Wasabisoft

We live in a world where weapon technology has vastly outpaced technologies capable of defending against that weapon.  For example: intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) give us the ability to annihilate an entire city anywhere on the planet with very little notice, but our ability to defend against ICBMs has only recently become possible.  Even relatively easy-to-acquire firearms have unsatisfactory defensive options (such as Kevlar materials and camoflague techniques) when compared to traditional melee weapons and suits of armor.  Particularly in the case of lethal weapons (like firearms) used by both sides in any given conflict, victory rests less and less with who happens to be wearing body armor and more with who simply fires first.  Go watch “The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly”, you’ll see what I’m talking about.  No no, I’ll wait.

See?  That’s why the quickdraw is so popular: it is the quintessential definition of initiative winning; the excitement comes from purposefully levelling the playing field and still just barely winning out.  That’s why the Klingons (etc.) in the old Star Trek were so unpopular; cloaking technology is sneaky, while a showdown in the bright light of noon is distinctly American.  Anyways.

Ask any old school tabletop gamer: in any battle where offensive capability vastly outweighs defensive capability, whoever has the initiative will win.  Hell, you don’t even have to find a tabletop gamer (they’re notoriously hard to find… I suggest checking strip mall game stores, local libraries, and your mom’s basement); ask any foul mouthed 13-year-old online gamer, they’ll tell you that most kills in a realistic first-person-shooter (FPS) like Call of Duty are made simply by getting the jump on another player and killing them before they realize they’re being fired upon.  (Halo, despite its attraction to fuckwads of ALL ages, is a case of defense catching up with offense in the form of personal shielding and… hit points.)

The rest of your typical FPS kills are made through intelligence (in the military “intel” sense, not the “I’m smarter than you” sense) or camping(which is just like real-life hunting, except classier).  In fact, in both a military and institutional sense, the response to situations where one cannot have the initiative is to employ both intel and camping; police cannot arrest people beforethey commit crimes (and thus cannot “take the initiative”) and so respond by increasing their investigative and surveillance (intel) abilities and creating a network of patrol routes in known high crime areas (essentially spawn-camping enemy territory).  In fact, the “stakeout” is a classic police example of camping that also provides intel functionality.

Entities in a defensive role are, by nature, effectively denied initiative and must rely upon intel and camping instead.  All of our security measures in this country are defensive in nature with the possible exception of the more black, CIA-esque programs… but these also require the use of intel (to find a target) and camping (to ensure mission success and bring the operators home) so as to create initiative.

The point is that, in a one-hit-kill kind of world, the person who fires first generally wins.  At this point you may be asking “Sean, where the hell are you going with this?  Are you just playing with a d20 and rambling?”  Close: I’m also drinking.  Where the question of initiative concerns me is on the topic of gun control.  I have very, very ear-bleedingly frequently heard the argument for less gun ownership restrictions boil down to the following: if everyone was required to have a gun, the country would be a safer place.  While I have also heard the “we need to be able to defend ourselves from our own government” defense of the Second Amendment, I choose to rebut that argument thusly: Spectre gunship.  Your militia doesn’t have one of THOSE, now does it?  Anyways.  Again.

I can understand the logic of the “everyone’s packin’ heat” argument: no one would dare use a firearm because everyone around them would gun them down.  If all the teachers in public schools and colleges were carrying guns, there would never be another school shooting ever again.  Bank robberies would be a thing of the past when every single person in line opens up on the guys in ski masks.  Sheer volume is the argument here; the Good Guys generally outnumber the Bad Guys in any typical crime-involving-firearms situation, so if all the Good Guys have guns, the Bad Guys will be too scared to commit crimes.  It’d be the equivalent of a posse on every street corner.  And everyone knows the posse always wins; just watch “The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly”.  Oh wait, you already did.  Did I prep you well for this discussion or what?

The problem with the concept of arming every American is one of initiative; the Bad Guys will have it, and the fact that all the Good Guys have guns too will just make the Bad Guys more willing to kill everyone so as not to get shot themselves.  Essentially, giving everyone a gun just makes the general populace an extension of the police force, with all the same disadvantages.  Leaving aside the question of vigilantism, the gun argument ignores the preeminence of initiative as the decisive factor in any situation involving guns.  I can understand having a gun for home defense; anyone invading your home is obviously not supposed to be there, and the fact that you actually have a gun gives you an unexpected (and surprising, initiative-esque) edge.  I can understand having a rifle for hunting; people need to eat and/or feel superior to animals.  But having a gun does not convey initiative, and therefore isn’t that much help.  I would say it can be more of a hindrance in that the presence of firearms increases the likelihood of a potentially non-fatal situation becoming decidedly less so.

So what is the best course of action?  Well, there really isn’t one.  The Second Amendment guarantees an ambiguous level of arms-bearing, so simply outlawing firearms is illegal.  Even if it was legal to do so, it wouldn’t work too well anyways without extremely severe penalties for the possession of a firearm… assuming the Bad Guys are crappy at hiding them.  You can’t give everyone a gun either, as having a gun does nothing to address the problem of initiative; to return to our tabletop RPG metaphor: if the main party of heroes is ambushed by a group of enemies with one-hit-kill weapons, it doesn’t particularly matter what the heroes were packing, they’ll all be dead or crippled before getting the chance to return fire.

My best-case solution?  Make firearms legal to own, carry, stockpile in your End Of The World Bomb Shelter, whatever.  But in conjunction with that, make the use of a firearm in conjunction with the commission of a crime punishable by death.  I’m serious.  This is what we do to separate the Good Guys With Guns from the Bad Guys With Guns: only one of those groups is committing crimes.  Using a gun to assist the commission of a crime reflects an intent to use lethal force if needed or desired; such willingness to take another person’s life to achieve selfish ends should, I feel, result in forfeiture of one’s own life in recompense.  I think this would be the most effective means of preventing Bad Guys from carrying guns at all as the fear of going from a 5-10 year felony stint straight to being executed may be enough to make the Bad Guys leave the guns at home.  If I myself planned to rob a liquor store and the difference between a potential death sentence and 10 years came down to whether I used a derringer or a rubber chicken… I think I’d avoid owning a pistola altogether.

Yes, the big problem with this idea (and the death penalty in general) is that the burden of evidence must (and should) be very high so as to justify taking a person’s life.  I also agree that getting pulled over for speeding and having a gun in your car should not merit death.  I’m not stupid.  The intent is, as always, the most important factor.  Simply carrying a gun is never grounds for arrest; using a gun, or brandishing one for criminal purposes, is what I’d like to curtail.  This topic will need more discussion to define specifics… but for now, the initiative factor undermining the “if everyone had guns, there would be no crime” argument is what I wanted to get across.  Honestly, due to initiative, everyone having a gun just makes it easier for criminals to carry out crimes, not to mention vastly increasing the risk of fatality in any crime situation.  And that’s not a world conducive to the idea of civilization.