Guns And Manners

Short summary

Indeed, as RobertHeinlein famously observed, an armed society is a polite society. The gun owners at this match were far from being the strutting, truculent rednecks of media myth. To the contrary: I observed, as I generally have at gun shows and ranges, a kind of bone-deep good manners and degree of mutual respect that is all too rare elsewhere - the sort of quiet civility and open-handedness that used to be called "good breeding". --EricRaymond (http://www.catb.org/~esr/guns/ipscc1.html)

Incredibly, I've occasionally observed good manners in situations where no guns are being carried. Maybe I'm just a crazy liberal and I was imagining it.

Or maybe politeness and good manners are related to not just guns?

Perhaps it's the case that you can have good manners when nobody has guns, or everybody has guns - but not when only some people have guns?

Calmness and serenity are a function of security. If you know you're on a level playing field, you're less likely to get all worked up about things. If you know that 1) the field is not level, 2) the other guy has the artillery, and 3) the other guy is a bully, then life can be a little tense. If the bully cannot casually impose his will without the contemplation of consequences, then a certain amount of respect obtains and people can be more relaxed. Unfortunately, since bullies are opportunists, you never get to relax completely, but you can have vigilance without paranoia. No, the model is not perfect, but if you could have a perfect model, we wouldn't have bullies. -- GarryHamilton

It doesn't matter if the bully guy has the artillery. If you don't have it, or are not ready to use it, his fists are enough.

Or, how they used to say, "God created man, Sam Colt made them equal."

Exactly. -- GarryHamilton

"God created man, Sam Colt made them equal."

As a card carrying pinko limey, there is been one aspect of the AmericanCulturalAssumption about guns that I have never understood.

Guns are not defensive weapons; they can be a deterrent, but only if the potential attacker believes that he cannot render you unable to retaliate, or that some third party will retaliate on your behalf.

The presence of guns may also aggravate a tense situation; in a potential conflict, your opponent may believe he has to get in his retaliation before you attack him, or he may just believe that you are about to retaliate first.

That's exactly the point. Because a tense situation is quite dangerous, you don't want to get into it in the first place. "An armed society is a polite society".

kind of bone-deep good manners and degree of mutual respect that is all too rare elsewhere

Of course, in a gun club rally, everyone has something in common, a love of guns and a hatred of pinkos like me. They've come together to celebrate that. I hear the vibe at the KKK was real family friendly too. -- AndyMorris

From experience, you get more extremes of manners in the UK without guns. People are more likely to let you out of a side-road in a stream of traffic, but other people are more likely to shout out of windows, make obscene gestures etc.

Some of the least violent people I know have been martial arts experts. They know that they can defend themselves against any unarmed attacker, so they are secure. They probably can disarm any weapon-wielding opponent at arms-length, too. Guns are a way for a spindly, short, otherwise undefendable person to gain the same benefit. However, this does require that the gun-owner actually train to use the weapon safely.

The "extra" manners are either there because of "extra" care in not upsetting the other party, or a practice of the "hidden knife behind the encouraging smile" oriental idiom. [see "clean shot at your back..." in a later section]. Ever wondered how come the Japanese Bushido warriors were very intense about manners and protocols?

If you were to go off your nut and decide to shoot people, where would you go? I'd go to a gun free zone. (The only shooting that has occurred in the Israeli school system in many, many years was when the Jordanians requested that weapons they all otherwise carry be left at home during a field trip.) The gun murder rate has soared in England since they disarmed the victims.

But the second amendment wasn't about duck hunting or shooting the nut case coming through your front door. The one thing that the KKK, the religious right, the liberals, the conservatives, monarchists, nazis, socialists and communists all have in common is their willingness to impose their world view on the rest of us. Such an imposition requires force and that, as Mao Tse Tung said, comes from the barrel of a gun. I'm not willing to impose my views on anyone else nor have anyone else (read government) do it in my name. But neither should yours be imposed on me. We are not free because we elect our masters. We would not be safe because we gave them our guns either. But then I suppose we'll always have flat-earthers along with those who believe that the wolves will turn in their guns to the shepherd with the rest of the sheep (and of course that we'll never have a shepherd with a taste for mutton). -- JDSmith

Re JDSmith's arguments, I'm in England, and our gun crime rate has risen very slightly since the banning of guns, probably due to an increase in drug traffic and the enormous availability of firearms from Eastern Europe. Arguably if we hadn't banned guns when we did, the place would now be as dangerous as LA. The number of firearms deaths in the entire country is comparable to that in a small American city. Regarding the idea that "victims" at one time had legal weapons available for self-protection, again you need to check your facts. Legal weapons in the UK have always had to be secured in a gun-safe except when in active use. -- JonCoupe

An armed society is a polite society? Then we can doubtless expect the wealthy of Europe and North America to be sending their daughters to finishing schools in Iraq and Afganistan. Those being countries famed for their civil, but well armed, behaviour. These would be the same finishing schools as were a few years ago institiuted in Bosnia and Somalia, taking advantage of the high level of gun ownership, and concomitant politesse in those regions?

Guns and manners go hand and hand. Haven't you ever noticed how the soldiers mind their p's and q's while blowing up the opposing teams? It's like a chess game. All civility and rationality. Oops, that was a journalist I shot? May I extend my deepest sympathies...

Do not mistake a sort of elephantine courtliness and elaborate speech for politeness.

I have read some articles by people who carried guns for a while and then stopped. They said that when armed they found themselves looking for reasons to use them.

Well, good for them. These are obviously the type of people for whom the responsibility of carrying is too great, so I agree with their self-imposed limitation. Well done.

Now, if we could only get CCW laws passed here in Illinois...I'd still not carry, probably.

Guns are excellent weapons at distances (even more so with a scope), manners are not easy to convey beyond a few paces. I think that any such proposed manners in an armed society is science fiction. Perhaps it's more I'll be nice to you, until I've got a clean shot at your back but I can't see two folks with loaded semi-automatic weapons settling a fenderbender with much civility or manners.

Guns are tools, period. How those tools are used, and if/when they are used, depends on situation, education and training. For personal protection, a gun is a last line of defense tool only, period. When there is no other way out, and a life is on the line, then and only then do you use it. The key is in the knowing. The confidence is in the training and the practice of marksmanship. At best, a gun makes a very poor weapon in most life-threatening encounters, because the perpetrator is too close to the victim. A perpetrator with a knife in hand and who is on the other side of an average living room, has the advantage over the individual with a gun in his pocket. The distance is just too close and the perpetrator will close that distance so fast that there is almost no chance that the gun-carrier will be able to draw let alone get a clean shot. All that firearms do, is raise the bar only ever so slightly for experienced and trained users in unexpected events of the type where most encounters occur. Most encounters occur at very close ranges, something like seven to twelve feet. A gun can actually put a person in harms way, because the individual may have a false sense of security and not be on-guard enough. All of that being said, I would hate to live in a place where the USA's second amendment does not apply. I feel the most safety for myself and family when I am in the company of individuals that carry firearms, for I know that there is protection from those individuals that go "postal" [Referring to the US postal workers who come into the un-armed workplace with their guns blazing when disgruntled and pushed over the edge by an dehumanizing work environment] When have you ever heard of a cowardly maniac choosing a shooting range to play shoot-the-humans-in-a-bowl? Guns can give us the "impression" of security and safety, and since life is all about personal perspective, I support them as one more tool for use when needed.

I guess I should have added, that armed is not necessarily polite, but it is usually more respectable for those who have "training". The problem arises with individuals that are either not trained, or do not have a suitable disposition for being in possession of arms. Politeness in regards to "armed" is not necessarily the best choice of wording, but it does convey a sense of "idea".

Or maybe politeness and good manners are related to not just guns?

Returning the discussion to GunsAndManners, may I suggest, that the possible, but not yet proved correlation between bearing gun and good manner may result from some common, but unknown third cause (e.g. a authoritarian society might imply both)?

I think the idea that being armed implies politness is obvious claptrap. Look at history - when people are armed, they *aren't* especially polite. Warfare is the most obvious example. In fact, if it were true, you could logically extend it to mean that there would be no warfare at all, because countries are armed and obviously would be polite with each other. Which actually is sort of true, but it's a very strained, fragile peace that is easily unbalanced when one side (or many sides!) have (or think they have) an advantage. Heinleins society would have worked equally well if it there was an armed executioner on every corner, and regular citizens weren't armed at all.

For an armed, polite society you must have:

And even then I'm not convinced. I don't believe there's any historical examples of "armed but polite" - the politeness inherent in Japanese culture referred to above is irrelevant as feudal Japan most certainly didn't have universal armament, and the warrior class wasn't any more polite to each other than they were to anyone else. I know plenty of very skilled martial artists who aren't in the least polite - the stereotype of the enlightened kung fu master is exactly that. Generally, people carry weapons either out of a desire to intimidate or attack others, or because they feel threatened. Aggressive people (the first group) aren't generally very polite. Frightened people (the second group) are very dangerous. People are polite when the social norm encourages it and and they're stable and comfortable, not when they're worried that someone is going to shoot them. --ChrisMellon?

Let's not forget that RobertHeinlein wrote fiction. As far as I know, nothing has ever been proven about the level of politeness in armed vs unarmed societies. I certainly don't think people in the US (thought never having been there) are more polite or less polite than those in Europe.

But an explanation for this perceived politeness could be that people who have a well-thought opninion about this issue, are generally intelligent, balanced and already polite of themselves. When surrounded by people like them, they see that image reflected. However, the population at large is not exactly like them at all. A polite person with a gun is still a polite person. A rude bastard with a gun, however, just got a whole lot scarier. --AalbertTorsius

Likewise, the small, frail types got a lot scarier to the bullies, who prior to guns/swords/clubs were easy pickings --PeteHardie

[I'm not sure how useful this is. Not all bullies are big hulking people. There's plenty of small, frail ones too. I think the "equalizing" power of the gun is mostly a myth] --ChrisMellon?

CategoryDiscussion

EditText of this page (last edited June 14, 2005) or FindPage with title or text search