An Armed Society Is A Polite Society
Sep. 14th, 2012 02:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deaneI've often seen this quote used as a defense of gun liberalisation. It comes from the Robert Heinlein novel Beyond This Horizon and goes like this:
The apparent reasoning is that people won't be civil to each other without the threat of violent death. It sounds like there should at least be some grain of truth there. After all, if someone were to shove a loaded gun in my face I would certainly choose my words quite carefully. But let's try to back it up with some numbers.
In 2007 the US was the most heavily armed society on the planet, by a wide margin, with 88.8 guns per 100 residents. That should make Americans the most polite people in the world, don't you think?
Googling for "polite american" gives me 26,700 hits while "rude american" garners 40,800 hits. Oops.
Well, there's a lot of negativism on the net. Maybe a polite/rude ratio of 0.65 is as high as it gets. Let's look at another country and see.
At 30.8 guns per resident Canada is less than half as heavily armed as the US, so it should be more than twice as rude, right?
"polite canadian" = 19,900 hits, "rude canadian" = 14,400, for a polite/rude ratio of 1.38. Oops again. Mind you, Canadians are famous for being polite. They practically wear it as a badge of honour. Maybe they're just an outlier. The exception which proves the rule. (Another great saying, that.)
The second and third most heavily-armed polities in the world are Serbia (58.2 guns per 100 people) and Yemen (54.8), both countries which are renowned for their astonishingly good manners.
At the other end of the scale we have the brutish Japanese (0.6) and the notoriously rude Singaporeans (0.5).
Now of course I'm cherry picking here. I could almost as easily have picked out heavily armed countries which most of us think of as polite and lightly armed ones which we consider relatively rude. The point is that when you look at the data there is simply no correlation between how heavily armed a society is and how polite its people are.
I'm calling this myth busted.
An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.
The apparent reasoning is that people won't be civil to each other without the threat of violent death. It sounds like there should at least be some grain of truth there. After all, if someone were to shove a loaded gun in my face I would certainly choose my words quite carefully. But let's try to back it up with some numbers.
In 2007 the US was the most heavily armed society on the planet, by a wide margin, with 88.8 guns per 100 residents. That should make Americans the most polite people in the world, don't you think?
Googling for "polite american" gives me 26,700 hits while "rude american" garners 40,800 hits. Oops.
Well, there's a lot of negativism on the net. Maybe a polite/rude ratio of 0.65 is as high as it gets. Let's look at another country and see.
At 30.8 guns per resident Canada is less than half as heavily armed as the US, so it should be more than twice as rude, right?
"polite canadian" = 19,900 hits, "rude canadian" = 14,400, for a polite/rude ratio of 1.38. Oops again. Mind you, Canadians are famous for being polite. They practically wear it as a badge of honour. Maybe they're just an outlier. The exception which proves the rule. (Another great saying, that.)
The second and third most heavily-armed polities in the world are Serbia (58.2 guns per 100 people) and Yemen (54.8), both countries which are renowned for their astonishingly good manners.
At the other end of the scale we have the brutish Japanese (0.6) and the notoriously rude Singaporeans (0.5).
Now of course I'm cherry picking here. I could almost as easily have picked out heavily armed countries which most of us think of as polite and lightly armed ones which we consider relatively rude. The point is that when you look at the data there is simply no correlation between how heavily armed a society is and how polite its people are.
I'm calling this myth busted.
