Armed children
<p>The Bear of Considerable Brain, <a href="http://www.truthlaidbear.com/weblogaction/archives/001455.html">writes</a>:<br />
&#8220;This does not mean every man, woman and child should roam the streets<br />
packing heat, much as some of my more rabid hoplophile colleagues in<br />
the Blogosphere might enjoy the sight.&#8221;</p>
<p>N.Z. was probably thinking of me as one of his &#8220;rabid hoplophile<br />
colleagues.&#8221;; I&#8217;d be rather disappointed if he weren&#8217;t, actually.  I<br />
endorse all his good sense about citizen miltias and the necessity of<br />
a decentralized response to decentralized threats; in fact, I wrote an<br />
<a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200309#63">essay</a><br />
on that topic the day of the WTC attack.  Establishing it as normal<br />
custom that adults go armed strikes me as an excellent idea, and<br />
not merely as a tactic against terrorism and crime either.  &#8220;The possession<br />
of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave.&#8221;</p>
<p>I was originally going to respond to His Ursinity&#8217;s remark by<br />
tossing off some denial that I contemplate universally arming children<br />
as a response to terrorism.  But I&#8217;ve decided it would be more<br />
interesting to attack the question from the opposite side: under what<br />
circumstances should children be armed?</p>
<p>If your answer is &#8220;Never!&#8221; than consider that this is actually<br />
quite a radical position.  In large parts of the U.S., rather young<br />
children have and use BB rifles.  In much of rural America,<br />
including most of my own state of Pennsylvania, boys learn to hunt<br />
early, and to accept both the weapons and responsibilities of men<br />
when barely into their teens.</p>
<p>The bloody slaughters nervous urban liberals would expect from this<br />
policy somehow never materialize.  Kliebold and Harris, the Columbine<br />
shooters, were the exception that demonstrates the rule; they were<br />
<em>not</em> taught to use firearms within approved contexts by their<br />
parents and other adults, but instead devedloped a pathological,<br />
isolated relationship to weapons that mirrored their pathological,<br />
isolated lives.  Their victims were not killed by the rural gun<br />
culture, but by its absence.</p>
<p>So part of our answer is this: children should be armed, at least<br />
part of the time when in company with responsible adults, in order<br />
to prepare them for the responsibility of arming themselves as adults<br />
and participating in civilian defense against terrorism and crime.</p>
<p>The next logical question is: under what circumstances should<br />
children be trusted to carry weapons for self-defense <em>without</em><br />
direct adult supervision?  Again, &#8220;Never!&#8221; would be a radical and<br />
historically exceptional answer.  It would also be unfair to the<br />
children, especially poor children who live in areas where the chance<br />
of encountering criminal or terrorist predators is significant.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s worth bearing in mind that most decisions about using a<br />
firearm in self-defense are pretty simple.  They don&#8217;t tend to involve<br />
complicated ethical abstractions &mdash; the relevant question is<br />
usually &#8220;Am I or a defenseless person I am responsible for in imminent<br />
danger of being assaulted, abducted or killed?&#8221;  If the answer is no,<br />
you don&#8217;t even draw your weapon.</p>
<p>Of course, the capacity to make those judgments varies from child<br />
to child.  I have known intelligent, precocious children as young as<br />
eight years old who I would sooner trust with my .45 than, say, an<br />
adult alcoholic with an impulse-control problem.  In fact, I wouldn&#8217;t<br />
consider most adult pro-gun-control voters as trustworthy as the<br />
children I have in mind; people who project fear of their own behavior<br />
with weapons onto others make that spot between my shoulderblades<br />
itch.</p>
<p>At the other extreme, it&#8217;s pretty obvious that pre-verbal children<br />
don&#8217;t have the apparatus to make even the simplest ethical decisions<br />
about lethal force.  They don&#8217;t know enough about the world yet.  The<br />
standard models of childhood development tell me the same thing as my<br />
experience of real kids; the on average, possibility of ethical<br />
competence sufficient for self-defense decisions opens up at around<br />
twelve years old.  It is not invariably present at that age, but the<br />
possibility deserves to be taken seriously.</p>
<p>I can say this.  If a person who is legally a minor but twelve or<br />
over shows signs of continuing responsibility (including either<br />
holding down a job or applying him/herself to make steady grades in<br />
school), and does not have a history of substance abuse or other<br />
self-destructive or criminal behavior, and <em>wants</em> to accept<br />
the responsibility of going armed &mdash; then I think custom should<br />
support that.</p>
<p>Finally, I want to point out that we may be doing children no favor<br />
by `protecting&#8217; them from the decisions that go with bearing arms.<br />
Thomas Jefferson once wrote to his teenage nephew as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>
&#8220;As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives [only]<br />
moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence<br />
to the mind.  Games played with the ball and others of that nature, are too<br />
violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun,<br />
therefore, be the constant companion to your walks.&#8221;
</p></blockquote>
<p>This was no aberration.  I have developed <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/guns/gun-ethics.html">elsewhere</a><br />
the theme that the practice of bearing arms was not important to the<br />
Founding Fathers merely as a counter against crime and overweening<br />
government, but as a school of moral character in the individual<br />
citizen.</p>
<p>The retreat of American gun culture from our cities and suburbs has<br />
coincided with the the fetishization of adolescence and<br />
the infantilization of our entire society.  To reverse that trend, we<br />
need to remember the ways we used to use to encourage people to<br />
acquire self-discipline, character, and maturity.  One of those ways<br />
was &mdash; and in large parts of the U.S., still is &mdash; the<br />
healthy use of lethal weapons.</p>
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