No one said it was, except for folks who misquote Robert Heinlein’s Beyind This Horizon.
He talks about manners being an essential (“sin qua non”) part of of civilization, and being armed as a way for the weak to cull themselves:
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I’ll admit; I had no idea that the correct quote as even more foolish than the misquote. Aside from the usual dubious expectation that selective pressure will change human psychology in the blink of an eye; valorizing a weapon system that (by design) does much of the work for you and frequently awards victory to whoever is impulsive enough to use it first as a tool against the weak and stupid seems…stupid.
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Ironically, I’ve had sandwiches slathered in mayo when asking for light mayo…then it dawned on me it was “lite” mayo. Now I just say, “and easy on the mayo”. Works about 50% of the time (which was better than my success with the light option.)
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You have to let the banana and mayo sit and meld. It’s a make at breakfast, eat at lunch kind of thing.
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Indeed. I was thinking the same thing, and in the very same words.
The claim that “Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life” doesn’t seem to be supported by experience. I’m not sure how the shrieking displays of entitlement or violent road rage incidents that we read about constantly on BoingBoing correlate with gun laws, but I would speculate that they are not significantly less frequent in states where your fellow citizens can reasonably be assumed to be strapped. In fact, there does seem to be some overlap between these fundamental failures of politeness and a world view that fetishizes firearms.
Or, if the US is off-limits as an example, look at some of the other places around the world where guns are ubiquitous. What you seem to get there isn’t good manners, but a kind of two-tier society, where those who aren’t able or willing to deal violence at the drop of a hat are reduced to cringing submissiveness, while those who are – mostly aggressive young men, who are ‘quick with their hands’ in a manner that would have delighted Heinlein – are paranoid, thuggish and short-tempered.
From politeness, Heinlein proceeds to a kind of idiot social Darwinism, where he suggests that the possibility of sudden violent death will thin the herd, eliminating those who can’t either win a fight or talk themselves out of one. It’s hard to know where to start unpacking how wrong this is, but it ought to be obvious that someone’s worth to society isn’t necessarily correlated with their ability to deal effective violence. I doubt Einstein would have won many gunfights, but I’ll take his contributions to the human race over those of Wild Bill Hickok. And even if you assume that being an efficient killer is somehow a cardinal virtue that we should select for, the fact is that firearms don’t necessarily favor the ‘superior’ individual. As the saying goes, Sam Colt made all men equal, and Heinlein’s quick-witted, quick-handed ideal is just as likely to be taken out of the gene pool by some drooling mouthbreather who happens to shoot first.
Either Heinlein is driving trollies, or he’s simply spouting ill-considered nonsense.
It’s interesting, incidentally, to look at the works of another science-fiction writer who spent a lot of ink on the role of guns in society. A.E. Van Vogt wrote a pair of novels (“The Weapon Shops of Isher” and “The Weapon Makers”) exploring the idea of guns as safeguards for individual safety and liberty along the lines favored by fans of the 2nd Amendment. What I remember most about “The Weapon Shops” was how far Van Vogt had to depart from reality in order to make the idea work; his weapons are essentially magical devices that cannot be used with bad intentions.
Van Vogt’s intellectual gymnastics demonstrate just how much the ‘good guy with a gun’ ideal is an unworkable fantasy; the way that Heinlein’s apparent position falls apart at the slightest scrutiny should make us equally suspicious of claims that ubiquitous guns would be a force for stability rather than chaos in a modern society.
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…and food poisoning for dessert. Fuck.
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(Unless you tell us Kiddo is 27 
)
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That’s what gunwankers do, all the time, when they try to sound clever.
But even Heinlein’s intent is bullshit. It’s not “quick hands” that win a gun fight and it’s not training. In a non-war situation, it’s poor impulse control that wins gun fights, as illustrated in this very case.
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Eco’s 14 ways of looking at a blackshirt seem like fair options for doing a rough-cut unpacking of what certainly appears to be a cult of action for action’s sake, life lived for struggle, contempt for the weak, attempted normalization of heroism, and tendency to play with weapons.
I can’t speak to the author’s position, one can write at a variety of removes from what one believes; or straightforwardly and unironically; but anyone who takes that paragraph from Beyond This Horizon as serious advice is a decently strong candidate for Ur-fascist hero.
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UCR data is patchy as hell, so I’m only providing it for want of better; but it’s pretty striking that the “murder circumstances” that contributed 3,410 of 2019’s 13,927 murders are coded as "“other arguments”; and that, for that year, sniper attacks, probably the most skill-and-forethought flavor of murder, are credited for 2.
If winning gunfights were either about competence, or done mostly to people so egregious that they need to back up their acts with their lives, second degree murder would basically shrink into a weird little vestigial category reserved for plea-bargaining in cases where premeditation seems a little tough to prove in court or the occasional serendipitous encounter between someone who was still working on their premeditation and their target; with all the actual homicides either being first degree executions well executed or justified and/or defensive killings. Not exactly what the actual numbers suggest.
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And they identified him. He was arrested in March 2021, charged with aggravated assault and cruelty to children. Bizarrely, he was allowed out on bail on that one, and of course could not possess firearms. It doesn’t give the details, and ag. assault could mean a wide range of different things, but still… it’s not just slapping or pushing someone.
It doesn’t say what other criminal history he has before 2021, but it’s probably a lot. There were some comments in this thread hinting that the CCW ruling would lead to stuff like this, but this guy couldn’t legally get a CCW or possess a firearm and he probably has a very long history of violence, and I just can’t understand why people like this guy are allowed out. RIP to his victim.
Where the hell do you think criminals get their guns? Straw man purchases, poorly secured firearms in homes, vehicles, etc, gun shows. There isn’t some nefarious illegal importation of guns into the US. People who aren’t allowed to have guns get them from people who are. Because you can’t throw a Glock without hitting another one in this country.
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You don’t KNOW that
You’re MAKING SHIT UP 
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