not2bright🇺🇸

Why arms are Civilization. (Adapted from an article by Marko Kloos) Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or compel me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it. In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Violence has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes violence from the menu is the keeping and bearing of arms, as paradoxical as it may sound. When I am armed, it is no longer profitable for someone to try to deal with me by force, because I have a way to negate their threat or employment of force. Arms are the only things that put a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound rapist, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old robber, and a single gay man on equal footing with a carload of drunken bigots with baseball bats. Arms remove the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender. There are plenty of people who consider arms as the source of bad force equations. These are the evil people who think that we’d be more civilized if all arms were removed from the law-abiding, because arms makes it easier for a criminal to do his job, or tyrannical politicians to impose their will. That, of course, is only true if the potential victims are disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat – it has no validity when most of a the potential victims are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms are ignorantly - or intentionally - asking for automatic rule by the select, the young, the strong, and the many - and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A violent criminal, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly. Then there are the argument that arms make confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is abjectly fallacious. Without arms involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the victim(s). Those who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that arms make lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is leveled. Arms are as lethal in the hands of a mobility-impaired octogenarian as they are in the hands of a weightlifter. When I am armed, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to have the means with which I can be kept safe. I am not armed because I’m afraid, and not because it doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason - only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes violence from the equation… and that’s why being armed is a civilized act.