This seems to me the most
productive level on which to be working. If you figure out whats
behind my words, I hope youll let me know.
[From Bill Powers (2007.09.12.0926 MDT)]
Mike Acree
(2007.09.11.1303 PDT) –
Can’t do that. But maybe you can.
Your recent posts brought
together two points Ive had trouble reconciling. (a) On the one
hand, as I said in the previous post, you have emphasized the need to
take people as they are (including the murderers, rapists, etc.), and not
to presuppose a change in human nature. You are particularly likely
to assert this view when other people speak of their vision of a good
society. That has always been my own position, but you have
apparently never believed that it was. Perhaps the underlying
problem is just that you persist in identifying libertarianism or
anarchism with pacifism or lack of organization, or both, despite all the
words weve exchanged on that subject. (b) On the other hand, in
speaking of your own vision in recent posts, you were talking, as I
pointed out and you acknowledged, about pretty big changes in a lot of
people. Superficially, it looks like a simple double standardother
theorists have to take people as they are and you dontso its clear Im
still dismayingly far from understanding your
thinking.
When I say we have to take people as they are, I mean we have to think of
ways to deal with them as they are, where “as they are”
includes a lot of belligerent, criminal, and violent types as well as all
the nice guys. The nice guys, of course, are reasonable and easy to deal
with. It seems to me that your vision of a good society will work only if
everyone is it is a nice guy. The changes in other people I was talking
about were changes in the behavior of the bad guys, induced by any means
that will work including imprisonment and when necessary, violence. I
just don’t want that organized violence to be mob violence: it should be
in the hands of professionals trained to use the least required force and
do it without getting angry. That means, God help us, the police, for all
their warts and failings which they share with the rest of us.
That is what I think we need as a way of holding on until a real solution
is worked out.
On the other hand, judging from your discussion of the attacks on you,
your preferred way of dealing with not-so-nice-guys seems to be to take
the law into your own hands up to and including the right to murder. From
my point of view, that puts you in the camp of the not-nice people. Of
course that is in conflict with my real impression of you, and perhaps
it’s in conflict with your own vision of yourself. You seem to be saying
so when you say you detest guns. Why should you detest them if you think
they’re a rational way to defend yourself?
Two of the three times Ive
been attacked have been by teams of three. There is no effective
defense against three people except a gun. Your wish to see me left
defenseless on the street comes across as really unfriendly. Im
guessing youre holding a fantasy image of an effective police force,
which just happened to slip up the three times Ive been assaulted.
The San Francisco Police Department has a 6-year backlog of 16,000
unsolved armed robberies, 1000 unsolved rapes, and 300 unsolved
murders. Incidents like mine dont even make it into the statistics
(the police strongly resisted my making a report the first time, and I
havent bothered since).
So would I, but, like private
education, its not an option except for the rich, since we all have to
pay, through taxes, for the useless government service. People or
companies with a lot to protect, like supermarkets and banks, have to
hire private security.
I don’t get any pleasure out of your being assaulted. If you want
to carry a gun around for your own protection, I assume you know the
penalties for being caught and think they’re worth the risk. I assume
you’d rather fight it out than move somewhere else. But we’re talking
social principles here, not individual cases. If we abolished the police
and left justice in individual hands, the gangs of three who attacked you
would have guns, too, and they would have them drawn and aimed at you by
the time you realized you were being attacked. You wouldn’t have a chance
of surviving if you started to draw your gun. Even more likely, if those
gangs knew there were no police and that you were probably armed, they
would wait in concealment until you passed, then shoot you in the back.
That’s by far the safest way of robbing an armed man. That’s called
bushwhacking, and was popular in the old West among those who couldn’t be
sure that they were the fastest draw. Guns were invented for
cowards who want to kill at a safe distance and by surprise, whether the
target be an animal or another person.
What I’m saying is that if you were allowed to carry a gun, it would NOT
be an effective means of self-defense. I don’t want to deny you an
effective means of self-defense; in fact I wish there were one, but
allowing everyone to carry a gun will not accomplish what you want. A gun
is no defense against three people who also carry guns for
self-defense.
The only effective self-defense is to organize a group of well-trained
people who are physically and mentally strong enough, and numerous
enough, to do that job. Vigilante groups are effective, but unfortunately
they are not distanced enough from social situations to be trusted as the
only means of preserving the peace. Their agendas tend to be narrow, like
getting the guy they think stole their horse or dammed the river (or if
not that guy, anyone else who looks like they might have done it –
the approach we use in international politics). To a lot of vigilantes,
as to a lot of police, “suspect” means the same thing as
“perpetrator.”
Unfortunately, to maintain an effective, well-trained, competent police
force means paying the people what they’re worth and paying to train
them, and hiring enough of them. That costs money, and that means taxes.
I think you know where that leads.
I prefer to hire a
professional police force.
The government service is not useless. It’s just not as useful as it
should be, because people who want safety are not willing to pay for
everyone’s protection. They want to use their money to pay for their own
safety instead of diluting it by trying to keep everyone safe. The result
is that nobody, not even the rich miser with three full-time bodyguards,
is safe.
I have asked different
officers, after each assault, how I could protect myself. One said
I should vary my route. Two of the assaults were within 6 blocks of
my house, and there arent that many options at that point. The
others told me simply that the police werent concerned with crime
prevention; they were called in only after something happened.
But, as the crime solution statistics show, they dont do anything then,
either.
Pretty useless. But you make it sound as if they choose to do their jobs
this way. Try questioning them about that. Saying they “don’t do
anything” is a bitter exaggeration. They do as much as they can with
the resources they are given, to the limit of their physical stamina,
under the rules they swore to obey, which include the Constitution.
The chances are very small
that a random pedestrian is going to be carrying enough cash to make it
worth risking a bulletor even the attention that a gunshot would
drawespecially when the take has to be divided by 3. That would be
true even if they were armed.
But if they were armed and concerned about your shooting them, they would
just shoot first and claim self-defense. And you’re forgetting that one
of the rewards of robbing people is having power and causing fear. The
kids in gangs enter their fights knowing that everyone is armed and
someone is going to be killed. That’s their idea of fun and
reputation-building.
Im obviously counting
on some degree of rationality here on the part of my assailants, and
perhaps too much. But both statistical data and anecdotal reports
suggest that merely drawing a gun is usually sufficient to repel an
attack; in the great majority of cases like this, it doesnt even need to
be fired.
That’s fine as long as you can be the only one with a gun. Only a stupid
criminal, if everyone is armed, will give you time to draw your gun. In a
fully-armed world, the first thing you will see of your assailant, if you
see him at all, will be with his gun pointed at you and his finger on the
trigger. He is not playing by your rules. No one-two-three,
shoot.
If the risk from
trigger-happy amateurs acting in self-defense were as great as you think,
we should hear about it occasionally, especially given the anti-gun bias
of the major media.
Fortunately the law tends to deter rational trigger-happy amateurs. As it
happens, however, just yesterday the attached news item appeared in the
local paper. I hope you can read the scan. It’s about a guy who took
exception to a road closure by going home and returning to the road crew
with a gun on his hip. This guy is a Libertarian candidate around here
once in a while. I once had a phone call from a deputy sheriff after I
wrote a letter to the newspaper in Durango about how badly written the
second amendment is. He agreed with me, saying it should have been
clearer. Then he bragged to me about how useful it is to be allowed to
wear a gun. He said that when he parked too close to someone just the
other day, and the other person got out of the car to remonstrate with
him, he got out, too, and the other person, as soon as he saw the gun,
closed his mouth and backed off. This deputy had somehow thought I was on
his side, and was sharing this humorous anecdote with me.
What I see instead is
recurrent reports of trigger-happy SWAT teams breaking in on false tips
from informants with a grudge or a plea bargain.
These are a few of the people who swear to uphold the Constitution and
are trained to make sure of their targets and use only what force is
necessary. Now think how false tips from informants with grudges or a
plea bargain are treated by amateurs with private agenda (like the KKK or
the Crips) who have sworn nothing about the Constitution and have had no
professional inhibitions concerning the use of deadly force or
violence.
I have one clue that looks
very significant: that you have been consistently, gratifyingly
complimentary of my writing, even while disagreeing, whenever you were
reading something that wasnt addressed to you.
I guess this one was addressed to me.
That makes it look as though
you experience my messages as attacks, in a way I havent intendedas
though, when I say, I dont see how these two positions fit together,
what you hear is, Youre contradicting yourselfyou idiot!
No, I just take it as a lack of understanding of my position. I don’t
think you’re being hostile, but I think you’re supporting a policy that I
consider to be against the best interests of everyone, in fact downright
dangerous. If it were you that I disapproved of, I probably wouldn’t
reply at all.
I remain interested in trying
to understand your views on social organization. Its a serious
disturbance to me to see you making so much sense in most areas and so
little in others, but I cant see that my contributions are helping
either one of us. Thats not a promise never to post againIve
recently run across another idea I was tempted to share, in factbut I
think I will do better in general to watch the flow from the
shore.
The basic problem here, and the reason I wrote last time about sort of
idling in the logic-level mode, is that I don’t think the solutions and
counter-solutions you and I have been talking about, or the solution of
any other social problem, is to be found in pushing back more effectively
against disturbances. All the ways of pushing back have been tried and
none of them works, except locally and temporarily. All that pushing back
proves is that there’s a conflict. We already know that. The solution
does not lie in winning the conflict.
What we need is to understand the social system and our part in it as
individuals, and that means we have to reorganize, not take positions and
defend them. We have to remove the causes of these conflicts, of the
violence, of the attacks, not just try to win the conflicts by being even
more violent in our own attacks. Once we have succeeded in becoming the
strongest and the most violent and least scrupulous, it will be our turn
to be removed from the scene by an uprising of those we are defending
ourselves against. Then it will be their turn, and so on to extinction.
Perhaps that’s all the human race is fit for, but I remain
optimistic.
All the followers of isms are working at the wrong level. They have a
vision of the best way for everyone to live, and are trying to persuade
or force others to agree, under the delusion that if we all agreed to the
same ism, there would be no more conflicts and violence. But as long as
we’re trying to think of logical solutions and invent universal
principles, we will end up in disagreement and conflict again. We have to
stop thinking of our own positions and look at the properties of the
system in which we live, or propose to live.
If you have a bomb and I have a bomb, the only way to prevent our blowing
each other up is to pull out the fuses.
Best,
Bill P.
