that abstaining from destroying things is something everyone should have the choice to do.)