Mutually Assured Destruction

The news of the day was that the pro-handgun Virginia Citizens Defense League would soon demonstrate at Tech, and at some other state universities, for the right to carry concealed handguns on campus.

The gun-rights folks don't seem to be very welcome on the VA Tech campus, students, teachers and administrators all agree they don't want guns there. Nevertheless, the pro-gun crowd can't help themselves from pushing for what they think is right.

Their best argument is the deterrent one. Armed good guys on campus would make the students safer , because "evil-doers won't know whether their potential victims are armed. That will deter bad guys."

This is pretty much the same brutally cold thinking that led to the security doctrine known as Mutually Assured Destruction, a charmer whose fitting acronym is "MAD."

It posits that the more nuclear weapons the world has, the safer we are because there is less chance they will be used — otherwise, everybody dies.

That logic launched an arms race to build weapons of mass destruction for the stated purpose of never using them.

The hitch to it is that now, governments all over the world are frantically trying to keep those nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of suicidal terrorists who care little about game theory or logic.

Isn't that a wonderful analogy? Nuclear weapons were produced in excess for the legitimate reason of deterring others from using theirs.  Just so, we should arm as many good guys as possible, even on college campuses in order to deter the bad guys from using theirs. MAD madness, indeed.

The big difference is, thanks to the severe controls and restrictions placed upon the nuclear programs, these terrible weapons have been kept out of the terrorists' hands.  Not so with guns, I'm afraid.  Guns have been produced in excess and continually slip into the hands of criminals.

So, wherever the pro-gun crowd succeed in pushing their nonsense on people, the gun flow problem in exacerbated.  And not only the problem of more guns slipping into the criminal world, all the other ways guns get misused are increased too.  It's simple arithmetic.

What's your opinion?  Is the Mutually Assured Destruction theory a good one to apply to gun ownership and CCW proliferation?  Would that work in the long run?

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