Virtually everyone claims to believe in self-defense, and contributors to and readers of the sorts of publications that place my column specifically never tire of affirming the Second Amendment.
Almost always, though, when the Second Amendment is discussed on the political stage, it is with respect to guns, with those on one side of the divide characteristically defending citizens’ right to bear them, while those on the other just as characteristically arguing for more restrictions on that right (even while claiming to support the right itself).
Guns are, essentially, devices designed to kill. Guns, whether they are used for hunting or self-defense, are valued on account of the ease with which they allow those who wield them to neutralize the physical advantages of those on whom they set their sights, whether big game animals or multiple human attackers.
Yet the Second Amendment does not express the right of citizens to, if need be, kill in self-defense with guns per se. It expresses the more fundamental right of citizens to, if need be, kill in self-defense by whatever the means. The Second Amendment enshrines the right of self-defense. Guns, or “arms,” are incidental to that right. In other words, the amendment’s authors and ratifiers did not mean to suggest that while it is permissible for a person to mortally wound assailants by shooting them, it is impermissible to mortally wound attackers via knives, sticks, pipes, baseball bats, or one’s own hands and feet. This should be obvious.
The gun is simply a tool. It is one tool among countless others. The most zealous defenders of Americans’ right to own and use guns and their equally zealous counterparts who tirelessly contend for greater “gun control” make one and the same mistake in personifying the gun. They both fetishize the gun, treating it as if it was a magic wand.
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There is no denying that a gun has advantages over other weapons, that it can make the performance of a violent action (whether a legal or criminal one) significantly easier and cleaner than it would otherwise be with other weaponry. Still, those whose interest is in sparing lives that may otherwise be lost, as opposed to scoring cheap political points, need to recognize that agency resides in the person, not in any artifact:
There is no such thing as “gun violence.” There are only violent people who would still subject others to violence even if they didn’t avail themselves of guns. Conversely, no gun ever saved anyone from danger. It is people who moved well enough, soon enough, and with resolve who protected themselves or others with guns.
Those who train in self-defense must grasp that they are the weapon. Guns, then, are an extension of the natural weapon, the person. People must train to develop mastery over the movement of their own bodies, to make their movement, at the subconscious level, as refined and subtle as possible. This neurological rewiring is what will permit them to take action, within a microsecond, and under the potent cocktail of an adrenaline dump, to incapacitate a threat.
Any commentator who has spilled syllables complaining (rightly) about the lawlessness that has been permitted to prevail in our cities, or arguing in favor of the Second Amendment, should encourage citizens to train in a martial art, a martial art in the literal and truest sense of the word “martial” (meaning “of or pertaining to war”). A real self-defense situation, one in which the threat is imminent and the only alternative to using violence is to be subjected to it by the attacker(s), is akin to war, for just as the soldier on the battlefield must do or die, so too is it the same for a civilian who is attacked by a total stranger within, say, the close quarters of a subway car, a bus, a public bathroom stall, or one’s home by intruders.
There are indeed skills, “soft skills,” like situational awareness, say, that can preempt the vast majority of violent conflicts from ever happening. But a genuine martial art will indelibly impress upon its practitioners the importance of cultivating the soft skills by equipping them with the “hard skills,” the ability and the resolve to prevail in potentially mortal combat over those who would kill them and their loved ones. When someone trains for victory over a bipedal attacker (as opposed to sport fighting), they are aware of the high stakes involved. They train to go all of the way. This, in turn, means that they are that much more determined, if at all possible, to avoid all potentially violent encounters.
An analogy might help: While some of the planet’s countries possess nuclear weaponry, there is only one time such weaponry was ever used by one country against its enemy. The doctrine of “Mutually Ensured Destruction” has endured for as long as it has precisely because it’s predicated on the recognition by all parties that the costs in suffering and death of nuclear warfare are astronomical. Similarly, those who train in an art of war to make themselves into “nuclear” weapons, so to speak, become equally cognizant of the costs in suffering and death that they are willing to inflict (and incur) if they should have to take action so as to protect themselves and/or others.
And, so, if at all possible, they will seek to preempt violent conflict by avoiding ever placing themselves into problematic circumstances in the first place.
If avoidance fails and an altercation ensues, those who train in a martial art will seek to de-escalate it.
But if avoidance and de-escalation both fail, then the practitioner of a martial art will have the choice, unavailable to others, of unleashing the dogs of war.
For the sake of peace and the safety, both the Second Amendment’s most vigorous proponents and their opponents should advocate on behalf of citizens taking up the study of a martial art.
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