The Probability Broach, chapter 5
Win sits up, dizzy and bloodied, his head throbbing from the explosion that hurled him into the air. He remembers fleeing from a hail of gunfire and escaping through what he thought was an emergency exit. But his surroundings bear no resemblance to that violent scene:
Through my personal haze, the scene was tranquil, bearing no relationship to the meat grinder I’d just been through: a broad emerald lawn and a five-foot hedge stretched endlessly in the distance. On the other side, a corrugated metal shack showed robin’s-egg blue. The air was warm, heavy with the scent of dark earth and growing things, dappled with sunshine and shade amid small groves of enormous trees; benches and sidewalks somehow tinted tones of red, orange, or yellow.
…Here and there, other people were dancing, talking in small groups, lying in pairs under leafy canopies, moving gently with the music. They wore a bewildering variety of costumes: bright swirly cloaks, skirts or kilts, trousers and tunics—riots of color strewn like shining flowers across the forested lawn.
…A hand on my shoulder—I started. A dark, pretty girl in orange bellbottoms stood behind me. “Are you all right?” she asked, almost apologetically… A sheathed dagger, needle slim, hung from a jewelled chain around her tanned and slender waist.
Unable to comprehend what’s happened, Win can only assume he was somehow thrown clear by the blast (“the Enquirer’s headline would read, POLICEMAN THROWN HUNDREDS OF FEET BY EXPLOSION, LIVES!”).
He croaks that he’s all right and staggers off, hurting and bewildered. People stare at him as he stumbles through the park, and as his head clears, he looks back at them. The first thing he notices, after the unfamiliar clothing styles, is that everyone is armed:
Whatever the local ordinances were, I saw more low-slung handguns, more dirks and daggers, than in a dozen B-westerns and swashbucklers spliced together reel to reel. I found myself grabbing convulsively at my left armpit more than once. Fort Collins sure had changed!
…There hadn’t been a hardware collection like this since the Crusades were catered. Women and children sporting arms right along with the men.
In case it isn’t obvious, Win has entered a parallel universe. It’s L. Neil Smith’s anarcho-capitalist utopia, the North American Confederacy. The NAC is a society with no government, no laws and no police. Everyone is responsible for their own safety, hence why everyone is carrying weapons. At any moment, you might have to defend yourself against someone trying to rob or kill you, and no one’s coming to help you if you can’t.
You might think that a lawless, heavily armed society would be like the Wild West. It should be a place where the threat of violence is always hanging in the air like thunderclouds, where every stranger is regarded with suspicion and hostility, and every encounter takes place through narrowed eyes and hands hovering above pistol grips. Smith insists that isn’t the case:
Something was missing—the barely concealed hostility and fear that haunted my city streets. These people never seemed to push or jostle, never avoided looking at one another. They’d nod politely—even speak!—and they carried their heads high, unafraid of the world around them. It sent shivers down my spine.
This is the “an armed society is a polite society” thinking that’s ubiquitous among gun-worshippers. It’s also completely false.
As ultra-violent America proves by its own bad example, putting more guns in more hands makes society more violent, not less. There will always be angry, unstable people who erupt at the slightest provocation. There will always be abusers and psychopaths who have no qualms about lashing out at others to get their way. In a world where nobody is armed, these confrontations might end in yelling, curses, or at worst, a brawl. In a world where everyone is armed, they’ll end with bullets.
And that’s what happens in the real world, where people know that calling the police is an option when you’re in danger, and where the threat of legal consequences deters people from choosing violence. In Smith’s world, going for your gun is the first and last resort. There’s every reason for lethal violence to be more common, and no reasons for it to be less. His North American Confederacy shouldn’t be a peaceful, well-mannered utopia; it should be a war zone.
But wait – among that panoply of armed strangers, did he mention children? Yes, children:
Even more jarring were the weapons—men and women alike, little people, children. I passed one obvious kindergartener carrying a pistol almost as big as he was! Was there some danger here I wasn’t seeing?
…Yet these people seemed so full of cordiality. Could the source of their pride and dignity be nothing more than the mechanical means of dealing death they carried?
Okay, look.
There’s a reason we don’t let children do things like drink alcohol or drive, and it’s not because we live in an overbearing nanny state. It’s because their brains are still developing and maturing. Kids exhibit a combo of intense emotions, lack of common sense, and impulsive behavior that can be hard for parents to manage at the best of times.
As the father of an 8-year-old boy, I can attest that kids are capable of being intelligent, sweet, compassionate, and insightful. They’re also prone to being stubborn and contrary for no good reason, ignoring directions they’ve been given a hundred times, doing dangerous things out of sheer carelessness, and throwing huge tantrums over inconsequential problems. They stick things in electric outlets, walk into traffic, try to pet strange animals, run up and down the stairs. My son once touched a cactus to see what would happen.
And he’s old enough now to occasionally reason out the consequences of his actions. Smith is proposing that even younger children should be trusted with deadly weapons. I wouldn’t even trust a kindergartener with a permanent marker!
Then there are the teenagers. Again, it’s not just the government passing arbitrary laws because they hate freedom. The frontal cortex of the brain, which is involved in foresight and self-control, isn’t fully developed in teens. That’s why they’re prone to impulsive, risky behavior like dangerous driving, drugs and unsafe sex. (The free market also recognizes this; that’s why they pay higher car insurance rates.)
You can imagine how disastrous it could be to add easily accessible, unregulated firearms to the mix. What happens in anarcho-capitalist world if you’re the parent of a teenager and you ground them for bad behavior? Can they threaten to shoot you?
Libertarians reflexively assume that humans are perfectly rational beings who carefully weigh the benefits and drawbacks of every decision, even in cases where it’s obvious that assumption is false. This is the most shocking example. Owning a firearm, much less carrying it around, demands a level of care, discipline and vigilance that most adults don’t possess.
Kids die, all the time, from finding and playing with their parents’ guns. In the past few years, guns have become the #1 cause of death for U.S. children and teenagers. It takes a willfully perverse mind to look at this carnage and conclude the only problem is that there aren’t enough kids packing heat.
Image credit: Public domain, via NARA/DVIDS
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Heh, yeah. If you didn’t, I was going to raise the point that the evening news is full of stories of teenagers shooting people and children playing with guns who accidentally shoot either themselves or their friends/siblings. Children’s brains aren’t developed enough to comprehend the consequences. I asked my son to pack an overnight bag for his best friend’s house when he was six. We spoke about things like pajamas and clothes for the next day and I sent him to his room to get ready. He packed one sock, a game controller, and soccer shorts. In the winter. There is no way I would have trusted this child to carry a lethal weapon.
And as for adults, there are frequent news stories of adults assassinating others over road rage and petty disagreements. If everyone is armed, picture the carnage the next time someone brings 11 items to the 10-or-fewer checkout at the grocery store.
The most horrifying road-rage story I’ve seen was the one where two men shot at each other, and each hit the other’s child:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/04/16/william-hale-frank-allison-florida-road-rage-shooting/11652073002/
Neither died, but that was pure luck. Being armed didn’t make either of those men more polite!
I think someone of Smith’s mindset would insist that if the aggressor-shooter had KNOWN the other guy was armed, he would not have started a shootout. So it’s everyone else’s fault for not advertising and requiring that everyone be openly carrying at all times.
All right. Now the craziness really steps into high gear. What could ever have possessed Smith to think that kindergarteners with guns was a good idea? Let alone that the resulting society would be stable? Moreover, since the NAC is an ultracapitalist society where corporations have free rein, what makes him think they wouldn’t be the ones committing atrocities in the absence of government? All corporations care about is their profits going up. That’s (one if the) reasons why it’s bad.
Now, I’m still just learning about what real anarchists want to replace with the police with, but giving everyone semiautomatics ain’t it. Mutual aid is not “everybody fend for himself”. It’s extremely complicated without a quick fix. But I have a sneaking suspicion, especially since Win is a policeman, that Smith wasn’t advocating for restorative justice. (I know you were asking before about how anarchism could possibly avoid recreating the police, and one proposed solution is “restorative justice” which is actually practiced in indigenous stateless societies. Similarly, consensus democracy is not “recreating the state”. These positions are far more radical than Smith’s idiotic “make capitalists the de facto state” proposal. But I’ll have more to say about how inferior Smith’s system is compared to libertarian _socialist_ proposals once we see more of this society.)
I hope your son wasn’t too badly hurt. But even if the needles just pricked him, I suppose it was difficult to remove them? My brother, when he was about five, once accidentally fell into a whole patch of cactuses and had to go to the hospital. (It was also nighttime so my parents didn’t at first know what had happened.)
I’ve read about restorative justice. I think it’s an excellent idea, far better than our brutal system of incarceration.
The only problem is that everyone has to participate voluntarily. There’s no way for it to handle a situation where the offender doesn’t believe they’re in the wrong or doesn’t feel remorse. (Like if they say, “Yeah, I killed him and I’m glad he’s dead, I’d do it again.”)
I’m in favor of more humane forms of justice. But there has to be a fallback option for people who won’t cooperate.
Ha, thanks for asking!
We were at a botanical garden and he touched one of the cactuses where the spines are like stiff, bristly hairs. Three or four of them stuck in his finger. We were able to get them out, and I don’t think they drew more than a few drops of blood. But it was a lesson he didn’t soon forget.
It has also occurred to me that part of the reason he made “our” society so ludicrously tyrannical was so to contrast it with the people of the libertarian society looking like hippies. Like, the world is so awful that seeing people enjoying their lives means they MUST be in another world! But this is a pale imitation of the Culture, even considering that the North American Confederacy was written first.
I can’t help but wonder if Neil Smith, like Republican pseudo-historian David Barton, enjoyed Louis L’Amour’s western novel Bendigo Shafter and thought the story about boys bringing six-shooters to their one-room schoolhouse was factual.
…Here and there, other people were dancing, talking in small groups, lying in pairs under leafy canopies, moving gently with the music…
Yeah, right…if I was reading this book, and hadn’t tossed it out before, I would surely have tossed it out at this point, even if I was a libertarian. This is just embarrassing. Everyone’s paranoid enough to carry guns everywhere at all times, but it’s a peaceful lovey-dovey hippie commune where everyone’s totally at ease and happiness reigns all year ’round? Whiskey Tango Actual Foxtrot?!
…I saw more low-slung handguns, more dirks and daggers, than in a dozen B-westerns and swashbucklers spliced together reel to reel.
And this is even less credible than all those dozen B-westerns and swashbucklers spliced together reel to reel. Those movies were based, if only loosely, on real events. Smith’s story is literally pure fantasy.
And if everyone is carrying weapons because everyone knows they might have to use them at any time, and everyone sees that at least a good many others have guns, then why would anyone bother with “dirks and daggers?”
It’s because their brains are still developing and maturing. Kids exhibit a combo of intense emotions, lack of common sense, and impulsive behavior that can be hard for parents to manage at the best of times.
Also, guns are HEAVY and hard for little hands and wrists to aim or hold steadily. I guarantee you if the kid in that picture were to fire that gun, he wouldn’t be grinning when he felt the recoil. (I once saw a video of a 10-year-old girl holding a fully-automatic rifle. She’d originally aimed for the target, but when she started firing the recoil caused it to swing wildly in all sorts of wrong directions, and ended up killing a few people she hadn’t intended to kill.)
@ ^ Raging Bee : The ten year old girl ha dbeen intending to kill people?! What?
Even in my libertarian days, I would have thought this was absurd. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of even any anarcho-capitalist besides Smith who’s advocated children using guns (although there have been some with similarly deranged ideas). He also seems unique in the idea of making security entirely self-help, as most have stated private police or similar would fill the gap. Whatever one thinks of that idea, it’s at least not this idiotic.
To be fair to the author, this book came out in 1979. The phrase “going postal” wasn’t coined until after multiple incidents in 1986, and the Columbine Massacre wasn’t until 1999. It’s not like mass shootings never happened before those, but the public awareness and perception (especially among the middle class) would have been in a very different place back then. It’s more “aged poorly” than “willful blindness” and/or “depraved indifference”.
Actually, the context of 1979 doesn’t really rescue the author or his deranged ideas. Mass-shootings weren’t as commonplace then as now, but they did happen, as did kids getting into trouble with guns. Also, drugs and violent crime were major political issues then, and the public generally were quite aware of the existence of random senseless violence. I was 19 back then, and I do remember hearing ideas much like Smith’s and thinking they were just as willfully stupid and insane as I think they are now. They did not “age poorly.”
One difference between 1979 and now is that back then people thought of random senseless violence as a big-city thing, whereas today we’re seeing school shootings and drug-trade-related violence in small towns and rural areas as well. So maybe back then Smith could have pretended that small-town life was better and more peaceful because more people in small towns had guns, and cities needed more people like Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish” movie character, who always does more to keep the peace than big-city cops.
For people who read TPB when it was published, the shooting they’d probably have heard about was the 1966 University of Texas clock tower massacre:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Texas_tower_shooting
Mass shootings weren’t as common, but it was definitely a thing that happened. It couldn’t have escaped the notice of an author writing a book about how more guns for everyone is an unambiguously good thing.
Thanks, I was gonna mention that incident if I’d remembered more details about it. Around 1979 most gun-rights were saying things like “yeah, that sort of thing is really bad, but DON’T ANYONE DARE TAKE AWAY MY HANDGUN!!!”