One of my Tea Party-leaning relatives (yes, like all of you, I have them) sent me an image from some gun owners’ association. It shows a curly-haired young woman leaning against a wall with an assault rifle slung over her shoulder. In large type alongside her: “Because a Restraining Order is just a piece of paper.” With the www address of the National Gun Rights Association. (I’m not going to link to the webpage because I don’t want to give them the clicks.) The rhetorical move here seems to me so typical of our moment that our regular programming will be suspended while I indulge in a little rant.

The ad makes the claim that gun ownership is virtuous because it does something most of us would agree is virtuous— protecting women from abusive exes. That’s a blanket claim that would collapse under a cursory statistical examination: the number of female gun owners who have found guns as helpful as or more helpful than a restraining order, and who have not suffered the side effects of e.g. having the gun pointed at them, or seeing it harm someone in an accident, must be very small compared to all the other gun owners. It makes the classical move of Anecdotage– getting you to think that one possibly fictional example is The Example that extends to cover all cases. But that’s just ordinary BS-ing. What irks me is something else.

A gun would be useful against— whom exactly? The kind of person who thinks that a restraining order is just a piece of paper. Now what kind of person is that? Someone who has no fear of the police, no respect for the law, no concern about having to pay fines or do jail time, but who just wants to shoot his (it’s usually a “he”) way out of his problems. A psychopath, in short, like the famous copycat shooters who get their names in the paper for performing bloody commando operations against kindergartners in this country. You might think that that is the problem. But the ad endorses this nihilist view of the law. It tramples the law underfoot as “just a piece of paper.” And the solution to the problem that it has just created is what? To get a bigger gun, which is certainly not a piece of paper, so that you too can shoot your way out of the problem constituted by people who think that you ought to shoot your way out of problems.

This is a widespread move in the world this summer. Putin’s Russia has just violated its previous treaties in which it promised to respect the sovereignty of Ukraine, and among the justifications was this, that “the US did it too in invading Iraq.” The Chinese are installing oil rigs and artificial islands in the “exclusive economic zone” of other countries, and intimidating vessels of other nations, on the grounds that China is a powerful nation and this is what powerful nations always do (e.g., the colonial powers of the nineteenth century). The spoiled children who fly the Gadsden flag at every opportunity and suck up federal largesse at every opportunity also wave their guns around and threaten to kill people on the grounds that the Guvamint, somewhere, somehow, has used its awesome power against ordinary Americans like them. Everybody has to create enemies, so that they can claim justification for going out and being that enemy.

Well, I say: the Second Amendment is just a piece of paper. I also say that the rest of the Constitution is just a piece of paper. And the Bible, and Euclid’s Elements, and so on. But if you are going to respect any piece of paper, you had better get wise to the reasons that make that paper cogent. They might be logical reasons, legal reasons, social reasons. And if you are going to tear up some piece of paper, let’s hear an explanation for why we’d be better off without it.

The underlying theory of diplomacy, I surmise, is that everybody wants peace, other things being equal; war is much worse than the next better outcome. Of course, there are times when a group of people is so upset about something, or so mistreated, that they have to take up arms. There are also situations in which people are not terribly oppressed, but make the calculation that they can get something out of violence that they can’t get out of negotiations or legislation. These disruptors (to allude to the New Yorker piece that was much chatted about this week) have less stake in keeping things as they are than they do in a possible future world that gives them more advantage, and sometimes they have the means to follow up on their bravado (an advanced weapon, a population of sacrificial lambs, a weakened neighbor). Acts of bluff by such people, like the annexations and Anschlüsse of the 1930s, often go unanswered because the other players have more invested in keeping the peace. Those who would rather keep the peace quite naturally see the costs of a preemptive battle written in large letters, and hope the menace will go away.

Supposedly the collective security agreements of the UN and other bodies were designed to prevent another period of escalation like what we saw in the 1930s. But here we are, experiencing one, and not very clear on what to do about it. I think it would just continue to feed the monster if the US were to take unilateral action against any of these gamblers— just as it would be bad policy for the FBI or the IRS to attack Tea Party nihilists directly. (Of course those nihilists will always believe that the direct attacks are and have always been real.) Multilateral action to preserve the parts of the status quo that are pretty good for everybody, and policy, diplomacy, legislation, law enforcement and reasoned debate (based, but I know this is asking a lot, on scientific research) to improve the parts that drive people to violence for lack of better alternatives— this old incremental recipe is what needs reviving.