“…an armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.” — Robert A. Heinlein.

It’s a nice sounding quote, but Heinlein was wrong.

There are an estimated 433,900,000 guns in the United States as of 2020, but only 329,500,000 people living here. That’s more than one gun per person. The next most-armed populace is in war-torn Yemen, where there’s barely half of one gun per person. If any society in the world qualifies as armed, the United States does. And yet, do people seem especially polite to you? Do people openly carrying firearms seem more polite than those who don’t?

The problem is the finality of a lethal weapon. To turn a phrase from Bertrand Russell, it doesn’t decide who’s right, only who’s left. A corpse can’t argue or give testimony in court. Armed people don’t have to change their ways if they learn to draw their weapon first whenever a situation becomes “threatening.”

Some people like to imagine that the “Old West” was civilized and that the good guy always won because everyone carried a gun on their hip, but let’s examine a case study.

Billy the Kid, famed outlaw, killed his first man at the age of 16, over a verbal altercation in a bar, using a stolen pistol. The two called each other names and then fought over Billy’s gun before he was able to win control of it over. He shot the other man, a blacksmith, who died the next day. Despite multiple witnesses, nobody stopped the fight or apprehended the shooter.

Billy fled the town, but returned a few days later and was caught by the justice of the peace. However, he soon escaped jail (a feat which he accomplished repeatedly through his life). From there, Billy eventually joined a gang of cattle rustlers, then the Regulators, and took part in the “Lincoln County War”, a fight between rival groups in the New Mexico Territory. The Regulators were, among other things, attempting to avenge the death of John Tunstall, who had been shot in the chest and head by a sheriff’s posse (no court case). The Regulators were able to apprehend the accused murderers, who were then shot while (allegedly) trying to escape (again, no court case). In subsequent shootouts, four more men were killed and Billy the Kid was shot in the thigh.

Before eventually being shot and killed himself at the age of 21 (no court case), Billy the Kid killed an estimated 21 people. His first murder was over a verbal argument in a bar, only five years previous. The “Old West” wasn’t a place where many people had the chance to grow old and wise.

People who walk around with firearms don’t become more polite, they become more bold and quick to violence, even over small arguments. They begin to act with the knowledge they can end a life at their discretion, before anyone can intercede. And that leaves them to decide what happened.

Unregulated gun ownership, and make no mistake, that’s very close to what we have now in the United States, will never lead to ‘law and order’. Guns empower the unruly as much as the lawful. Perhaps even more so.

There have to be some limits on who is allowed to carry weapons, and what kinds of weapons those can be. A bar-none approach to gun ownership is simply a recipe for unending violence.

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