“An armed society is a polite society”
Says Robert Heinlein, who adds “Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.” So openly carrying arms is a proposal for asshole management, except also radically misguided, for all the reasons Thomas Hobbes so vividly explained in Leviathan. Even if civility doesn’t require an absolute sovereign, as Hobbes claimed, it surely requires great assurances against mortal threats, lest we all take the cautious course of preventive action–“‘Anticipation,” to use Hobbes’s word–and quickly descend into a war of all against all. There is no civility without peace. (For related discussion of Hobbes, see this post.)
