“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, Beyond This Horizon
An epithet heard often amongst second amendment rights advocates.
Streets and highways in the U.S. are quite a bit worse than Mad Max with regard to street and highway gun fatalities.
We Live In A Violent Country
One argument that doesn’t hold true is, that if everyone is carrying a weapon, people will be polite to each other.
We see over the last 15 years that the U.S. has engaged in an unprecedented experiment in gun deregulation. We see what happens when we saturate the United States with hundreds of millions of guns.
What we’ve seen is that an armed society is not actually a very polite society. What we are seeing is people who have guns and struggle with control issues, use guns to solve problems.
So going to the store, to school, to the bank, or driving a car might subject you to lethal violence for no reason. You just happened to be there. You happened to be a bystander. Where gathering in public around others is threatened by the risk of deadly violence.
An armed society is a fearful society. And that society is set for authoritarianism and autocracy. What else do you get when you can’t be in public?
And even if you don’t get shot, seeing people carrying guns around in public spaces has a mental and psychological impact on people. They may not be directly threatening you, but they are marking the place as a place where violence can happen.
So an armed society is not a very polite society. It’s a scary society. It’s a sad society.