#range weapons

...You can imagine that comfort zone evolving over millions of years of human interaction; there’s logic behind it. Arm’s length is the threshold of physical contact, and the slightly longer distance is about where you’d be able to carry on a conversation without raising your voice. The perceived zone of safe interaction for most humans, then, seems to be one that discourages physical contact while still permitting us to communicate. That’s a good basic blueprint for safety. ... Range weapons, on the other hand, completely disrupt our evolved sense of what constitutes a safe distance from a potential enemy. And while this disruptive quality is precisely what makes them such effective weapons, it also makes them, in the long term, detrimental to our safety. What carrying a weapon can do, though, is inspire a false sense of power and security. It can make you conscious of your vastly extended range of lethality. And that may lead you to do really stupid things, because the bigger the space around you that you feel entitled to defend, the bigger the perimeter is that you must secure. It’s basic math: If I want people to stay six feet away from me, I have to police a circle with an area of 113 square feet and a circumference of 37 feet. If I decide to carry a 9mm Luger, designed to be lethal at 50 yards, I’m concerned about threats in an area of roughly an acre and a half, with a circumference of over 300 yards. That’s a hell of a lot of territory to defend. In other words, once you have a gun, you need a gun. Projected force may start out defensive in nature, but it can quickly become pre-emptive—or, in plainer terms, offensive. It’s almost inevitable, given the way range weapons re-frame safety and danger. And governments are even more susceptible to this offensive drift than individuals, which is why we as a nation now fight our wars almost exclusively at long range, doing the damage further and further away from where the generals sit. Our military relies on missiles, air strikes, and unmanned drones to kill people on the other side of the planet, which is a very tidy arrangement—for us. … But when we push our enemies out so far that we can’t communicate with or even see them, we cut off the possibility of anything other than conflict. And when we engage at such a distance that we risk no damage ourselves, we lose interest in things like prudence and self-control. Then it becomes very difficult to escape continued, escalating conflict. This is true whether you’re addressing global conflict or a pervasive culture of sexual violence: Long-range weapons are a short-term solution at best. If we want more lasting answers, we need a different kind of courage—one that doesn’t rely on our being safely out of range.