Nerd Gun Love

So, regarding the guff blown off some American nerds regarding guns addressed in the previous post. Nerds love guns for many of the same reasons other Americans do.

But nerds have a special relationship with guns, too. Libertarian nerdfather Heinlein wrote that "An armed society is a polite society". It's easy to see the emotional appeal of a gun to a social pariah- it solicits through the threat of violence the respect most people achieve through social acceptance. For those who've had trouble figuring out or conforming to the subtleties of human interaction, the "polite society" of Heinlein's imaginings seems like Utopia(1).

(To others, living under the constant threat of death from those around you is a nightmare.)

Besides the dream of enforced civility, there is also the siren song of revenge. A gun obliterates the differences between us. Strength and size, charm and wit are all the same to a gun. Depending on your particular fantasy, there doesn't even have to be a quick-draw contest, only well-justified murder.

All this, however, forms the subtext of the issue. The most striking and obvious aspect of nerd gun love is in its appeal to reason.

Intelligence is the source of a nerd's self-esteem, almost by definition. This can sometimes lead to an ironic mistake- assuming that those who are most intelligent are also the most reasonable. Conflating intelligence with other virtues has always been the original nerd sin, despite having separate INT, WIS and CHA scores clearly marked on D&D character sheets.

Guns belong the hands of the nerd, supposes the nerd, because they don't act irrationally. Aren't intelligent decisions usually the right ones? And who's better equipped to make those decisions?

To be a nerd is, on one level, to be rejected for making logical (geeky) decisions instead of illogical (socially acceptable) ones. By the time they've become adults, most nerds have learned to stifle their negative emotions in the face of rejection and even violence.

As if the mind were a zero-sum game, with the intellect crowding out the emotions. The impulse to abuse power is only available to the powerful- the revolutionary turned dictator, the citizen turned sadist, patriots turned torturers.

The notion that intelligence acts as a restraint to savagery has been thoroughly debunked by history. Humans are bad people, and nerds are human. Cho Seung-Hui was probably mentally ill, and that's a different ball of wax. But this dork isn't, and neither is this one.

Violence is seductive.

1) This might also explain the peculiar love nerds have for military organizations in science fiction. The dream is of escaping the vague but urgent social demands of day-to-day existence for a more rigid, but explicit and comprehensible social order.