About 30 years ago I took a look at L. Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach, about a detective from a dystopian near-future (dystopian because government is tyranny. I got to the point where Smith’s protagonist, having landed in a utopian alt.timeline, learns that in this anarchic no-government world, there’s no slavery because Thomas Jefferson convinced everyone to just stop. And there was no discrimination against the indigenous people — without government the colonists had to buy the land instead of taking it by force (and the Native Americans were all happy to sell).
I put the book down at that point. However I’m enjoying Daylight Atheism’s dissection of the book, including that Smith thinks one of the keys to freedom is guns: everyone has guns so nobody messes with them. Including pre-teens with guns because how could that go wrong? In Smith’s world it doesn’t: everyone’s calm, friendly, polite, cordial. They know other people don’t pose a danger to them so their armed society, as Robert E. Heinlein put it, is a polite society.
This sounds sensible. It isn’t. As Daylight Atheism points out, people aren’t rational: knowing someone has a gun may make them more confident (sure, the other guy’s got a gun but they can take him) or more afraid (he’s got a gun and he’s pissed — better I shoot first!). See Kyle Rittenhouse for an example. He shows up at a protest with a gun, people try to protect themselves, he starts shooting.
Then there’s the problem of jackholes. Some people hear that Heinlein phrase and interpret it as “everyone better be polite to me!” The idea that when they belittle, talk down or demand they’re being impolite doesn’t occur to them.
And quite simply, it’s a lousy idea. Impoliteness can include texting on your phone during a movie, farting in public, cutting someone off in traffic, cat-calling at women on the street. None of these are good (particularly cat-calling) but none of them deserve a death sentence, which is what we’re talking about here. In the “polite society” fantasy that’s not a problem: people mind their manners so no guns have to be drawn. But that only works if the gun-owners back it up with bullets. Sooner or later they’d have to.
Finally there’s the legal questions — not a problem for Smith, whose alt.world has no law, no government — but certainly for anyone recommending it in our world. Shooting someone for rudeness (“He was playing his stereo loud at 2 a.m.!”) gets you a prison term. An armed society would only be polite if the law were changed to allow some sort of code duello (or like Jim Crow, to have juries refuse to convict white people who committed honor killings against blacks). Do the “polite society” gun lovers think they should get the equivalent of a stand-your-ground law? Is some kind of formal duel required or can they just blow away anyone who pisses them off? And can someone do the same to them? As I said above, I doubt anyone who visualizes themselves imposing good manners at gunpoint really thinks they deserve the same discipline. It’s Wilhoit’s Law again: having guns protects “us” and makes “them” polite.
