{"id":36,"date":"2002-10-31T16:39:00","date_gmt":"2002-10-31T21:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=36"},"modified":"2002-10-31T16:39:00","modified_gmt":"2002-10-31T21:39:00","slug":"armed-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=36","title":{"rendered":"Armed children"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Bear of Considerable Brain, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.truthlaidbear.com\/weblogaction\/archives\/001455.html\">writes<\/a>:<br \/>\n&#8220;This does not mean every man, woman and child should roam the streets<br \/>\npacking heat, much as some of my more rabid hoplophile colleagues in<br \/>\nthe Blogosphere might enjoy the sight.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>N.Z. was probably thinking of me as one of his &#8220;rabid hoplophile<br \/>\ncolleagues.&#8221;; I&#8217;d be rather disappointed if he weren&#8217;t, actually.  I<br \/>\nendorse all his good sense about citizen miltias and the necessity of<br \/>\na decentralized response to decentralized threats; in fact, I wrote an<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?m=200309#63\">essay<\/a><br \/>\non that topic the day of the WTC attack.  Establishing it as normal<br \/>\ncustom that adults go armed strikes me as an excellent idea, and<br \/>\nnot merely as a tactic against terrorism and crime either.  &#8220;The possession<br \/>\nof arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I was originally going to respond to His Ursinity&#8217;s remark by<br \/>\ntossing off some denial that I contemplate universally arming children<br \/>\nas a response to terrorism.  But I&#8217;ve decided it would be more<br \/>\ninteresting to attack the question from the opposite side: under what<br \/>\ncircumstances should children be armed?<\/p>\n<p>If your answer is &#8220;Never!&#8221; than consider that this is actually<br \/>\nquite a radical position.  In large parts of the U.S., rather young<br \/>\nchildren have and use BB rifles.  In much of rural America,<br \/>\nincluding most of my own state of Pennsylvania, boys learn to hunt<br \/>\nearly, and to accept both the weapons and responsibilities of men<br \/>\nwhen barely into their teens.<\/p>\n<p>The bloody slaughters nervous urban liberals would expect from this<br \/>\npolicy somehow never materialize.  Kliebold and Harris, the Columbine<br \/>\nshooters, were the exception that demonstrates the rule; they were<br \/>\n<em>not<\/em> taught to use firearms within approved contexts by their<br \/>\nparents and other adults, but instead devedloped a pathological,<br \/>\nisolated relationship to weapons that mirrored their pathological,<br \/>\nisolated lives.  Their victims were not killed by the rural gun<br \/>\nculture, but by its absence.<\/p>\n<p>So part of our answer is this: children should be armed, at least<br \/>\npart of the time when in company with responsible adults, in order<br \/>\nto prepare them for the responsibility of arming themselves as adults<br \/>\nand participating in civilian defense against terrorism and crime.<\/p>\n<p>The next logical question is: under what circumstances should<br \/>\nchildren be trusted to carry weapons for self-defense <em>without<\/em><br \/>\ndirect adult supervision?  Again, &#8220;Never!&#8221; would be a radical and<br \/>\nhistorically exceptional answer.  It would also be unfair to the<br \/>\nchildren, especially poor children who live in areas where the chance<br \/>\nof encountering criminal or terrorist predators is significant.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s worth bearing in mind that most decisions about using a<br \/>\nfirearm in self-defense are pretty simple.  They don&#8217;t tend to involve<br \/>\ncomplicated ethical abstractions &mdash; the relevant question is<br \/>\nusually &#8220;Am I or a defenseless person I am responsible for in imminent<br \/>\ndanger of being assaulted, abducted or killed?&#8221;  If the answer is no,<br \/>\nyou don&#8217;t even draw your weapon.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the capacity to make those judgments varies from child<br \/>\nto child.  I have known intelligent, precocious children as young as<br \/>\neight years old who I would sooner trust with my .45 than, say, an<br \/>\nadult alcoholic with an impulse-control problem.  In fact, I wouldn&#8217;t<br \/>\nconsider most adult pro-gun-control voters as trustworthy as the<br \/>\nchildren I have in mind; people who project fear of their own behavior<br \/>\nwith weapons onto others make that spot between my shoulderblades<br \/>\nitch.<\/p>\n<p>At the other extreme, it&#8217;s pretty obvious that pre-verbal children<br \/>\ndon&#8217;t have the apparatus to make even the simplest ethical decisions<br \/>\nabout lethal force.  They don&#8217;t know enough about the world yet.  The<br \/>\nstandard models of childhood development tell me the same thing as my<br \/>\nexperience of real kids; the on average, possibility of ethical<br \/>\ncompetence sufficient for self-defense decisions opens up at around<br \/>\ntwelve years old.  It is not invariably present at that age, but the<br \/>\npossibility deserves to be taken seriously.<\/p>\n<p>I can say this.  If a person who is legally a minor but twelve or<br \/>\nover shows signs of continuing responsibility (including either<br \/>\nholding down a job or applying him\/herself to make steady grades in<br \/>\nschool), and does not have a history of substance abuse or other<br \/>\nself-destructive or criminal behavior, and <em>wants<\/em> to accept<br \/>\nthe responsibility of going armed &mdash; then I think custom should<br \/>\nsupport that.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I want to point out that we may be doing children no favor<br \/>\nby `protecting&#8217; them from the decisions that go with bearing arms.<br \/>\nThomas Jefferson once wrote to his teenage nephew as follows:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n&#8220;As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives [only]<br \/>\nmoderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence<br \/>\nto the mind.  Games played with the ball and others of that nature, are too<br \/>\nviolent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun,<br \/>\ntherefore, be the constant companion to your walks.&#8221;\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This was no aberration.  I have developed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/~esr\/guns\/gun-ethics.html\">elsewhere<\/a><br \/>\nthe theme that the practice of bearing arms was not important to the<br \/>\nFounding Fathers merely as a counter against crime and overweening<br \/>\ngovernment, but as a school of moral character in the individual<br \/>\ncitizen.<\/p>\n<p>The retreat of American gun culture from our cities and suburbs has<br \/>\ncoincided with the the fetishization of adolescence and<br \/>\nthe infantilization of our entire society.  To reverse that trend, we<br \/>\nneed to remember the ways we used to use to encourage people to<br \/>\nacquire self-discipline, character, and maturity.  One of those ways<br \/>\nwas &mdash; and in large parts of the U.S., still is &mdash; the<br \/>\nhealthy use of lethal weapons.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=83850549\">Blogspot comments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Bear of Considerable Brain, writes: &#8220;This does not mean every man, woman and child should roam the streets packing heat, much as some of my more rabid hoplophile colleagues in the Blogosphere might enjoy the sight.&#8221; N.Z. was probably thinking of me as one of his &#8220;rabid hoplophile colleagues.&#8221;; I&#8217;d be rather disappointed if&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=36\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Armed children<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-firearms","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}