Imagine a world without arms. BY ABDUL AJI Just imagine a world without arms. “Imagine the world without guns" was a bumper sticker that began making the rounds after the murder of John Lennon on December 18, 1980. So let us try hard to imagine what a world without guns would look like. It is not hard to do. However, it is not a pretty picture. The way to get to a gun-free world, the gun prohibition groups says, is to pass laws banning them. We can begin by imagining the enactment of laws which ban all non-government possession of firearms. Laws affect mainly those willing to obey them. And where there's an unfulfilled need and money to be made, there's usually a way around the law. So let's imagine, instead, a nationwide gun ban, or maybe even a worldwide ban. Then again, to site an instance, heroin and cocaine have been illegal in most countries of the world, for nearly a century. Huge resources have been devoted to suppressing their production, sale, and use, and many innocent people have been sacrificed in the crossfire of the "drug war." Yet heroin and cocaine are readily available on the streets of almost all large cities of the world and at prices that today are lower than in previous decades. Perhaps a global prohibition law is not good enough. Maybe imposing the harshest penalty possible for violation of such a law will give it real teeth: mandatory life in prison for possession of a gun, or even for possession of a single bullet. A gun-free world is truly within our grasp and it is time to see what man hath to do. Let us take a look back at the kind of world our ancestors lived in. To say that life in the pre-gunpowder world was violent would be an understatement. Land travel, especially over long distances, was fraught with danger from murderers, robbers, and other criminals. There is an adage in Nigeria and other parts of Africa which says, “Gone were the days when men were men and women were owned by those who deserved them�. This refers to the world of bullies in the continent when there were no guns for the weak to defend them self at a distance. Most women couldn't protect themselves from rape, except by granting unlimited sexual access to one male in exchange for protection from other males. Back then, weapons depended on muscle power. Advances in weaponry primarily magnified the effect of muscle power. The stronger one is, the better one's prospects for fighting up close with an edged weapon like a sword or a knife, or at a distance with a bow or a javelin, both of which require strong arms. The superb ability of such old-fashioned edged weapons to inflict carnage on innocents was graphically demonstrated by the stabbing to death of eight second graders on June 8, 2001, by a former school clerk, Mamoru Takuma, in gun-free Osaka, Japan. A local example is the killing of innocent male students at a college in Yobe State. When it comes to muscle power, young men usually win over women, children and the elderly. It was warriors who dominated society in gun-free feudal Europe, Africa and other worlds. A weak man usually had to resign himself
to settle on a life of toil and obedience in exchange for a place within the castle walls when evil was afoot. What of the women? According to the custom of jus primae noctis, a supposed legal right in medieval Europe, and elsewhere, allowing feudal lords to have sexual relations with subordinate women on their wedding night. A lord had the right to sleep with the bride of a newly married peasant on the first night, a necessary price for the commoner to pay, in exchange for the promise of safety and security. Does that ring a bell? Not uncommonly. This arrangement did not end with the wedding night, since one's lord had the practical power to take any woman, any time. Regardless of whether jus primae noctis was formally observed in a region, rich, strong men had little besides their conscience to stop them from having their way with women who were not protected by another wealthy strongman. But there's yet another problem with imagining gunpowder out of existence: We can get rid of firearms, but we cannot get rid of guns. With the advent of the blow gun some 40,000 years ago, man discovered the efficacy of a tube for concentrating air power and aiming a missile, making the eventual appearance of air-guns inevitable. So gunpowder or no gunpowder, all we have been doing, thus far, amounts to quibbling over the means for propelling something out of a tube. Air-guns date back to somewhere around the beginning of the 17th century. Before the advent of self-contained powder cartridge guns, air-guns were considered serious weapons. In fact, three hundred years ago, air-powered guns were among the most powerful and accurate large-bore rifles around. While their biggest disadvantages were cost and intricacy of manufacture, they were more dependable and could be fired more rapidly than firearms of the same period. Air-gun was carried by Lewis and Clark on their historic expedition, and used successfully for taking game just as locally made and used by African hunters till this day. Air-guns even saw duty in military engagements more than 200 years ago. Today, fully automatic M-16-style air-guns are a reality. It was only because of greater cost relative to powder guns, and the greater convenience afforded by powder arms, that air-gun technology was never pushed to its lethal limits. Other non-powder weapon systems have competed for man's attention, as well. The 20th century was the bloodiest century in the history of mankind. And while firearms were used for killing, for example, with machine guns arranged to create interlocking fields of fire in the trench warfare of World War I, they were hardly essential. By far, the greatest number of deliberate killings occurred during the genocides and demo-cides perpetrated by governments against disarmed populations. To imagine a world with no guns is to imagine a world in which the strong rule the weak, in which women are dominated by men, and in which minorities are easily abused or mass-murdered by majorities. Practically speaking, a firearm is the only weapon that allows a weaker person to defend himself from a larger, stronger group of attackers, and to do so at a distance. As George Orwell observed, a weapon like a rifle "gives claws to the weak."
The failure of imagination among people who yearn for a gun-free world is their naive assumption that getting rid of claws will get rid of the desire to dominate and kill. They fail to acknowledge the undeniable fact that when the weak are deprived of claws or firearms, the strong will have access to other weapons, including sheer muscle power. A gun-free world would be much more dangerous for women, and much safer for brutes and tyrants. The one society in history that successfully gave up firearms was Japan in the 17th century, as detailed in Noel Perrin's superb book: Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword 1543-1879. An isolated island with a totalitarian dictatorship, Japan was able to get rid of the guns. Historian Stephen Turnbull in his book, The Samurai: a Military History, summarizes the result: “The dictator Hidéyoshi's resources were such that the edict was carried out to the letter. The growing social mobility of peasants was thus flung suddenly into reverse. The warrior-monks, became figures of the past. Hidéyoshi had deprived the peasants of their weapons. Iéyasu, the next ruler, now began to deprive them of their self respect. If a peasant offended a samurai he might be cut down on the spot by the samurai's sword. The inferior status of the peasantry having been affirmed by civil disarmament, the Samurai enjoyed kiri-sute gomen, permission to kill and depart. Any disrespectful member of the lower class could be executed by a Samurai's sword. The Japanese disarmament laws helped mold the culture of submission to authority which facilitated Japan's domination by an imperialist military dictatorship in the 1930s, which led the nation into a disastrous world war. In short, Japan, the one country that created a truly gun-free society created a society of harsh class oppression, in which the strongmen of the upper class could kill the lower classes with impunity. When a racist, militarist, imperialist government took power, there was no effective means of resistance. The gunfree world of Japan turned into just the opposite of the gentle, egalitarian utopia of John Lennon's song "Imagine." Instead of imagining a world without a particular technology, what about imagining a world in which the human heart grows gentler, and people treat each other decently? This is part of the vision of many of the world's great religions. Although we have a long way to go, there is no denying that hundreds of millions of lives have changed for the better because people came to believe what these religions teach. If a truly peaceful world is attainable or, even if unattainable, worth striving for, there is nothing to be gained from the futile attempt to eliminate all guns. A more worthwhile result can flow from the changing of human hearts, one soul at a time.