No. 7: The safety dance. Be reflective if you must be armed.
Is anything worth firing a shot?
The Old Truck on Tyranny.
This week continues a series inspired by Tim Snyder’s 2017 book On Tyranny and the “20 Lessons” derived from his study.
Lesson 7: Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no.
Once or twice a year boys would show up to my Catholic grade school wearing bright orange vests, announcing their graduation from Hunter Safety training. This rite of passage was a training my own dad felt his son did not need. We sang Barbershop harmony together instead.
Fifty or so years earlier, while studying in a one-room grade school, my father had had to spend his after school hours hunting with his brothers for what small game they could find in the alkali-laced plains near Wheat Basin, Montana. Hunting was the way to put protein in their mother’s stew pot. Mostly coney (rabbit) and gopher, though I had to imagine the details. Dad did not talk often about the specifics of his childhood poverty. Still, I learned that gopher meat is stringy, without ever having to taste it.
The stew pot and what went into it were no doubt a source of some dinner table stress for his parents. When my grandfather turned seventeen, he left his childhood behind to emigrate to America. He never saw his family again. He wanted a shot at his American dream of growing a successful farm of his own. Which was something he could have never hoped for, back in Luxembourg, due to ancient inheritance and property laws. He was the second oldest son in a culture that transferred all property to the first.
Like most homesteaders on the high plains of Montana and the Dakotas, my grandparents eventually gave up the farm and moved to town. This dream-ending decision happened after raising five children through the Great Depression, and the lingering 1930s drought which followed. Three of their four sons had left to fight World War 2, and their daughter was off to nursing school.
By the time I showed up in the mid-sixties, my father rated his business week a success if our mom could by meat at the grocery store and serve it up for dinner. Which happened nearly every night. Except for Fridays, at least early on, before Catholic bishops changed the rules on fasting.
My parents did not start locking our front door on Yellowstone Avenue until the early 1970s. I remember being given my own bright orange latch key and shown how to use it. I still own my dad’s hunting rifle. It is a bolt-action, Winchester .22 caliber single-shot. He once referred to it as his “coney killer.”
I never saw him fire it, not even once.
Dad’s rifle would not be much to rely on by way of home defense. It gives you one shot of the smallest caliber. Then you pop the bolt and reload. So you had better get it right. Imagine the pressure, knowing dinner depends on you and that one small shot. If the breeze blows wrong and you come home empty handed the result is hunger, and perhaps a deeper gnaw of shame for having failed to provide for those you love. For having failed to keep them safe.
I think of this gnaw whenever I consider the quintessentially American right to bear arms. Arms like those my Dad bore to help put food on his family’s table. Arms like those he bore to help put an end to Hitler. Because of him, and his stories, I have never been able to condemn weaponry as universally wrong, even if I appreciate the idealism of those who do. I wish I felt so safe or willing to die.
All that said, there is a deep forest full of distinctions between a rifle being used to hunt food, or to kill for other reasons. It is hard to imagine much thrill in trudging the same parched fields after school, day after day, hunting for some small brown motion to be popped into eternal stillness and taken home for a bloody stripping. Taken for dinner in a home with fire but no refrigerator. Just an ice box for when you could afford the ice.
Hunting for food is not just labor but the most ancient labor of all. We humans were hunters and gatherers long before farming came along. No one knows for certain if we hunted first or merely gathered. Along the way we developed an ethic against killing, though, or at least most of it. Some of it? All? It depends.
If I were hunting for a way to distinguish moral from immoral use of deadly force, I would use this notion of labor as a guide. Is a genuine human need being met if I find a target and fire a shot? Will this shot feed someone in hunger, or keep them safe from harm? Will it protect them as they gather? If so, are the lives I choose to protect worth more than those I am willing to end? Why do I believe that?
Who deserves my personal willingness to kill?
For that matter, is a decision to end a life even legitimately mine to make? And, can I even ask a life-ending question rationally if I am feeling hungry or unsafe? Does anyone have any right to end a life at all, unless, or even if, hunger or safety are at stake? How fearful or starving must we be, before pointing a gun?
Where exactly does fear end and lust begin?
Any question about who is legitimately entitled to use violence points in turn towards the central rationale for government. Legitimate governments exist to serve and protect to those elect and maintain it1. So, if a government cannot be trusted to serve and protect those it governs, then there is no legitimate reason for it to claim a monopoly over violence; a principle which has implications when discussing armed militias, as Joel did here on Old Truck Good Coffee last week.
When states lay sole claim to legimate violence, any soldier or police officer laboring for that state needs to ask: will my gun protect those who have given me the right to carry it? If not, then it is immoral to so much as touch it.
A state is a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” - Max Weber
https://www.britannica.com/topic/state-monopoly-on-violence