What is safety?
The question that is the title of this article may seem to have an obvious answer. Safety is the absence of risk, a protection against failure or error, an invulnerability to contrariness. That may be a good definition for the word, but if so, does safety exist?
My M1911A0.5 has both a grip and thumb safety, the former being depressed when the pistol is held properly, and the latter serving as a convenient rest for my big digit. Both are designed to lock the action when they are in operation, and yet, I still follow Jeff Cooper’s Four Rules, since both safeties can be disengaged through interactions with objects other than my hands. Such devices or the heavy trigger weight of a double-action handgun, the dingus on triggers like a Glock’s that are the equivalent of putting the parking brake release on the gas pedal, and any other gadget called a safety are mechanisms that reduce the likelihood of something undesired happening. They are called safeties for the sake of verbal convenience, but impeders of negligence and misadventure would be more accurate.
What is true about firearms is true in all of life. There is an idiot who will vex the designer of every idiot-proof device ever made. Every machine, plan, and intention comes with various failure modes, many of which are unknown to the person who came up with and the person who employs the object in question. And that addresses only people with the best of wishes. Agents of wickedness weave in whole new layers of potential bad ends.
These thoughts have come to me as I have been following the news regarding the products of Liberty Safe, a company well known to gun owners and probably to any visitor of a big box outdoorsish store. The safes made by Liberty, we all have learned, came with a cheat code that the company could use to get inside, ostensibly for the purpose of saving customers a good deal of expense if they forgot their personal combinations. Liberty was presented a warrant to be executed against one of their customers and gave this means of entry to the FBI, drawing the ire of many owners and of the various heads that talk to the gun community. The company has since promised to delete the secret code from their records if a customer requests that to be done—on the understanding that calling customer service will no longer be all that helpful if said buyers need to be rescued—and how much this promise can be trusted is anyone’s guess.
But here again, I have to ask, what is a safe? The name for the storage device is a misnomer, a mere convenience that alas fools a lot of users. The reality is that no such box is secure against anyone with enough time and the right destructive tools to get inside. Law enforcement agents with warrants are a prime example here. What Liberty Safe did was to save the FBI the necessity of bringing in an angle grinder or similar and removing the front of the container.
The purpose of a safe of this sort is to delay entry, be it a fire or an illegal home invader or the like that wants access to the contents. Someone intent on burglary wishes to get in, get done, get out, and get on. A safe makes the second of those more difficult. Such a device also limits successful theft to competent operators—i.e., such people as have acquired the skills of defeating safes. For those for whom “safe” creates pleasant feelings, be it noted that one’s adolescent children may have acquired these skills in much the same way as they are the ones who set up parental controls on electronic gadgets for their not-so-savvy guardians.
The reality is that no physical object meets a platonic ideal of safety. Any material thing can be taken by someone who has a sufficient desire for it. The only question is how many obstacles its rightful owner is willing to put in between would be takers and their beloveds, which is to say, how inconvenient it will be for everyone, the proper owner included, to get at the thing.
What the revelation about Liberty Safe should do is to alert us all to the problem of privacy in the modern era. Many people have accepted that all of our devices from the obvious such as computers and cell phones to the ridiculous—Internet-connected coffee makers, for example—are fire hoses of data about their lives. And it is well past time that we all push back against this trend.
As I suggested above, there is no such thing as safety in the ideal sense, but this does not mean that we have to make access easy for anyone who wants it. Government agents will cut open a gun safe if they are so ordered, but we do not have to decide to have safes with manufacturer’s combinations at the ready. We can use cell phones that are not like submissive dogs. We can have computer operating systems that are not shoveling information about our every activity to Apple or Microsoft for distribution to anyone with the money to buy it. It is possible, in other words, to move much farther along the curve toward the asymptote of safety.
The good news is that once we are alert to the risks, improving our degrees of safety is not all that difficult, and the awareness that we gain makes us sensitive to any remaining vulnerabilities.