WHY THE GUN IS CIVILIZATION

[Mtbkski]

The following is very well said, and perhaps should be
disseminated to those who don't get it...
>
> WHY THE GUN IS CIVILIZATION
> By Marko Kloos
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another:
> reason and force. If you want me to do something for you,
> you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or
> force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every
> human interaction falls into one of those two categories,
> without exception. Reason or force, that's it.
>
> In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively
> interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid
> method of social interaction, and the only thing that
> removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as
> paradoxical as it may sound to some.
>
> When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You
> have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have
> a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The
> gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound
> woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger,
> a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old
> gang banger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a
> carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes
> the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers
> between a potential attacker and a defender.
>
> There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the
> source of bad force equations. These are the people who
> think that we'd be more civilized if all guns were removed
> from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a
> [armed] mugger to do his job. That, of course,
> is only true if the mugger's potential victims are mostly
> disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat--it has
> no validity when most of a mugger's potential marks are
> armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for
> automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and
> that's the exact opposite of a civilized society. A
> mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful
> living in a society where the state has granted him a
> force monopoly.
>
> Then there's the argument that the gun makes
> confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in
> injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways.
> Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the
> physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury
> on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or
> stones don't constitute lethal force watch too much TV,
> where people take beatings and come out of it with a
> bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal
> force easier works solely in favor of the weaker
> defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed,
> the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that's as
> lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the
> hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn't work as well
> as a force equalizer if it wasn't both lethal and easily
> employable.
>
> When I carry a gun, I don't do so because I am looking for
> a fight, but because I'm looking to be left alone. The gun
> at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded.
> I don't carry it because I'm afraid, but because it
> enables me to be unafraid. It doesn't limit the actions of
> those who would interact with me through reason, only the
> actions of those who would do so by force. It removes
> force from the equation...and that's why carrying a gun is
> a civilized act.

[Atomic Dog]

Yes, Yes, hell yes, and damn skippy!

[ChamberedRound]

Bravo... bravo!!!

[FUNDAMENTALS]

This is what I call: Critical Thinking Ability. This man who was a professional
soilder, plainly and simply negated antigun views in a heartbeat. The background
references for this comes from the simplest of research, HISTORY!

[MK41144]

AWESOME! E-mailing that to all my buddies.

[LastManOut]

This essay was actually written by Marko Kloos, as documented here: http://munchkinwrangler.blogspot.com...lagiarism.html

In case the link doesn't work, here's the text:

"A while ago, I posted a little essay called "Why the Gun is Civilization". It was pretty well received, and got me a lot of positive comments from a variety of people. Some folks asked for permission to reprint and publish the essay in various newsletters and webzines, and I gladly granted it every time, only asking for attribution in return.

Recently, I have noticed my essay pop up on the Internet a lot in various forums, most of which I do not frequent. This in itself causes me no grief, but the reposts are almost invariably attributed to someone who is not me. Some are attributed to a Major L.Caudill, USMC (Ret.), and some are merely marked as "forwarded" by the same person. Others are not attributed at all, giving the impression that the person who posted the essay is also its author.

In school, we call reproduction without attribution "plagiarism". It's usually cause for a failing grade or even expulsion in most college codes of conduct. In the publishing world, we call the same thing "intellectual property theft".

Now, my little blog scribblings are hardly published works in the traditional sense, nor do I incur any financial damage from this unattributed copying, but it's still a matter of honor. I did, after all, sit down and type up that little essay. It may not make it into any print anthologies, but it's mine, and seeing it with someone else's name on the byline is a little annoying. Call it ego, call it vanity, but there it is.

In the end, I guess I should probably shrug it off and tell myself that I can produce something that's worth stealing."

P.S. I corrected the same post I made earlier.http://www.pafoa.org/forum/national-...ilization.html

[Average Baer]

This is very well stated.

[jsb889]

Great piece of writing! I'll be using that on anyone that questions me when I begin carrying

[PA Dave]

A copy of this should be a sticky somewhere on this forum.

A very articulate explanation. Kudos

[ChamberedRound]

I'm resurrecting this thread to provide some links to a few more of Marko's essays.

To recap for those that don't know, Marko Kloos is a writer, supporter of the RKBA, and at one point was a moderator of Oleg Volk's The High Road forum (not sure if he's still is though). In any event, he wrote the above essay that Mtbkski put in his OP. The other day, I was reading Marko's Blog and came across some other equally profound essays that he wrote, and thought they were worth referencing for the benefit of the PAFOA membership.

So without further ado, here you go... enjoy!

http://munchkinwrangler.wordpress.com/essays/

I'm particularly fond of the following, which I'll copy here for convenience, but I encourage everyone to follow the above link and read them all.

http://munchkinwrangler.wordpress.co...-them-nothing/

Give Them Nothing
by Marko Kloos

A long time ago, I had a discussion with my former mother-in-law about my desire to carry a gun for protection. She was very much opposed to the concept, to put it mildly. When I asked her what her plans were if she ever got robbed at gun- or knifepoint, she replied that she’d try and talk it out with her attacker, or just give them what they want.

“Everybody wants to be respected,” she said. “We’re all just human beings.”

I told her that she was nurturing a very dangerous misconception, one that could very well get her hurt or killed someday.

There are people in this world to whom you’re not a human being. They don’t want to be respected by you. They don’t care about you–they’re not even really aware of you. They only care about the food you represent, the money that’s in your pocket. You’re not a person to them, but an obstacle. You’re just in the way of the reward, like a wrapper around a candy bar, and these people are willing to discard you just like that wrapper in order to get what they want.

If you don’t believe that, if you are one of the people who think that “everyone wants to be valued and respected”, you are deluding yourself, to put it mildly. There are literally hundreds of surveillance camera videos out on the Internet that show criminals injuring or killing people for the transgression of not handing over the money or opening the safe fast enough. For those of you who think that “if you give them what they want, they’ll go away”, there are almost as many videos out there of people getting hurt or killed after handing over the goods, simply because they’re now witnesses to a crime that allows for a lengthy jail term. Leaving you alive greatly increases the chance of getting caught, you see, and the extra ten years for shooting you don’t enter the thug’s mind. Besides, few people ever commit a crime expecting to get caught.

Whenever I see the camera footage of some poor convenience store clerk getting shot at point-blank range just because the robber is angry at the lack of cash in the drawer, or the fast food manager being shot as he is lying prone in front of his safe after the robbers have already removed the cash, I get angry. I feel anger at the thought of these low-lifes, people who have never known another way of making a living than to take what they want from others by force. I feel anger at the sight of someone casually taking another’s life over a few hundred bucks–taking a husband from his wife, a son from his parents, or a father from his children, just because they’re in the way. Can you imagine your life ending tonight, with you taking your last breaths on the dingy linoleum floor of some convenience store, just because you had the bad luck of drawing third shift? Can you imagine what it would be like to have everything taken from you in a few moments–your history, your knowledge, your hopes, your dreams, your consciousness–all over a few pieces of paper? If you can, don’t you, too, feel white hot anger when you think of the person who would do such a thing to you without a second thought just so they can get a fix, pay the rent, and get a new game for the Playstation?

It’s mind-boggling to me that there are people who perpetuate the dangerous myth that you can rely on the humanity and reason of a person who is already threatening to kill you over the contents of your wallet, an entirely inhumane and unreasonable act in itself.

“Violence begets violence”, they say, as if that’s somehow a bad thing. In the words of the late Jeff Cooper, I would certainly hope that it does. That’s the whole point of self-defense: when reason doesn’t work anymore, then naked force is the only thing that’s left other than abject surrender. It would be a great and awesome world where the majority of criminals are the ones who end up in the body bag, and not their victims. Appeasement doesn’t stop the bully or the thug, and neither does submission. What stops them is the knowledge that they’re likely to bite off more than they can chew, which is why they invariably pick their targets among those who are perceived as meek or soft.

Think about it for a second, and pretend you’re someone who makes a living by sticking guns in people’s faces. Which kind of society would encourage you to keep doing what you’re doing–one where you know people are being told to “give them what they want and don’t resist”, or one where people refuse to go quietly into that good night, and where they will fight back with anything that comes to hand?

No, the appropriate response to violence is not submission. Submission encourages the thugs, and it gives them absolutely no incentive to consider a career change. When you preach submission, you only guarantee more of the behavior that takes advantage of that submission. The only appropriate response to violence is white-hot anger. When someone sticks a gun in your face and threatens to kill you over the contents of your wallet or your register, your response ought to be rage. The very thought of some low-life thug threatening to snuff you out and make your children orphans for no reason other than the money you carry ought to make you furious.

And then you need to put that fury to good use. Yield nothing, not an inch, not a penny, not a hair on your head, without fighting for it tooth and nail. Do your level best to ensure that if someone has to end up in a body bag this hour, it won’t be your body in that bag. And even if it should happen to be your turn to take your seat in Valhalla, you might as well put your best effort into making sure that you arrive there with your attacker in a firm headlock.