_ARMA VIRUMQUE CANO_ July 25, 2010
From _The Libertarian Enterprise_
Number 580, July 25, 2010
A few days ago, in a peculiar sort of sidebar to an argument I seem to be having with a handful of trendy lefties who resent the fact that I insist on ownership of what I write, somebody named Rick over on a blog at the Mises.org site decided it was time to open another front.
I would post the URL here, but this frigging software won’t let me do it.
Responding to an article of mine that had recently been published in The Libertarian Enterprise concerning Intellectual Property Rights, or, more precisely, to a photograph that editor Ken Holder had chosen to decorate it with, Rick treated us to a prolonged whimper, thus:
“Why did Smith feel the need to post a picture of him posing with a gun? How is that picture relevant to a discussion about IP[R]? Is that an attempt to intimidate or come off as macho libertarian gun slingers?”
I added the R in brackets. This dispute is not over intellectual property, as such, but whether it ought to be owned and controlled by the individual who creates it—and without whose effort it would not exist—or some mini-horde of collectivists that arbitrarily decides to lay claim to it. Rick apparently places himself among the latter category.
Oughta be a no-brainer to anyone who claims to be a libertarian, right?
But I have digressed.
“…It’s that kind of stupid gun posturing,” says Rick, “that makes it harder on gun owners who take firearms seriously and responsibly and who don’t go around flaunting or posing like that just for the purposes of acting tough or ‘libertarian’. If you have a gun, fine. But hopefully you’ll never actually have to use it for self-defense, which means don’t draw unless you intend to fire and don’t waste your time trying to impress people who know better with stupid pictures like that.”
So there, nyahh.
Over the decades I’ve known a thousand Ricks, and so have you: sour-visaged lip-pursers and finger-shakers, living embodiments of the proverbial Mrs. Grundy, whose principal joy in life—very probably their only joy in life—appears to consist of officiously telling other individuals what they ought to do with their own lives and possessions.
What never fails to astonish me is the utter clairvoyance of these specimens—or maybe it’s telepathy—which allows them to know what great masses of human beings, in this case something like a hundred million gun owners, think and feel at any given moment about any given topic. In my experience most of them never see a newspaper, never watch TV, never listen to the radio. It’s all so beneath them. So how do they know what they claim to know? And why is it that every cause they dedicate themselves to begins to suffer the very minute they sign on?
You may know the name of Jerry Ahern, an action-adventure novelist who, together with his wife, Sharon, has written more books than any other eleven writers, including yours truly. Jerry was also the first person to write me a real, live, professional check—he was the Associate Editor at Guns Magazine at the time—for something I’d written. Sometime later, Jerry’s photo—Sharon took the pix, as I recall—appeared in a magazine piece he’d written. It was a dramatic pose, Jerry and his gun, muscles tensed, a thousand-yard stare in his eyes.
It was a swell picture and I liked it.
I was comparatively new to the business then, so it surprised me when, starting with the next issue, Jerry became a target for exactly the same mind-garbage that Rick’s blog entry is full of, coming from exactly the same kind of clairvoyants and telepaths who can never do anything remarkable themselves but always have plenty of advice for those who do. I met dozens of them after I had the temerity—having grown weary of the Libertarian Party’s embarrassing timidity and lack of imagination—to write and publish my own first novel, The Probability Broach, without asking for their valuable guidance and permission.
TPB didn’t have a man with a gun on the cover.
It had a gorilla with a gun.
The title of this essay “Arma virumque cano…” are the opening words, give or take, of Virgil’s Aeneid, a ten thousand line epic poem written around 19 A.D., about the guy, a Trojan famously defeated by the Greeks, named Aeneas, who refugeed out to found the city that would someday be Rome. The words mean “Of arms and the man I sing…”
For some reason nobody knows, male figures don’t appear very much in our species’ most ancient artworks, the cave paintings in France and elsewhere. Cave Grandpa enjoyed painting animals a lot more (to my eye they are unspeakably beautiful) and occasionally representing Cave Grandma in little statues—featuring tiny heads and hands, gigantic breasts, and a booty that would throw Sir Mix-a-lot into tachycardia—I am morally certain were handed around the campfire and giggled over.
However when the first males show up as little stick characters in cave paintings, they’re invariably depicted carrying or throwing their spears. So it appears that our friend Rick is blubbering about a phenomenon that only goes back about two thousand generations before he first saw the light of day, one that will doubtless continue— here and among the stars—for thousands of generations after he is gone.
In between, we have hundreds of sarcophagi, effigies, and stained glass windows showing warriors with their mighty weapons. The famous Maciejowski Bible is full of illuminations of men wielding all kinds of strange and wonderful swords and pole-arms. Archers show up in what passed for popular culture, crossbowmen, and eventually arquebusiers, musketeers, riflemen, Minutemen, pioneers, red Indians, and pistol fighters. Half-naked females in distress alone can’t sell true crime magazines.
“When in doubt,” Raymond Chandler advised younger writers, “bring a man with a gun in his hand through the door.” Good advice. And Chandler, like his protagonist Philip Marlowe, preferred a Colt .38 automatic. I’ve seen a picture of him holding it, likewise a picture of Ian Fleming with a Luger or a Broomhandle or something. I can’t remember.
Maybe a Webley.
And as for Mickey Spillane…
Whether that kind of “gun posturing” is “stupid” or not, is a matter of aesthetics, and Rick hasn’t convinced me he’s any kind of judge.
Whether it “makes it harder on gun owners” or not is a matter of political judgement. I’ve heard the same sort of ridiculous claptrap from others, most of them members of the National Rifle Association, so often over the years that I’ve lost count. The NRA, with its craven slave mentality and its corrupt and cowardly policies of appeasement, has damaged the right of the individual to own and carry weapons over and over, as one might expect from the world’s oldest and largest gun control organization. Recently they even volunteered to help various leftists in Congress to obliterate the First Amendment, in exchange for special powers and immunities gained at the expense other, better organizations.
If Rick isn’t an NRA member, he should sign right up. He’s a natural. You think me harsh? What am I to make, otherwise, of some scribbler I never heard of, who knows absolutely nothing about me, but who nevertheless accuses me, on no evidence, of not taking firearms seriously and responsibly, and of going around “flaunting or posing like that just for the purposes,” he says “of acting tough or ‘libertarian’”?
There’s that old telepathy again.
“If you have a gun,” Rick grants us that freedom magnanimously, “fine. But hopefully you’ll never actually have to use it for self-defense, which means—” Which means that if you haven’t handled it and lived with it every waking hour, your body won’t know what the hell to do with it when the crunch comes. That’s the way that reflexes work.
Rick’s advice, “…don’t draw unless you intend to fire…” rules out occasionally cleaning your gun and confirming its good repair and readiness. It eliminates the practice you need drawing it smoothly and swiftly from a holster, a skill you may find yourself wanting someday. It makes dry-fire practice impossible, pointing the weapon at a target (say a thumb tack in the wall), aligning the sights properly, then pulling the trigger while controlling both the weapon and your own breathing, until the sear breaks, assuring a one-shot hit.
Do it a hundred times a day, you’ll cut the amount of live ammo you require to achieve proficiency to a third of what it would take otherwise.
But apparently Rick doesn’t know that.
“[A]nd don’t waste your time,” he finishes with a flourish, “trying to impress people who know better with stupid pictures like that.” Just what Rick thinks he knows better is a mystery we’ll get to.
If I display a picture of myself with a gun, it can serve any one of a number of purposes. One is to show that I’m physically familiar with the subject at hand. If it was cows, then you’d see me with a cow.
Another is to demonstrate that I am serious enough about the issue to be photographed with a gun, a test many a so-called libertarian candidate has failed miserably. I once said that a candidate has to have the moxie to be photographed shooting a “black” rifle, and that there should be empty cases in the air. It’s one reason I like Sarah Palin.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I said.
A third reason is for my own amusement and the delight of my readers, possibly to show them a new toy. Rick doesn’t understand— may not be capable of understanding—that the enemies of freedom hate the joy to be discovered in guns as much as they hate the guns themselves. I delight in the gleaming blue steel and the warm glow of polished walnut that makes my Marlin 1895CB one of the world’s most pleasing sights. I share visions like that with my readers whenever I can.
When you’ve lost the joy, you’ve lost the cause.
And then there’s this: I once said that if you gave Teddy Kennedy a pair of sixguns in a western rig and left him alone, he’d be up in his bedroom practicing fast-draws in the mirror in fifteen minutes. I could be wrong, but I’d bet even money on Charles Schumer, as well. It’s part of a human and pre-human heritage that goes back in time maybe a million years. It’s an artform and aesthetic universal to human experience. It’s an expression of American artistic and athletic forms.
“What monster kooks,” Rick says, switching to plural for some reason, even though he’s writing about little old me—or thinks he is. “I don’t care what they’ve written or how many books they’ve sold. They’re total dorks playing the role of one of their tough guy fantasy characters when they pose with guns like that. Such alter-ego nonsense.”
Rick doesn’t care how many books I’ve sold (somewhere north of 30 now) because, if he were capable of the same effort, he wouldn’t write nonsense like he writes. It’s quite true, to a degree, that physical props help. All through the process of writing my recent vampire novel Sweeter Than Wine, I kept a 1911A1 Colt .45 Automatic pistol on the desk beside my keyboard, along with a Colt .38 Detective Special. These are the weapons my viewpoint character carries, and if I’d had a 1934 Beretta, the gun his lady-love prefers, it would have been there, too.
Whenever I write detective Win Bear, the S&W Model 58 .41 Military and Police is there on the desk, along with his Browning P-35 High Power.
I’m quite proficient with all of these guns, and if “role-playing” in this way makes me a dork, I’m an award-winning dork whose readers love his characters because they say they have a feeling of reality to them.
Psychic Rick tells us, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t even bother training with his gun, at least not seriously…anybody can shoot at a fixed target…I bet he probably couldn’t hit the side of a barn if in that million-to-one chance he should actually need to use it.”
Well let’s see. I’ve been shooting both formally and informally since I was 11; make that 53 years, since 1957. I’ve never been attacked by a barn door, so I can’t attest to my proficiency in that arena. I’ve been shot at, drawn a gun in self-defense on four occasions, and gone through a broken door in the dark with a gun in my hand.
Using a revolver with iron sights, I can hit a chest-sized steel target in a prairie crosswind a hundred yards off—you won’t believe how far away that seems—and I’ve got a big board decorated with dozens of colored ribbons and a trophy to attest to it. I qualified to shoot NRA Falling Plates—a game for autopistols—with a 3-inch barrelled revolver because it was all I happened to have with me that day.
With a scoped rifle, I can hit a mule deer at roughly the same distance, running diagonally, full out, down a hillside above me. I once hit another mule deer running away from me in the back of the head with a .45 caliber sixgun. I have never shot a rabbit with anything but a short-barrelled .38 Special, and then only in the throat so it will die instantly and not make that horrible noise they make.
Could Rick possibly be more wrong?
‘Fraid so. Shortly after the poor fellow’s blog entry, the following arrived, from an individual named Peter: “What picture of him posing with a gun? Do you mean the one on the front page of ncc-1776.org [The Libertarian Enterprise]? That’s not L. Neil Smith, that’s Nathan Fillion, the actor from Firefly (more recently: Castle).”
Thanks, Pete. I really am ruggedly handsome, aren’t I?
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Neil- You ARE a handsome devil. (okay, I’m sucking up a little for laughs)
To whom it may concern (this means YOU, ricky-poo). I have been in Neil’s house. I have shot with him once or twice, many years ago. I have sat with him, talking, to the wonderful “Snap!” sound of a crisply breaking sear on a S&W 10mm revolver. I’ve seen him draw in practice (quite nicely, I might add). I’ve seen some of the ribbons he’s won shooting. When I, as a gunsmith, run into problems, I call Neil to talk me through them. In case this doesn’t make it clear, dumbass, the man knows guns FAR better than you know your own hand. And, when the chips are down, and the time coes for “serious social work” (to quote the master, Jeff Cooper), I’ll take ONE L. Neil Smith with a .22 Woodsman over 5 cops with shotguns ANY day.
Sorry, Neil, I know you don’t need defending, but I felt obliged to be your back-up.
Too many academic types are uncomfortable around weapons. Not just guns, a person who doesn’t have a lighter, knife and a multitool on him or handy is not prepared to deal with life’s contingencies, yet too many academics won’t carry them and discourage others from doing so. Perhaps it is an honest belief that problems should be settled with words and intellect, not physical tools. Maybe it’s a commitment to a snobbish world view in which “philosophers” don’t dirty their hands handling weapons and tool except when studying them in the lab, let alone work with them.
The opinions of effete snobs should not matter to people who work with their hands, or even those of us who let others do the work out of laziness. admittedly I fall in the lazy category, however this laziness does not convey any moral superiority no matter what some Europeanized snob says.
One of these days, I may figure out what folks like “Rick” think they’re accomplishing. Maybe it’s what you say, that their main or only joy in life consists of depriving others of joy, but I think there’s more to it than that. If that were all of it, such folk wouldn’t feel the need to attack you directly; they’d find it much more effective to attack (in this case) the editors of the Enterprise (assuming they’re not so ignorant as to miss the fact that it’s the editor, not the author, who has final say what goes on the published page — whether words or images or even, in these multi-media days, sounds).
My suspicion is that such folk get almost equal joy from hearing themselves proclaim their superiority, to what they get by depriving someone else of equality or superiority. It’s not enough for them to outlaw fun, they also have to explain in unending detail how weak we are for wanting (or, heaven forbid, needing) fun in our lives, and how strong they are because they don’t need, want, or even enjoy the things we do that are fun. Mrs. Grundy herself appears to have felt that way about sex and anything vaguely related to it; Molly Crosby went on record feeling that way about alcohol (seemingly along with any other drug that might let folks have fun more readily or ease the burden of day to day living); any of us can probably name a grade school or high school teacher who did the same “favor” for the simple joy of learning that one subject that came easily.
I’ll admit it, I’ve occasionally caught myself showing a little of that stripe, though in my defense, it’s almost always been related to ignorance or blind stupidity, which some folks seem to enjoy as much as I like my homebrew, my guns, and my cameras.
I think, Donald, that the specimens we’re discussing here are mostly embarrassed by their more outgoing cosapients. I ran into exactly the same phenomenon in the Libertarian Party, frightened little elbow-joggers who want you to soft-pedal whatever you’re saying as a candidate or a spokesman because they themselves are horrifically afraid of being laughed or sneered at if they’re called upon to explain it.
To be perfectly honest, I just _love_ making life impossible for oxygen-wasters like that. If they can’t handle what was required of them when they signed up for a social revolution, they should stay at home, out of the way of people who know what they’re doing, and watch soap operas.
It is in me to be flamboyant — although it didn’t come naturally; I was painfully shy as a child — and I have always believed it to be the most effective tactic (see my “Maidenform Bra” speech). But I confess I’d do it anyway, because I agree with Heinlein, that you should always take big bites, and that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Life is too short to spend it skulking around down inside the baseboards like a cockroach.
Say, I wonder if I should notify Rick over there in VonMisesLand that he’s been written about, both here and in _The Libertarian Enterprise_. It’d be the honorable thing, I suppose, but he should really make a habit of reading the _important_ journals of the movement, and I’m not even sure I know how to do it.
I’m sure he can be contacted through publisher of his original comment.
Perhaps if the struggle to properly enforce the right to keep and bear arms (national preemptive Vermont carry law with the admission that the RKBA is a natural right and all the law can do is help enforce it not restrict it) was won there would be no need to be in people’s face about exercising it. Perhaps we could keep our weapons concealed so that people who like to pretend rights don’t have to be forcibly defended by the people claiming these rights would not have to face reality.
But until then to openly display weapons is necessary to keep this right from being eroded. besides it is fun to show of one’s property.
That’s the price you pay for reading the blog entries at Lew Rockwell, I suggest you don’t. I avoid doing that most assiduously, both early and often. I read the regular puffery of the published articles, and ignore the dreck. I only know they have a blog when their summary in the sidebar highlights an entry that interests me.
What is going on at “VonMisesLand”? Rick with his panties in a knot reaction to Neil posing with his guns, Lessig and Kinsella being quoted to argue against intellectual property rights. I thought Von Mises was about individual liberty and supported property rights, including intellectual property rights.
Have they been infiltrated and subverted or what?
Al asks, “What is going on at ‘VonMisesLand’?”
It’s complicated and simple at the same time, Al, and I can’t cover the whole mess here. But briefly, when most of us were busy attending to various threats to our life, liberty, and property issuing from “progressive” and conservative quarters, an insidious form of collectivism was either spontaneously generated or imported (I’m not sure yet which) within our own movement.
This doctrine begins by imposing a utilitarian socialist “explanation” for the institution of individual property rights, attempting to substitute it for the rational moral code on which we have always based them, or the more practical observation that, if my rights fail to be fully respected, on my terms, I’ll withdraw my effort at propping up civilization, persuade as many others as I can to to do so, and let the collectivist bastards freeze in the dark.
So now we’re in a position where Atlas has to Shrug, not with regard to the state, but with regard to portions of the libertarian movement, notably the parasites and scavengers that now infest the Ludwig von Mises Institute and, dismayingly, the Foundation for Economic Education.
There is no longer any mystery why LewRockwell.com has spent so much time, effort, and bandwidth tearing down Ayn Rand — as if this were a sovietized society that jettisons its heroes now and again — and elevating Murray Rothbard to godhood.
Apparently one of the few institutions that support intellectual property rights (never say “IP”, always say “IPR”) is CATO, which is like waking up in the morning and finding yourself in bed with Rosie O’Donnel. Oh well.
The next step in this miniputsch is to create a false distinction between what might be termed physical property and intellectual property and assert, for various spurious reasons (which I will examine in depth when my other comittments permit), that I have no moral claim on the creations of my mind — my books, for example — and that anyone is free to copy them, alter them, or claim them for his (or, more typically, _their_) own. If I protest even mildly, that makes me a “statist asshole”
In October, I’ll be making a video speech to a convention in which I’ll say, among other things, that if we are ever to get our civilization back, we must root out and extirpate every little bit of socialism within it, including police forces, public schools, national parks, and so forth. You can’t live with “just a little bit” of cancer.
Thanks to the last few days of seeing them in their full putrescence, those who claim I have no rights to my own work will now go to the top of that list.
“Apparently one of the few institutions that support intellectual property rights (never say “IP”, always say “IPR”) is CATO, which is like waking up in the morning and finding yourself in bed with Rosie O’Donnel. Oh well.”
I’ve had it. If I gotta fuck RO’D to stay Libertarian, I quit. I’m going back to my roots. Where’s Professor Bernardo De La Paz Hanging his hat these days?? Maybe I’ff just pretend to love JEEEZUS, join the Republiturds, and stage a Pallas coup and make it over into a real party. But whatever it takes, Rosie ain’t getting a piece o’ me!!! RRRRRAAAALLLPPPHHHHH!!
This “Rick” gink sounds like someone who farts in the bath tub . . . then tries to bite the bubbles.
Ken Valentine - July 30, 2010
This “Rick” gink sounds like someone who farts in the bath tub . . . then tries to bite the bubbles.
ken- WHERE the hell did you come up with that line??? I snorted out a glass of milk when I read that with no warning.
I was telling Ken off-blog that when I was a little kid we used to use that as a definition of a “frilly-dilly” — someone who’d been circumcized with pinking shears. Of course in 3rd grade, I had no idea what that implied.
some years back a friend told a perfect one liner while I had a mouthful of hot coffee (drink coffee black, so not even heat loss from stirring in creamer and /or sugar). Looked like alien from V (1980’s version haven’t seen new series) trying to swallow coffee before I laughed so that coffee would not come out nose. Earned me several WTF stares.
Regarding the post about Rick and his whining about photos and guns - I carry a Colt .45 for self-defense. That gun is always within arm’s reach unless I’m at work (Firefighters don’t carry weapons). Anytime anybody whines about guns, even libertarians, it’s the same thing, just watered down - they don’t like guns, they don’t trust anyone with them, and they just want them to go away. Thank God the founders of this country knew better - a free society is an armed society!
(Firefighters don’t carry weapons)
Why not? During several riot incidents firefighters were targeted. Is it a municipal law or are folks afraid that ammunition will cook off from the heat?
I wonder what “Rick” would say if he accidentally found himself at http://olegvolk.net/gallery/technology/arms/ . I suppose he might have cardiac arrest… Talk about photos of people happily showing off their weapons. Not to mention photos explaining why they do, and why you and I should do likewise.
(Oleg does with pictures what Neil does with words.)
Mallorca Property For Sale…
Mallorca lies in the Mediterranean Sea off the south east coast of mainland Spain…