Butterflies And Paradise

As calls for gun control sound once again, following another killing of innocents in a mythical “gun free zone,” I’d encourage you to read this short fable from James Thurber, The Butterfly, The Ladybug, And The Phoebe. The fable ends with a very useful moral for anyone who believes that passing more gun control laws will bring about the end of this sort of violence. It goes like this:

“She who goes unarmed in Paradise should first be sure that’s where she is.”

Do you live in Paradise? No, you don’t. None of us do. And we never will, at least not in this life. In this life, rightly or wrongly, there are somewhere around 400 million guns in the United States, and that is unlikely to change to any great degree, no matter what laws are passed.

This is the real world, and even if laws were passed tomorrow banning every gun in America, they will not just go away. I am not going to get into the logistics and complexities of why that is the case, but it is the plain and simple truth. You are not going to rid America of guns, and as such, you are not going to end armed attacks on the innocent. At best, you would simply create an even larger pool of disarmed victims for still-armed criminals to prey upon…think Minneapolis Catholic schoolkids times 300 million.

The only real choice you have, the only thing which is truly under your control is to decide how you will face the reality of a society which will always have armed violent criminals. You can choose to live in the real world and go armed and prepared to defend yourself and those you love, or you can be Thurber’s butterfly…flitting along in an imaginary Paradise.

If you read the fable, you know how that story ended.

Photo by Steve Creek.