I have never been to Iran. And this is not about politics.
I don’t care who won the election (well, I do, but let’s face it, it’s a choice between the less worse in quality A, and the less worse in quality B.) But let’s be honest — statistically speaking, it’s all extremely dodgy, and as a result, kids and students are being bludgeoned, shot and kidnapped in Iran. Kids who are more politically engaged than most of their peers in Western countries, and who, at this point, probably just want to surf the websites they want and hold hands in public without some bearded cretin berating or even arresting them for it. I really hate stifling censorship, and all noise about democracy aside, stifling people is really sort of what this is about.
So, here’s my universal anti-tyranny solution for Darfur, Belarus, Afghanistan, Iran, Rwanda (15 years late), and any other shithole, with apologies to the Iranians, where the rule of law has broken down, and/or where some gang of thugs wants to keep down a significant portion of the people. Let’s take a page from the playbook of the World War II Office of Strategic Services on how to let the average Joe deal with occupiers or oppressors without hugely complex infrastructure, organization or logistics — give him cheap and disposable guns.
I can sort of see why you wouldn’t want to see the streets of functioning countries flooded with guns, although I am pretty sure the overall impact of an informed, armed citizenry would be vastly more positive than the horror scenario most gun-banners make it out to be. But when club-wielding paramilitaries on motorcycles maim and kill political protesters, most of the aspects governing a “functioning country” fly out the window.
Guns, for better or worse, are the great equalizer. They are what put paid to the landed knights of feudal Europe, when a handcannon-armed peasant could unmount an armored horseman at fifty paces. Guns allowed disorganized American revolutionaries to constitute a credible threat to vastly better-trained British infantry until sufficient numbers of French money and German officers could be imported to knock together a proper fighting force, and guns enabled heroic Poles to put up a credible fight against vastly superior Nazi forces before being crushed thanks to Soviet treachery. In short, a man with a gun is much closer in power to another man armed with pretty much anything, than a man without a gun is to another man armed with pretty much anything.
As such, I propose the following:
Instead of dumping uncounted trillions of dollars, euros and yen into peacekeeping or nation-building projects, the stable democracies of the West should invest in the purchase of millions of cheap Chinese-made copies of snubnose Colt Cobra revolvers, chambered at .38 Special. Duct-tape several reloads worth of ammo to each one, and wrap it in a laminated pictographic set of usage instructions. Then, airdrop them by the hundreds of thousands, each hanging by its own little parachute, over troubled areas.
These pistols’ compact size and low recoil make them ideal for civilians to hide and wield, and their limited range and low-powered ammunition, while completely sufficient against fanatics with machetes, make them unlikely to ever constitute much of a credible and organized military threat.
While crime rates might initially rise a bit, they would plummet the moment everyone realizes that everyone else is likely to be packing heat — we’ve already established that a gun-wielding individual is more equal in power to, say, a rifle-armed opponent than an unarmed citizen is to a club-swinging paramilitary thug.
I can’t see a downside to this idea — the first Afghan girl who puts a hole in some rejected 50-year-old suitor who tried to blind her with acid out of revenge for turning down his advances, the first Kenyan “witch” who blows away jealous neighbors trying to burn her for supposedly possessing the local cattle, the first Darfuri herdsman who sends a raiding Janjaweed horseman to his great reward, and the first Iranian student who takes out a Basiji sniper, each would send a message in their own way that you can’t beat down someone who not only has the will, but also the means, to fight back against the local schoolyard bully.