No… it’s a dystopian society
This piece by Mark Sumner at DKos summarizes our current dilemma and it’s horrifying:
The aphorism “an armed society is a polite society” is a frequently used saying among gun supporters on the right. It’s also been featured on banners, buttons, and T-shirts from the National Rifle Association. But no one ever seems to ask what it really means.
This is what it means. All of this. It means in a society with more guns than people, even the slightest provocation ends with someone getting shot.
The origin of the phrase, usually described as “a Robert Heinlein quote,” is actually the dystopian novel “Beyond This Horizon.” The antihero of his novel is a privileged product of eugenics who happily shoots people for the slightest infraction, real or perceived.
The context of the quote—which ends with the character saying, “We do not have enough things to kill off the weak and the stupid these days, but to stay alive as an armed citizen a man has to be either quick with his wits or with his hands, preferably both”—rarely makes a T-shirt or bumper sticker. Neither does the novel’s lavish praise of eugenics, telepathic powers, and general weirdness.
But even if it were a fictional quote taken completely out of context, the saying turns out to be true, in a way. In a sufficiently armed society, any small transgression is met with bullets. America is sufficiently armed.
The shooting of Kinsley White and her family—that’s the 6-year-old who tried to chase down a basketball—illustrates this perfectly.
As reported by The Guardian, several neighborhood children were playing basketball when the ball bounced away and rolled into the yard of 25-year-old Robert Singletary. Singletary responded by screaming and cursing at the children. The ages of all the children weren’t given, but this included screaming and cursing directed toward at least one kindergarten-aged girl. In response, one of the fathers told Singletary he needed to stop yelling at children, and that if he had a problem, he needed to come over to the adults and work it out. Instead, Singletary went into his house, got a gun, came back outside, and began shooting.
Somewhere in this process, Kinsley White’s father also grabbed a gun and returned fire. Singletary unloaded at least one full clip, hitting Kinsley’s father, the father of another child present, and leaving Kinsley with bullet fragments in her cheek.
“Why did you shoot my daddy and me?” Kinsley said into the camera in an interview with a local television station. “Why did you shoot a kid’s dad?”
If you were ever a child in this country, or likely any country, you’re bound to have run into a situation like this at some point. The neighborhood asshole who yells at any kid who steps on his perfect grass, or who has some utterly nuts feelings about the inviolability of his patch of earth. The guy who, old or not, screams, “Get off my lawn!” or something worse at the first provocation. Maybe that’s the end of it. Maybe it comes down to two neighbor guys squaring off across the invisible boundary between one patch of green and the next and glaring at each other. Oh yeah? Yeah! That’s not how things work in an armed society.
As USA Today reported in March, the United States is also seeing a sharp increase in “road rage” incidents that lead to shootings. Among the more than 550 incidents last year were a man who was shot while driving kids to a birthday party when he asked another driver to slow down, and a man who was shot while driving his son home from a Little League game. As states drop requirements on concealed carry, these incidents continue to rise.
In an armed society, the perceived insult of being asked not to cuss at a child is a shooting offense. Opening someone’s car door is a shooting offense. Pulling into a driveway where the owner was tired of people using their little stretch of blacktop to turn around is a shooting offense. Asking someone to slow down is a shooting offense. Anything that might have ended with an exchange of fists, or just hot words, a raised finger behind a window, or even with one person just mumbling under their breath is a shooting offense.
That’s the point of the saying. In an armed society, you don’t dare offend anyone, at any time, about anything. Because everything, no matter how trivial, is a shooting offense.
America … is an armed society. We’ve reached that dystopia where a child fetching a basketball, or a cheerleader touching the wrong car on her way back from practice, or a kid stepping onto the wrong porch doesn’t get words or glares. It gets bullets.
Forget for a moment the big shooting sprees, those in which someone decides to show that their wonder weapon is capable of wiping out a school full of children, or a crowded nightclub, or an office packed with former coworkers. These incidents aren’t about plans drawn up by people who spent weeks making those final adjustments to their manifestos.
These are such tiny, ordinary, everyday events that they should be forgotten in a moment. That guy next door? Sorry, I don’t remember. What was his name again? Except they turn into trauma, or injury, that can last a lifetime. Or they cut that lifetime hugely short. The guy who thought you turned in front of him at the stoplight becomes the most important figure in your life, and the life of your family. Because, when you add a gun, every momentary loss of control is a murderous rage.
This is what gun culture has brought us and the people who love their guns more than their children are happy about it. They’ve turned every disagreement into a potentially lethal encounter. How can we live among these people?