ZOMBIE FORUMS

With all deepest respect to Emy, and in reference to this:



Emy's favourite writer was mistaken. One can point to quite a few armed societies around the planet that are not polite: Angola, Brazil, Colombia and Ethiopia come to mind instantly, amongst a host of others. Perhaps, though, RAH meant something different by "an armed society" than "a large collection of humans all of whom have brutally effective weapons that want them". I'm not sure I care.

I don't trust people who do not already understand and respect politeness to learn it either by carrying a weapon or by being threatened by a weapon. Impolite, selfish people who acquire weapons will use those weapons in impolite and selfish ways.

It is simplistic to the point of meaninglessness to say something like "human beings are inherently bad" or "human beings are inherently perfectible". From such premises come the excesses of the Inquisition and of the Soviet regime, respectively. It is neither simple nor meaningless, however, to say that "primates, including human beings, are instinctually avaricious".

We are evolved to be greedy. The whole notion of "society" is the human response to the distribution of resources. Give us weapons, and at least some of us will not let a little thing like politeness get between whatever it is we want and whomever it is currently thinks he owns it.

Tamayo the disillusioned

Well, I would point out that one idea is not enough to base a society on.

Certainly, Heinlein <a href="http://news.google.com/news?q=road+rage&hl=en&hs=fnT&lr=&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&sa=N&tab=nn&oi=newsr">missed something</a> when he wrote:

So compare and contrast: the exact same situation arises all the time in real life. Someone is cut off on the road and enacts violence on the other driver. Quite often the person attacked IS armed[*] and the aggressor winds up losing the fight, but this doesn't seem to deter road rage.

I think that the thing that is missing is none of the "over-armed" countries mentioned above have a good rule of law. Many people in the US have access to firearms and associate with other armed people. In areas where the law holds well, we have sportsman's' clubs, gun collectors societies, etc. Where the law does not hold sway we have gangs.



There is an <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=00005438-F938-13D7-9FCA83414B7FFE87">interesting bit of primate research</a> on the policing effects of the dominant members of a macaque troop. Normally, the dominant males broke up fights and troop unity was high. The researchers removed the policing males for a day, and the troop quickly broke into aggressive cliques.

So perhaps, the need for rule of law is just as much a part of primate evolution as greed. If the greedy know that they will be caught and punished and things are fair, then society runs smoothly. If one person gets away with a crime, it only encourages others; not just because they believe they will not be punished, but because they know that the only way to get ahead of the cheaters is to start cheating society themselves.

The reason I think the issue is not access to "weapons" per se is because anything can be a weapon. Anything that cuts, anything that burns, anything that increases leverage, anything that can be thrown is a weapon. As I understand it, Britain has gone a long way towards eliminating private gun ownership. This has corresponded with a notable increase in knife-crimes.

Eventually all society must come down to basic trust. Society is based on cooperation. We trust that the cities will provide drinking water, so we don't drill our own wells and drain the aquifurs dry. We trust that our neighbors are not trying to invade our homes, so we don't board up our easily-broken glass picture windows. We trust that the people we meet are not killers, so we don't go everywhere armed.

Rule of law engenders this trust in a way that heavily-armed anarchy simply cannot.



* Thinman carries a surplus police truncheon under his car seat for this exact reason.

But Rule of Law + everyone being armed is better than either one of them alone.

How is, all other things being equal, an orderly society with guns better than an orderly society without guns?

What does an orderly society without guns do for themselves when unorderly types from other societies come in with guns?

Tamayo, would you agree that the threat of mutually assured destruction was the only thing that prevented a conventional war between the US and the USSR?

That's easy -- no. It might have been the most important reason that those two powers never went to war, but it could hardly have been the only one.

I disagree. Introducing a weapon to a situation, even an even distribution of weapons, only raises the risk to everyone involved.

Situation: you wake up and somebody is in your house. Since we're running with the "everyone is armed" scenerio, this person more than likely has a weapon with which he or she is unlikely to hesitate to break the law. You, on the other hand, have a weapon with which you have a right to defend yourself. This situation has very likely become one where someone will be seriously injured or killed.
Removing the weapon from one of the persons in the scenerio changes the picture a bit. In all likelihood it'll be the person breaking the law already that has the weapon, so you know you need to stay quiet and call the authorities or let them take stuff. The three primary possibilities for this situation (assuming you don't confront the armed robber - that could go either way): you could call the authorities and likely show overwhelming force to the thief, you could be caught trying to call the authorities and become a knockout victim (you aren't likely to be able to put up much resistance, and are thus less likely to be killed), or you could let them take your stuff. These aren't all the best examples and I'm sorry for that, but it's pretty clear to me at least that having a weapon raises the stakes and makes this situation worse.
As for the situation where nobody has a weapon? Physical prowess plays a big part if you actually confront them, but you're less likely to be seriously hurt or killed in your own home when you know the surroundings and may well be able to scare them off. This situation is less likely than one person having a weapon because outlawing weapons just doesn't work. A person who breaks the law anyway won't usually hesitate to carry backup, especially illegal backup.

Nope. Everyone being armed makes the situation better. It takes time for police to arrive, and I don't want my stuff to get taken. On the other hand, I don't care if I have a dead theif, and I know my house better than he does. And they can't call backup if they're dead.

*wheels out tired statistic of more people being shot with their own guns than actually shooting other people with them etc etc*

That's because people are idiots, and don't follow the four basic rules of gun safety.

1. Always act as though the gun is loaded.
2. Never put your finger on the trigger until you're about to shoot.
3. Never point a gun at something you don't mind being destroyed.
4. Always keep in mind what is behind your target.

It ain't hard, it's just that people are stupid and/or suicidal.

Guns = cowards way out.

If you really mean it, stab the fucker and feel the life drain out of them while they're pressed against you and you feel the blood covering your own hands.

Or better yet, strangle them. Squeeze all the life out of them. Watch them turning blue and laugh that they were stupid enough to try to steal your PS2.

Don't ever kill someone unless you're prepared to do it with your bare hands and mean it.

.. but once you take that into account.

Letting stupid people have access to guns is generally a bad idea, and it'd be far safer for the nearly everyone around them for them to -not- have a weapon, than them having the chance of fucking up, and randomly shooting something/one by accident, due to stupidity.

Whatever. If I'm going to kill someone to protect my family or property, I'm going to do it in the most effective way possible. I'm not going to deny myself the most effective weapon available because it offends someone else's ideas about 'honor'.

Tatsu: Which is why you make firearms safety courses mandatory. Because this is the type of stupidity that can be cured. Look at Switzerland.

Didn't say anything about honor. I just think it's always a good idea to REALLY mean it when you kill someone. Who knows, you might actually discover some kind of humanity or guilt after the act. You'd want to avoid that by knowing it wasn't going to happen right?

So, you're saying I should take less effective means to defend myself and my family just because I might feel guilty after the fact?

I'll take that chance, thanks. It's better to feel guilty because you did the right thing, than guilty because you didn't.

That's simply a ploy to introduce disorder into the equation, which is outside of the bounds of the question I asked. Though, you and your neighbors against an army are still screwed. With or without guns.

And an attitude like that leads to arms races. Stockpiling of weapons. But the problem with arms races are they always come to an end, and even the ones with reletively peaceful ends still can cause incalcuable damage. And we all know what happened at the end of the Cold War, all those weapons (at least on the Communist side of the Bloc) were sold off to the highest bidder. AK-47s to Africa and the Middle East.

Undoubtedly, these areas were unstable to begin with. However, the depth and breadth of the chaos would have been much smaller if the Arms Race mentality were absent in the 1950s. It's said that idle hands are the workers of the Devil. Replace "hands" with "guns" and we get an accurate representation of the poorest regions of the world in the past 15 years.

Obviously, guns have their uses, but we must never put out of our mind this fact, "Guns are made to kill things." Be it deer, quail, 70-year-old lawyers, that gangsta' thug down the block, or your enemy on the battlefield, they have just one purpose. To make the thing on the other end stop moving. It's not the Defender of Justice, or the Bringer of Freedom. It's the Killer of Living Things. Guns are amoral, it has no brain other than the one on the other side of the trigger finger.

And, as a nation, America has a royally fucked up attitude. Probably not a good idea to give *us* weapons, let alone the terrorists who were able to buy their's at special closeout discounts.

Where did I actually say that?

You want guns then have guns. I don't actually care. My *preference* is that I would rather not in favour of the claw hammer I keep under my bed and the baseball bat in my cupboard. And this is coming from someone who grew up around guns and was encouraged to go hunting and play "target practice" with rifles as a child.

I don't hate guns or think you're wrong for wanting "protect your family" or whatever. I just wouldn't do it the same way as you.

I on the other hand think you're a danger to society and should be restricted to accessing only other gun-toting lunatics until most of you kill each-other off.

Sweet.

The pro-gun people pretty much invariably have to use anecdote to argue with, while the anti-gun people use statistics. Becauses the statistics are pretty much all are their side.

Anecdote is the more powerful form of argument, but statistics, for obvious reasons, works better for large scale issues that involve populations. Which describes almost anything involving government and law.

"An armed society is a polite society" is one of the things Heinlein got completely wrong. He wasn't much into formal sociological analysis, though he put some interesting insights into his "History of the Future" series. He detailed, for instance the triumph of a reactionary Christian movement over a high-tech future American society.

A statistical truth: throughout history, armed cultures and subcultures are almost always LESS polite then unarmed cultures and subcultures. Power feeds the ego, and weapons are power. People who have power feel superior to others and don't treat them with the interactive respect that is traditionally understood to be "politeness."

So, if you give a bunch of drunken cowherds weapons, they will argue with and use their weapons on each other and passing strangers. If you give them lethal weapons some people will get killed, and if you give them all the latest model lethal weapons, allowing any one of them kill someone by flicking a switch (called a trigger in a revolver) there will be a steady a predictable death rate.

The same thing applies when a ruling noble elite gains weapons and armor that make they superior warriors to the local militia. Or if you give trained soldiers the freedom to indulge themselves among the civilians of local farms and towns.

One interesting and classic example: in classical and medieval Eurasia and Africa, two potent weapons, the composite bow and the horse, became part of the culture of various nations of nomadic pastoralists. These peoples sprang from several racial sources: Semites (Arabs), Hamites (Berbers, Tauregs), Indo-Europeans (Scythians, Germans, Russians, Alans, Yue-Chi), Finno-Ugrics (Hungarians), and Turko-Mongols. What inevitably happened is that these horse-bound nations developed a culture of raiding for loot and glory, justified by their sense of racial superiority to the peasants living around their steppe/desert homelands.

Some other common cultural influence? Maybe.

When the horse was introduced in quantity to the North American steppes after 1680, a number of tribes of various cultures that had previously been farmers and/or hunters took up the horse-borne hunting lifestyle. The horse, the skills acquired from a lifetime in the saddle, and the hunting skills with bows, knives, and lances gave these tribes a significant weapon advantage over the neighboring farming cultures.

So, what happened when these tribal peoples became an armed soceity? They developed a competitive warrior/hunter culture that made the defeat of various enemies the most prestigious goal of an adult male and a prime measure of stature in their society.

So, they fought regularly within their own societies, many of them left the drudge work of society to women, and they preyed constantly on their neighbors.

This transformation took only three generations; the first large pony herds appeared on the Great Plains around 1700 and the predatory societies produced were in full flower by the time of the American Revolution.

Teach a culture to fish, and it eats regularly; teach it shoot guns, and it shoots people on a regular basis.