Whenever there are mass shootings or some other kind of related act of violence in the United States, there is on the side of leftists a hue and cry for tougher gun control laws.  While such appeals tend to fall on deaf ears with me, for reasons I will shortly explain, it is quite possible that not everyone is as immune to such calls as I am, and so it is worthwhile to at least point out why such calls are precisely the wrong sort of action one should take in the face of such violent deeds.  Moreover, it should be noted that such an approach that runs counter to unilateral disarmament is something that is useful not only in dealing with the problem of mass shootings and other acts of domestic terrorism, but is also useful when examining geopolitics as well as dealing with bullies or other predators.  But, as is often the case, it is worthwhile to examine why the commonly promoted solution is indeed mistaken and why it is preferable to go another way, even if that way might require a great deal more effort on the part of peaceable people, as I presume all of my readers to be.

Why is it that gun control is a failed solution to the problem of mass violence?  There are two essential problems with the call to disarm law-abiding citizens in the face of incidents of mass violence.  The first is that criminals and terrorists do not obey laws.  If regulations make a school a no-carry zone, then law-abiding citizens will not carry weapons there, but those who wish to do others harm will disregard the law and see a no-carry zone as a place full of soft and vulnerable targets.  The second problem is that it is generally useless to rely on police officers to protect defenseless unarmed civilians from mass attacks, because if someone has enough firepower to commit a mass attack they are generally going to choose a sufficiently easy target and their immense firepower through either numbers of attackers and/or massive firepower will allow for a great deal of violence to be done before the police are even to show up in force.  And if the firepower is immense enough, as was the case in the Parkland shooting in Florida, the policemen may cravenly hide rather than engage the shooter, thus failing to protect and serve those who are under assault.  It should be noted that this solution of trying to protect citizens through disarmament is the precise same solution chosen by the Western democracies in the interwar period, one that made Western Europeans and Americans (and others) more vulnerable to militant regimes like Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, which is yet another sign of its failure, and of the refusal of people to learn from history.

So if disarming law-abiding and peaceful citizens does not reduce the threat or the danger of mass attacks or the harm that they cause, what kind of solution should be undertaken instead?  The key to making peaceable people more secure (if not perfectly secure, since this is not a reasonable aim) is to make the targets harder, by increasing the amount of armed and trained people that exist in a given group.  A harder target is less vulnerable, for if someone had to fear that students and/or teachers at a school or visiting a garlic festival would be ready and willing to fight back, they would be far less likely to target such a place, since violent and predatory people in general tend to look for an easy fight rather than a fair fight.  The evidence for this is suggestive, whether we look at statistical data like the decreased amount of crime in a Georgia town that mandated gun ownership for all of its residents or we look at anecdotal evidence like the benefit a concealed carrier had in lowering the death toll in the Clackamas Town Center shooting in late 2012 right across the street from where I lived at the time.  This is the sort of outcome we would want to see, where people are safer because they are less easy to attack, and where any assault on them is likely to be a fair fight and not a massacre.

It should be noted as well that there are many ways that targets can be hardened, and that doing so helps solve a lot of problems in one’s existence.  For example, acquiring skill in rhetoric is an example of hardening the target when it comes to dealing with debates and verbal interaction, just as acquiring martial arts or weapons proficiency helps one harden oneself as a target in dealing with physical confrontation and makes one better able to defend oneself.  Whether one is dealing with bullies or other kinds of predators, having the ability to defend oneself verbally and physically makes someone a less attractive target, all without the negative side effects that follow from seeking to make oneself a less attractive target in other ways, like being less attractive.  One need not become more aggressive, but having the confidence to be assertive in a way that does not threaten others is a way to increase one’s safety.  To be sure, to harden targets takes a great deal of effort, but it is worthwhile effort since it reduces one’s vulnerability to a great many threats while also helping to make other people safer as well.

Yet it must be candidly admitted that there are at least a few reasons why such efforts are not undertaken more frequently or urged more generally.  For one, there is no way that we can ensure our own safety no matter how strong we make ourselves.  There will always be ways–sneak attacks and having others gang up on us–that people who wish to do us harm will seek to do so no matter how invulnerable we make ourselves, so we cannot trust in our own safety even as we seek to make ourselves harder targets for others.  Additionally, having an armed populace ready and willing to defend itself from predation is not ideal if there are people who wish to use the police and military forces of government to prey on the populace.  To be sure, a government that has no such ill intent would prefer a populace capable of self-defense because it would lower the costs of policing accordingly, but a society that is capable of defending its freedom by force is also a society that must be treated with a certain degree of respect and deference which authorities are not always willing to do.  And those who urge a populace to disarm or seek to coerce such a disarmament are not to be trusted because only a bully or a potential predator wishes to see others be less capable of self-defense.