What America’s Love Affair with Guns Says About Us

There are people who believe that an armed society is a safer and therefore better society.

One can argue about the meaning of “better.” But there can be no equivocation on the word “safer,” and anyone with a 4th grade command of mathematics and access to the graph below can explain that.

The author of the meme here is making a more subtle point.  If the level of courtesy I display to those around me is a function of the fact that I can shoot him to death if he does something that annoys me, and he can do the same to me, is it at all correct to say that either one of us is “polite?”

If our only claim to calling ourselves civilized is our capacity and willingness to kill one another, the precise opposite is closer: we are both savages.