The New Paradoxes of Defense

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 16^th 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.