A Monopoly on Violence

Whenever there is some kind of unpleasantness in the world, whenever a man—because it will almost always be a man—uses a gun to kill someone famous or whenever innocents are harmed, talk about gun control always follows. People wonder if the world wouldn’t be a better place if no one had guns.

I believe that the world WOULD be a better place if NO ONE had guns.

What a fine place the world would be if no one had guns, if men settled their differences with swords—or better yet—THEIR BARE HANDS! None of this sitting in a tower picking men off from a quarter mile away! A man should have to look another man in the eye before he kills him. He should know and feel and understand what he is doing.

However, the sad truth is that—because they are men—men will always look to increase their advantage in combat. Decreasing your own risk while increasing your opponent’s risk is good strategy, and our ancestors invented projectile weapons for this reason long before they invented guns. Guns—and missiles—are just an improvement on spears and arrows and slingshots.

The problem is that when people talk about gun control, they aren’t really talking about a world without guns. They are talking about a world where only the state has guns. They are talking about giving the government a monopoly on violence.

I live in Portland, Oregon. Portland is a city so prissy and liberal that there’s a TV show where prissy liberals from other cities make fun of Portland for being too prissy and liberal. I can’t throw a locally produced organic muffin without hitting a car that has a bumper sticker expressing some kind of beef with the government.

“If you are not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

“I love my country, but I fear my government.”

“Oh well, I wasn’t using my civil rights anyway.”

At this point I think just about everyone, right or left, assumes that the majority of people working at high levels in government—especially the politicians who are supposed to represent them—are prone to lying and corruption and the misuse of power. People make exceptions for their personal political darlings and pet programs. They especially make exceptions for government programs that cater to their own interests. But very few people on the left or right would stand up and seriously make the case that the government is not corrupt. Indeed, it seems as though exposing government corruption is a national pastime. It’s undeniably a popular theme in movies and television. People don’t trust the government to do right (or left).

This is the thing that I just don’t understand about gun control advocacy.

If you don’t trust the government, why the hell would you give the government a monopoly on lethal weaponry?

Do you honestly think that the government will stop being corrupt, and always act in the best interest of the people, when absolutely no one has any meaningful power to resist tyranny?

People don’t make this point often enough.

It is in the event of tragedy that even sane moderates seem more inclined to hand the state greater power. Maybe we could prevent further tragedies, the logic goes, if we increased the (corrupt) government’s ability to choose who gets access to weapons. Maybe we could stop such tragedies from happening at all, one day, if no one had guns. (No one, except the government.)

This is how the state—the state you think is run by corrupt people—gets more power, and this is how the people lose the means to resist that power.

In a previous piece titled “Violence is Golden,” I argued that all governments are coercive. Order and the rule of law both rely on coercion backed by the threat of violence.  For social order to be maintained, the state must wield more power than individual men can muster, so that men cannot act with impunity. The state is, in its ideal form, a gang of men organized for the greater good of the group. However, when the state has a monopoly on the means of violence, the state—the state you think is run by corrupt people—can act with impunity.

Is that really what you want?

About Jack Donovan

Jack Donovan moonlights as an advocate for the resurgence of patriarchal, paleo-masculine values among the Men of the West. He has contributed articles to Alternative Right.com and has also written for the anti-feminist/men’s interest site The Spearhead.

Donovan has appeared on television and radio to discuss the topic of manhood, and in 2010 spoke to a group of students at a private high school about “Masculinity in the 21st Century.”

Jack Donovan is originally from rural Pennsylvania. He has lived and worked in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.