The price of security
Reality is complex. Does this need to be explained to my readers? Surely not, but I have spent most of my life trying to get people around me to understand that “goddidit” does not sufficiently explain the universe, that the English language is a combination of French spelling and German grammar and will thus not be impressed with complaints about how obstinately tedious it can seem, and that Google maps is not the territory.
What reality does not have to be is complicated. “Complex” and “complicated” may sound like synonyms, but I tend to separate them this way: Both describe things that are difficult, but a complicated situation or system is so as the result of poor planning, inattention, or incompetence. A Breguet Repeater is a complex mechanism; filling one’s schedule with a lot of meaningless activities that must be completed in sequence is complication. The portraits of John Singer Sargent are deceptively simple, while yielding meaning upon study; setting up a family photograph is often an exercise in hiding messes. The Bill of Rights says what it means; attempts at getting around it are the envy of a Byzantine lawyer.
One of the signs that organisms are not intelligently designed is that they are complicated. A genius at engineering or architecture would not run the single support column of a bipedal animal up one outer rim and project vital parts away at right angles. And even an apprentice in those fields would, it is to be hoped, no better than to run food and air intake through the same passage. When, by contrast, self-replicating systems make copies of themselves with near but not total fidelity, those copies surviving differentially on the basis of how they perform in their given environments, all with no plan, the results are what would be called “jury-rigged” in human productions.
And we humans do love to complicate things. As the saying goes, why make things difficult when with a little more effort, we can make them impossible? Why fill out a form on a webpage if we must also print out a screenshot and keep a personal record book whose pages we have to copy, the paperwork having to be filed in the same office that gets e-mailed the on-line form? Why take a property tax document to one desk to be stamped, only to have to carry said document ten feet to the left to pay? One answer is that some small minds measure accomplishment by the number of steps that must be completed in a process.
But that is not the only answer. Want healthcare in the United States? Want to visit a country that requires months to get a visa? Want a user manual for an iPhone? Well, too bad. If such things and many more were easy, everyone would get or do them.
The explanation that goes beyond the bureaucrat’s love of flow charts is that many of us are not supposed to make the journey through to the desired result. For a few, there are loopholes and cheat codes. For the rest, the obstructions are the point.
Take the example of former New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who took multiple New York Police Department officers with him as his private security after he left office, bodyguards who even go with him to his property in Bermuda, an archipelago whose violent crime tends to follow the Big Apple’s pattern: conflicts between gangs, robberies of lone tourists, and some drug dealing in the parts of town that Bloomberg is unlikely to visit.
But woe betide any ordinary New Yorker who wants to get a carry license and actually use it, even after the Bruen decision.
“Rules for thee, but not for me” is the common reply, but that is not precisely accurate. The rules are often the same for everyone. It is just that a few can hire assistants to get the paperwork done. Or, as Anatole France put it, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”
And this is how gun control works. The rules are the same for all economic and social classes. Rich and poor alike are free to hire armed guards whose companies secure licenses from the government. Both are free to come up with the funds to live in protected communities, and both have the right to lawyers to defend them if the security measures incur some legal liability. Who could ever possibly need personal weapons under such circumstances?
Security, as with so much else in life, is complex. It is best arranged in layers—call this defense in depth—and people with many means can have as good a defensive posture as is available. But also as with so much, security ought not to be needlessly complicated, especially not made so by laws designed to keep ordinary people in our place.