When I was a child, my father would tell me about his misadventures in the small town where he grew up in North Western Pennsylvania. Waking up neighbors with fire-crackers, taunting the dog in a junk yard, prank phone calls to local pizza places, you get the idea. He once told me that the most powerful tool for a kid looking to disrupt the functions of society is a bike lock.
“I regret my antics as a child now, but when I was a kid, I never felt more powerful than when I was holding a bike lock. The possibilities were endless. Imagine you’re walking up to the local post office with a bike in hand; security cameras weren’t around, and in this small town there was hardly a need for security. But you throw that bike lock on their front door, suddenly, you’ve halted the functions of a crucial hub in your community for upwards of an hour before someone comes with a pair of bolt cutters to take it off. But if you get on of those U-shaped ones, most bolt cutters wouldn’t make it through. It could take hours to get it off without the combination” he would say. Replace post office with a supermarket, the main entrance to a high school, insurance building, whatever you like. For 25–30 dollars, you can arrest the functions of most establishments. That kind of return on investment is hard to beat.
Now obviously, someone who would do that is a bad actor. Their interests run counter to the collective wishes of society. Their intention is to create a disruption. Now lets take this concept of a bike lock and tweak it ever so slightly. Instead of a bike-lock arresting the functions of a crucial part of society, lets up the stakes and lower the barrier to entry for the sake of argument. Instead of a 30 dollar bike lock, imagine there’s a big red button at the front of city hall. Someone pushes that button, and power goes out for the entire town for 1 hour. This would clearly massively disrupt the community.
Now any person in society has the ability to disrupt the functions of that society. So say an angry mob approaches the mayors office and says “Mayor, on average once to twice a week, somebody is pressing that button and we’re going without power for an hour each time. This is ridiculous, please take away that button.” And the mayor replies that “the button isn’t the problem. Its the people pressing the button. Rather than remove the button, we need to host productive talks with the community about why they should not press the button. We need to assume the best in people, and act as if there aren’t bad actors in the community. The button itself cannot remove power to the city, only people pressing it can. Our town constitution says we’re not allowed to remove the button, or even limit who can access it. In fact, we can’t even make it harder to get to the button, or monitor who’s approaching the button.”
Obviously the citizens would be irate. We took that bike lock analogy amplified it, but the point was the highlight the extremes: high capacity to disrupt society, vs low barrier of entry. In this case, instead of a lock that can disrupt the functions of a single building for upwards of an hour or 2, its removing power to the city for an hour. Instead of a 30 dollar bike lock, its a button you can press for free. But the structure is the same.
I view firearms to similarly have the perfect balance to disrupt the society we’ve created at an astonishingly low barrier to entry. All of the rules and conventions we’ve created as a society work when we assume there are no bad actors among us. We’ve started to have airports that feel like military bases with all of the security and detection technology. Many of our schools now have armed guards. My local town hall now has a metal detector on the front door. This would be the equivalent to our earlier analogy of, instead of removing the button, recommending every home purchases a gas powered generator.
Think about how powerful a firearm is in the hands of a bad actor. A single individual with a single firearm can successfully hold up an establishment with 50 or more people. Any altercation involving an armed person and an unarmed person automatically goes to the armed person. I do not believe when our constitution was written and the second amendment added, firearms had the ability to arrest the functions of an entire area the way that they do today. Pretending that bad actors don’t exist and writing laws on that wishful thinking is the same as not allowing the button to be removed from city hall.
Saying “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is akin to saying “the button can’t turn off your electricity, it requires someone to push it”. Saying “we don’t have a gun issue, we have a mental health issue” is like saying “we need to address the mindset of the people who push the button, not getting rid of it”. Saying “look, the town next to ours doesn’t have a button and they don’t have rolling power outages” and being replied with “its not the button, its the citizens” is like trying to point to gun violence stats from Japan or England and being met with “their citizens are just calmer than ours, it has nothing to do with our gun laws”.
I don’t think anybody in a society should have the tools to disrupt the flow of society so easily. There’s a reason we attempt to control which countries have nuclear weapons. We don’t want any bad actor to start a nuclear war, we want only trusted countries to have that access. But because of an amendment that was written back when even a skilled shooter could at most fire 3–4 rounds in a single minute, we cannot take any measure to reducing the destructive capacity of these bad actors.
I say, instead of hoping for a society without bad actors, we assume our society has them, so we write laws accordingly. Don’t give everyone a bike lock.
