80 million intransigent gun owners

Our best defense against Big Brother?

Jul 10, 2024

Transcript

This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.

To see the first post, which doubles as an explainer, click here.

Also a quick reminder that you can listen to the podcast version of each post wherever you listen to podcasts.

Guns are admittedly pretty cool

The other day, I stumbled across this 4th of July post by Naval Ravikant:

Ultimately, whether visible or not, the people with the guns are always in charge. America, and by extension, the West, remain free because of 80 million armed and intransigent Americans.

Like any normal boy, I thought guns were pretty cool when I was young, because in some sense they are objectively neat, insofar as they are one of the fundamental marvels of projectile engineering, and insofarther as it is fun to shoot things.

I didn’t do well in Boy Scouts (we moved too much, and I was bad at keeping records), but I did go to camp two or three years in a row, and by far my favorite merit badge was marksmanship. We all got to shoot .22 caliber rifles at targets down a range in the woods, and I’ve always had steady hands.

That was one of a very small handful of memories I have of ever shooting a gun. Guns really just aren’t a big part of my life.

I say all this by way of disclaimer, because while I’ve been trying to trend away from too many disclaimers in general, guns are an understandably fraught topic.

Which is why, when I read Naval’s post about 80 million armed Americans, I had to sit still for a minute and resist my knee-jerk distaste for hobbyist gun owners and wonder.

Is he right?

The favorite counter to the proposition that gun toting civilians are responsible for stemming the tide of tyranny is what’s an AR 15 gonna do against a tank?

Because of course if a tank rolls up it won’t matter what Rodney Redneck can pull out of his arsenal of small arms. But that argument only works if we’re talking about specific, limited scenarios (of which there have been several tragic examples).

But it doesn’t work at scale.

Consider Typical Town, USA, with its Typical police and Typical civilians, some percentage of whom own guns. Not a lot of guns, not big guns, but guns that could nonetheless kill a Typical Town beat cop just fine.

In an alternate version of Typical Town, in which zero civilians owned guns, it would be much easier for Typical Town cops to do totalitarian things. If they have regular guns, and the civilians have none at all, then, as Naval suggested, there is zero balance of lethal power.

But in the real Typical Town, with the typical number of gun owners and guns, the calculus is always going to be different. Totalitarian things are a much less viable option. State coercion of any kind is much more costly.

Now multiply Typical Town by about twenty thousand. Sure, the tanks could show up in any given town or city, but they can’t show up in all of them. And even if they could, it would be disastrously expensive.

Which is why, for the vast majority of state coercion, the tip of the spear is normal cops, who must continually make the calculation of whether any perceived overreach of the state is worth the potential costs of conflict with that ornery percentage of normal citizens who, come to think of it, have plenty of guns.

As distasteful as you might find the American-flag-waving, MAGA-hat-wearing, NRA-card-holding gun enthusiast, it’s at least possible that these people are keeping Big Brother’s long, thirsty fingers from strangling the life out of the rest of us.