Postscript to a not very small thing

What with one thing and another, I never got to comment on the AK-47 fiasco last week. But better late than never, if only to give some perspective to it.

It’s not as trivial as it seems, the sort of thing to dismiss with a joke or two. Or treat as just “one of those things.” There are several things wrong with it.

One is Ronald Llamas’ justification of having an assault rifle in his car because he needs to protect himself. He says he has been getting death threats of late, the kind that might not be dismissed with a joke or two.

Well, at the very least death threats are part of the territory. You become a public official, you learn to live—or die—with death threats. If death threats were a justification for public officials to arm themselves to the teeth, we will have a veritable moving armory plying the streets. The bigger the threat, the bigger the arms. You push that logic to absurd lengths, which are the lengths logic gets to be pushed in these parts, you will have public officials, civilian or military, stashing grenade throwers in their cars. You will have an arms race in the streets.

I said much the same thing some years ago when the journalists were proposing to be allowed to carry arms in public places to defend themselves. In their case, they were not just being threatened, they were being killed. Rather plentifully in the last years of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s rule, which included the tribe that perished in the Maguindanao massacre. If public officials may be allowed to carry assault weapons to protect themselves on the basis of mere threats, why may journalists not be allowed to do so on the basis of a grim history of a pile of their dead?

At the very least, I said, the problem with that solution was that it didn’t solve problems at all, it only created more of them. If people really want to kill you, there’s really precious little you can do. They are not going to engage you in a firefight, they are going to shoot you in the back. The way they did in Rolly Kintanar, who was one of the most wary or well-armed or well-secured, of men. The better protection in fact is not arms, it is integrity. Take it from “The Godfather”: The Corleone family decided to assassinate a cop (an action bound to invite certain retribution from the authorities), only because he was hugely corrupt, which precluded getting him public sympathy, and which precluded unforgiving retribution from the force. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s a better bet.

At the very most, I said, maybe it could protect the journalists from their enemies, but who would protect the public from the journalists? You arm the journalists, you make them predator instead of prey. The notion that they are naturally responsible individuals who will not be prone to abuse is the same notion that government officials are naturally responsible individuals who are not prone to abuse. The opposite is probably true. Most of them are naturally irresponsible individuals who like to flaunt power. You give them guns, heaven help the rest of us.

Two is that it sends the wrong message to the public. At the very least again, it undercuts P-Noy’s gesture of banning wang-wangs. Which do you think the public is more likely to mind, or be more fearful of: the sight of SUVs barreling down a busy street with sirens blaring and shoving every one out of their path or the belief that the same SUVs (by itself already a statement) that carry the plate numbers “6,” “7” and “8” contain an arsenal in them? Arguably, the wang-wangs are far more conspicuous and obtrusive. But assault rifles are far deadlier. In any case, the accident that befell Llamas’ car—an accident waiting to happen, unless you are prepared to believe that his new Montero just happened to have an AK-47 on the very day it figured in an accident—turns suspicion into knowledge. Which will make you move aside with more fearful alacrity—wang-wangs or AK-47s?

At the very most, it conjures an image of a different set of boys with toys. Except that the toys are not cars or computers, they are guns. I’ve always subscribed to Nandy Pacheco’s favorite campaign because the proliferation of guns in this country is alarming. That won’t be curbed by the top officials themselves showing a fetish for them. It’s not true at all that guns do not kill, people do. Guns do kill, and nowhere is that more in evidence than in the mounting number of campus slaughter in the United States, as documented by Michael Moore in “Bowling for Columbine.” Guns are a culture, and culture does things to people. That culture bathes in the waters of machismo, a blight we have here, a culture that says gun-wielders are tough and peacemakers soft. In fact, at its core, toughness is moral, not feral. I’ll bet Pacheco is far tougher than any of the Malacañang denizens who like to show off their prowess at the firing range.

And finally, well, I remember what a friend used to say, which was that he always wore a good brief every time he stepped out of the house. Can you imagine, he said, if you had an accident and they brought you to a hospital and the nurses discovered you wore a purple brief with holes in it? Being caught with an Armalite in your car is its equivalent. Wouldn’t it have been another thing entirely if Llamas’ car had yielded a Kindle or two, or even an iPad, and/or a bunch of the more traditional printed books to boot? Wouldn’t that have done wonders for the image of public officials? Wouldn’t that have boosted the P-Noy government to lofty heights? Which would you rather have P-Noy’s boys doing:

Improving their aim or improving their mind?