To Insure Domestic Tranquility
By: Craig Allen Heath
Tags: Humor, Guns, Peace, USA, Politics

Many Americans believe fighting guns with guns will stop the killing and are willing to kill to prove it.

The innate and foundational cruelty of the American spirit is rarely on clearer display in the current era than in the now daily debate over gun violence. Particularly nauseating is the assertion that the solution to gun violence is that we all become armed combatants. Social media is, of course, rife with this disgusting flavor of viciousness masquerading as cogent argument.

Hello Mr. Correlation-Equals-Causation

And now, in the wake of the most recent mass shooting (at least, as I write these words) in Florida, the President of the United States has decided it’s a promising idea to devolve the monopoly on the use of force down to the average citizen.

What could possibly go wrong?

What was once only the psycho-sexual fantasy of a few self-proclaimed citizen-soldiers (little more than wanna-be mercenaries) is now a proposal for official federal policy.

Yes, maybe, if, very well could, if, or…not

An obvious reason is that the blood of our children helps to fuel the economy. Every shooting results in more gun sales, higher stock prices for gun and gun-related manufacturers, room for newer, more innovative — and very expensive — products and services to prevent or minimize the damage of gun attacks, training and counseling programs, bullet-resistant backpacks and so on ad nauseum. A trickle of that immense river of money feeds political campaigns, and so the ‘circle of death’ continues.

But let’s leave aside that shockingly inhumane topic and consider the proposal itself in isolation.

…the best way to counteract such gun violence is to engage in more of it — to make everybody a potential ‘active shooter’.

The argument goes something like this: People are going to commit shootings. Nothing can change this. The fact of daily random homicide, suicide, accidental death, and killings in the commission of crimes using guns in this country is a fait accompli. Expect and accept this as the normal business of everyday life in the United States. So, it follows, as the night the day, that the best way to counteract such gun violence is to engage in more of it — to make everybody a potential ‘active shooter’.

These advocates consider the horrifying spectacle of mass shootings, unique to the U.S., to be the best case in which to apply this bizarrely bloodthirsty practice. When a man, armed with the destructive capability of an infantry fire team (minus, so far, the grenadier) begins firing on a crowd of people, the best response, this argument goes, is for the people, up to this moment nothing more to one another than strangers, acquaintances, coworkers, teachers, students, customers and shopkeepers, to draw their own guns, organize themselves, form skirmish lines, and return fire. If the attacker is on the ground, the defenders should form sub-teams, set up a fixed cover-fire position, then execute a bounding overwatch maneuver to attack and neutralize the objective. Military precision in this operation would minimize blue-on-blue casualties. Since the defenders have not trained for the operation, however, some losses from friendly fire are inevitable and part of the body count.

A case like that of the Las Vegas shooter, however, presents a distinct set of challenges to these ad-hoc citizen special ops teams. Since the redoubtable Mr. Paddock fired from his hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, some 500 yards away from the concert crowd, enjoying not only the advantages of surprise and elevation but also of preparation, the situation on the ground called for more defensive tactics while others stormed the citadel. It would have been a great advantage if some in the crowd had smoke canisters, the deployment of which would give temporary concealment, since no cover was near at hand. Given that the equivalent of automatic weapons fire was raining down — Mr. Paddock achieved an effective firing rate somewhere between 400 and 800 rounds per minute using the now-famous and inexpensive bump-stock — smoke would not in itself have lowered the casualty rate by much. It could, however, allow time for the more forward-thinking and prepared of the open-air concert audience to assemble and sight their longer-range rifles and pepper the bunker with suppressing fire. This would cause the shooter to take cover, minimizing further losses until the hotel maids and bellhops could use shaped charges to blow the room door and employ a citizen-legal flame thrower , dealing the attacker an excruciatingly painful, fiery death.

Good thing Californians can get one now

Given that he had smashed the room window, it is possible those on the ground might have enjoyed the barbarically satisfying sight of a flaming Mr. Paddock, screaming the screams of the damned in hell, plummeting to the hotel parking lot to land with a gratifying splat.

Any reader who dismisses my scenarios as absurd is getting the point. The notion of a universally armed and battle-ready citizenry as the answer to the selectively armed assailant is beyond absurd. It is the insane fantasy of existentially terrified children.

Any reader who dismisses my scenarios as absurd is getting the point.

On the other hand, such a policy, should anything even remotely similar come to pass, would be a waking nightmare of bloodshed, intentional and accidental, coupled with an enforced, unrelenting psychic trauma. Military combat personnel receive rigorous training and drill in the execution of collaborative battle, yet still often face challenges that no training or experience can manage, and lose the fight or inflict injury and death on their own comrades. They are also prepared, as much as is possible, for the emotional and mental shocks of warfare, and still many return with psychic wounds that leave them unable to function again as average civilians. How much more self-inflicted tragedy, how many added innocents would this rag-tag collection of would-be action heroes kill and maim in the cross fire created by a reacting to a shooting with their own firepower? How much deeper and permanent would be the emotional scars caused by living under constant threat of immanent battle, then the blistering reality of attack, defense, and counter-attack? Imagine living in civilian ‘peacetime’ with the trip-wire life-and-death reality of the forward-deployed Marine, overshadowing the everyday necessities of going to work, attending school, shopping for groceries, or walking the dog?

Would any of those mundane civilian activities long survive such a social contract?

We can’t stop here, Fido — no cover

Yet there are people of goodwill who not only entertain such fantasies but advocate them as the logical answer to our signature national crime. I know some of these people. I like and respect them for many reasons, and in the name of collegiality overlook aspects of their lives and lifestyles, social and political positions I consider mistaken in logic or common sense or even simple humanity. They afford me the same tolerance. They and countless others persist in this bizarre and indefensible fantasy and trot it out in social media and conversation after every new sickening bloodletting we call a ‘mass shooting’ (4 or more shot, besides the shooter), which for the past 1,870 days has occurred 1,624 times, or an average of nine days in ten.

If only someone — a teacher, another student, a guard, an administrator, a passerby — had a gun, they say, they could have brought the attacker down and saved lives. Despite all the evidence, statistical and anecdotal, that gun combat is ridiculously difficult, fraught with hazards to self and innocents, and inherently traumatizing to the shooter as well as others, this comic-book, action-movie myth persists.

Fashionable Firepower — it will kill, but not clash

I sometimes smile at the irony when I hear people talk of these fantastical minutemen of the modern era, describing how a “good guy with a gun” could bring down that “bad guy with a gun’, expressing in this mantra their ultimate trust in their cardboard cut-out heroes. They seem to see no disconnect between expressing their desire to place their lives and the lives of their loved ones in the hands of these pistol-packing strangers, and in the next breath or social media post condemning these same strangers with the vilest language and intent, calling them stupid or evil. To hear them tell it, the stupid and evil people make up the clear majority of the population, but if they packed heat, it seems, they would thereby gain intelligence and moral redemption.

“Think of how stupid the average person is” said George Carlin, “and realize half of them are stupider than that.” These tough-minded advocates for an armed populace usually agree with the comedian’s observation. And yet it is such people they seem willing to enlist as war-ready secret heroes, whose roles in society as grocers and cabbies, teachers, and baristas, are merely their mild-mannered disguises.

Don’t be fooled by that smile — Trevor will kill you

Taking a further step, however, let’s leave aside all the arguments of practicality or feasibility. Let’s sidestep appeals to safeguard rights and liberty. Let’s ignore the statistics that show just how vicious and callous is the cultural zeitgeist of vast swaths of our country, countered only by anecdotal evidence of good people banding together in the face of adversity. What I never hear in these discussions is the answer to a fundamental question — who in their right mind wants to live in such a society?

The tough-minded pass by this nagging thought with nary a glance. It’s just the way things are, they answer, if they answer at all. That’s life. No matter what you do, you can’t stop someone from committing a crime. People are bad, and that’s just something we all must accept. How people think, and act has nothing to do with culture, environment, economy, health, status, history, or any other factor of the nation and society that surrounds and influences the individual. Bad people are bad people because they are bad people, and the only thing to do is to kill the bad people as quickly as possible. If everyone carried firearms at all times, they assert, then at least one would make the life-saving kill-shot before many more innocents die at the hands of the evil perpetrator.

The more soft-hearted enablers of the tough-minded say we won’t arm everybody and ask them to remain ready to engage. We’ll not ask children, or the aged, or the infirm, or pregnant mothers to join the militia and spring into action. We’ll train people, mostly able-bodied men and women, especially those in key areas of responsibility — like teachers and managers and guards and customer service workers and fast food employees and delivery drivers and pharmacists and gas station clerks — we’ll arm and train them in the skills of gun battle and rely on them, more than the countless others to whom we’ll also give concealed and open-carry carte blanche, to stem the tide.

Those who give the entire ghastly situation even more thought have what they assert is a better plan: Recruit the tens of thousands of returning veterans, as well as retired police, prison and security guards (read: mercenaries), who are already trained, some who have already seen combat — and deputize them to remain armed and vigilant at all times, ready to engage the moment a barrel is seen or a bolt cycling is heard. A new military-adjunct civilian force would be set up, employing those who have already served in some role, to patrol the streets and malls and schools and movie houses and open-air concerts throughout the land. Some would don uniforms and carry their bristling arsenal openly, as both deterrence and last line of defense. Others would remain hidden, outfitted as average people, their powerful weaponry hidden, to surprise the would-be shooter with superior fire power as soon as the perpetrator begins the killing spree, and cut short the carnage, save for their own stray fire inflicting regrettable, but inevitable and acceptable, casualties.

And so, those who advocate for more violence to stop violence leave us with a vision of American life that would play out as some blending of three themes: Sheer lead-flying, bloody, random, anarchic free-for-all, a slightly less anarchic free-for-all in which one wagers one’s life on being near one of these ‘trained’ gunfighters when the first shots are fired (and hope their ‘training’ is sufficient to know when to shoot, and who, and how), or life under the eye and boot of an armed paramilitary force policing our quotidian affairs with Rules of Engagement more lax than in any current overseas battle theater.

But no one who puts forth such recommendations seems to ask, let alone answer, the questions that spring easily to any sane mind: Is that how we want to live? Is that the life we want for our children, and theirs beyond that? Is that America? Is that civilization? Is that humanity?

Would you like a little Reign of Terror with your Revolution?

For all its faults, omissions, and codification of human evil (think defining some humans as three-fifths human), the Constitution of the United States makes a bold if imperfect stab at creating the legal, social, and moral conditions for a society better than those that preceded it. Of the reasons for its establishment, stated in the preamble, the architects of this fragile social construct named ‘domestic tranquility’ as a coequal goal along with ‘justice’, ‘the common defense’, ‘the general welfare’, and the ‘blessings of liberty’. Just a modicum of study into the times in which these men drafted this document, with an eye to the history they understood, would clarify why ‘domestic tranquility’ would be a key goal of this experiment.

What they called ‘domestic tranquility’ is not just the absence of violence. A society which enshrines and creates a tranquil domestic culture makes it possible for all its citizens to achieve their full potential. Such a goal becomes impossible in an environment of anarchy, violence, and the feudal system from which our forefathers had only recently emerged. So, the next question comes up in this debate — what is the goal of a society, a culture, a nation? Is sheer, unadulterated, raw, red-of-tooth-and-claw survival the ultimate goal of human society? If so, then the models championed by the tough-minded and their allies is enough. If that is all we want, then praise the nihilism and pass the ammunition.

If, on the other hand, we admit to a possible second course, or a third, we are faced with a critical inflection point. We must admit into our discourse the possibility that our problem with violence is unique to our culture, and deal with it accordingly. Otherwise, we doom ourselves to believing that the crimes and atrocities that are exclusively a part of our national psyche, absent elsewhere, reflect base human instinct and conditioning, immutable as the tides that follow the gravitational pull of the moon. The latter of those ideas carries us forward as we have been and are now — into a death spiral of epic proportions, no less dramatic than the fall of any empire the known world has ever seen and recorded.

The former idea, repeated, championed, exercised in debate and conversation and media attention, might still, even in this late hour of collapse, give us a lifeline to grab and save the last vestige of our humanity and society. Any attempt at civilization aims to transcend the bestial, the bloodthirsty, the barbaric parts of our hearts and souls. If we think the attempt impossible, there is no recourse but give up any pretense of trying. A gun in every hand, and devil take the hindmost.

‘Domestic tranquility’ is not a side-effect, a frivolity, luxury, of human society. It is the essence, the foundation, the very atmosphere, of what it means to be human and to advance human achievement, exploration, and happiness. Why would we ever think anything less is desirable?

To ask those questions is to admit another solution might be possible. To strive to answer those questions, in word and deed, is the work of civilized people. To ignore those questions is to condemn us all to the dissolution of sane and humane society. The outcome is not a physical law, like ebb and flow of tides. We can choose one or the other. The outcome is in our hands.

But today our hands are bloody and holding a smoking gun.