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| George says Hi. |
In 1599 the English swordmaster George
Silver published a work called “The Paradoxes of Defense.” Part
analysis, part rant, the work had one major target for his ire: the
Rapier. For those of you not history buffs ( or Renfair geeks like
myself) the rapier is a sword; a particularly long, thin one, and in
the late 1500's it became a kind of deadly fad as a tool for dueling.
Like an example? Go re-read Shakespeare's “Romeo and Juliet.”
Those are rapiers leaving teenage blood all over the stage. Silver's
point about the weapon was singular: the long, narrow blade was
deadly in attack and difficult to stop, but, because of its length
and fragility, it was virtually useless in defense. It could kill
your opponent, but could do almost nothing to keep you from being
killed. The winners in such contests tended to be difficult to
distinguish from the losers, and the public death toll, particularly
among the young, became alarming.
It occurred to me the other day, in the
midst of the March for Our Lives and our national discussion of guns,
that firearms are rather like the rapier. They are lethal in attack,
but there is absolutely nothing you can do with a gun that will have
any effect on an incoming bullet. Like the rapier, they are useless
in defense. There is nothing they can do to protect you, and while
attacking an attacker (long a military dictatum in cases of ambush)
may lessen the damage, only being proactive and attacking first
could possibly render you any semblance of “safe” with a gun.
This makes somewhat problematic one of
the main solutions posed to our recent epidemic of school
shootings by the NRA and gun aficionados (often dubbed “ammosexuals”
their opponents); the idea that arming large numbers of school
personnel--teachers, janitors, coaches—will somehow protect the
children by getting the “bad guy.” How do you protect with
something that has no ability to shield? By their nature, school
shootings are an ambush, they occur as a surprise, so your valiant
defenders, leaving their classrooms and lunchrooms and presumably
leaving their charges behind to engage the villain, will not, by the
very nature of the event, get off the first shot. And given that
even trained police only have a hit rate of about 18% in live fire
situations, the potential for collateral damage—that being bunched
up groups of terrified children—is very high. We risk, still deep
in George Silver's “Paradox,” placing our school students in the
midst of firefights, all in the name of protecting them. Clearly,
the only way to prevent this scenario—and the shooting itself—is
to be somehow proactive about the attacker.
In Silver's day, the reaction of
government was proactive and unequivocal. Like Shakespeare's Prince
in the play, they acted. Fed up with the carnage, the wearing of the
rapier was banned in numerous cities, and dueling itself was made
illegal. Sword lengths were regulated (particularly in Spain, where
the fad was rampant), or they were simply banned within city limits.
Those who broke the ban were punished, the weapons confiscated, and
the combination of law and outraged public opinion allowed reason to
be reinstated, and the death toll faded.
In our day, being proactive may mean a
number of things. Certainly, a rational ban on high capacity
magazines, controlling the widespread ownership of military grade
semiautomatic weapons, and ending the easy acquisition of such
weapons by the dangerous and incompetent are reasonable actions that
might be taken. However, the idea that flooding our schools with more
guns in the name of protection is as ludicrous in our time as
flooding the streets with rapiers as a way to end dueling would have
been in the 16th Century. Teachers and those who support
their work, by their nature, have nurturence and protection as a
focus of their lives. Their job as shields for our children should
never be altered to make them shock troops on their behalf. Let us
take actions before the fact to keep it that way.
George was right.
