Neither Victims nor Executioners: The Pistol Problem

Albert Camus wrote "Neither Victims nor Executioners" in the aftermath of WWII, Europe was still in ruins and the Cold War had already emerged between the American and Soviet empires. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atomic war seemed the only alternative to a humane peace. A year before, as a veteran of the Resistance against the Nazis, he had written, "We are in a world in which we must choose too be either victim or executioner--there is no other choice" (p. 257). In late 1946, he saw both alternatives as unacceptably destructive. 

Implicit in his article is the Hegelian dialectic, the method of resolving contradictory opposites in a synthesis that preserves the essential aims of both. People in the 20th century, Camus wrote, had lost faith in the possibility of eliciting humane behavior by communicating with each other. Instead, inflexible ideologies on all sides justified cruelty for abstract good, real bloodshed for unreal expectations. The outcome was a century of fear: "A man who cannot be persuaded is a man who makes others afraid" (p. 258). Camus' synthesis, which he admits to be "utopian" but sees as the only real alternative (because the others destroy what they want to save), is mutual respect and good-faith negotiation instead of resorting to force. He asks two questions: "Yes or no, directly or indirectly, do you want to be killed or assaulted? Yes or no, directly or indirectly, do you want to kill or assault?" (p. 259) If you answer no to both of these, you must persist in looking for a nonviolent middle way that disarms fear with openness to persuasion.

Camus' call for conflict resolution doesn't deny that there will still be victims and executioners ("We're not that crazy"), but he challenges us to minimize cruelty by refusing to pre-cast ourselves in either role, especially since posing as executioners provokes fear in potential victims and invites them to become our executioners. A fearful victim is a would-be executioner. Choosing avoidably to be either one is a death-wish. What is a battlefield but a melee of executioner-victims? I see a particular application of Camus' challenge in the American practice of bearing arms--not the right, which is a separate issue, but in the casual decision to pack a pistol. The decision acts out a willingness to kill or assault and invites justified reprisal.

I recall a friend of mine in Kentucky who was DJ for a Christian radio station and directed children's theatre. His National Guard unit had been called up to serve in Iraq, where he had kicked in doors and heard IEDs explode. I have no idea if he "executed" anyone while going door-to-door with his squad. I hope not. In any case, he spent months cast in the executioner role, one trigger-pull away from terrified victims in a hostile land where he was terrified of becoming a victim himself. The stress must have been brutal, but he mentioned his service quietly, without apparent emotion, and I marveled at the equanimity with which he directed thirty teeming child actors. My friend seemed a mild-mannered fellow, well adjusted to civilian life.

Then, not long after I moved to Virginia, tragedy struck. I'll tell what I understand from news, emails, and Facebook. It started as an encounter between my friend in one car and a bailiff and his wife in another one, both driving west on Nashville Road through town. Maybe road rage was involved, maybe a fender bender. I never learned. In any case, the bailiff and his wife pulled off into a parking lot, and my friend pulled in close behind. The bailiff, an out-of-uniform court officer with no law enforcement powers on the street, approached my friend's car with a pistol in his hand. My friend opened his door, also holding a pistol. The bailiff kicked the door closed and shot through it repeatedly. While my friend bled, the bailiff called 911 and paced the lot, waving bystanders off with his gun and badge. My friend died in the ICU without gaining consciousness. The bailiff was not arrested. A grand jury declined to indict. Self defense.

It turned out that my friend's automatic didn't have a round chambered. Without a slow and obvious cocking movement, he carried a harmless stage prop, but the bailiff couldn't have known that. I guess my friend just wanted to look tough. In any case, a father and promising performer died aged twenty-seven because he posed as an executioner and another one beat him to the draw. It's inconceivable the bailiff would have shot if he'd seen empty hands. Personally, I'm mystified why anybody not, say, a gangster, law officer, or jewel merchant would pack for self-defense in Bowling Green. I lived there eighteen years, and I was even spoken to harshly only once. The wind blew my truck door open, it hit the adjacent car, and a buff dude--obviously already pissed about something--stormed up shouting curses. I just said, "Oh, I'm so sorry, sir," and carried on impersonating an embarrassed old coot--not a difficult act--until he drove away disgusted. Mission accomplished. Bowling Green ain't Vichy France. You're usually given a choice, and you're far less likely to be a victim if you decline to play executioner.

So why did a children's theatre director have a pistol in his car on Nashville road? A clue came on Facebook after he died. His wife posted that his young children were asking, "Who will protect us from bad guys now that Daddy's gone?" I grew up in a neighborhood where doors weren't locked until bedtime, where the farthest thing from my mind (and presumably my father's) was that lurking bad men were held at bay by his threat of violence. What a dark world to grow up in! Why would a father bequeath that to his children? The obvious answer is the imprint of combat, fear carried home like an incurable disease. I suppose my friend was carrying a gun because Iraq showed him what men could do to each other, that reflexes engrained there clicked when the armed bailiff came at him. I see my friend as an unregistered casualty of the war. An obsession with "bad guys" manufactures both victims and executioners--and, in many cases, the only difference between the two is which one is fastest on the draw.

Preparing for the worst and hoping for the best might seem a risk-free strategy if preparation weren't prophecy. Preparation predicts the worst. The loser in a nonlethal fight, say a shoving match over handicapped parking, pulls a gun, frightened because the winner is tall and black. An unarmed jogger, resists armed vigilantes. He's trying "to take the gun" (which he hasn't threatened to use, but the vigilante has), so he is shot. Shots are fired in a mall; a plainclothes "good guy" draws to pursue the shooter and is killed by police. Police are sworn to protect the Second Amendment--unless, of course, they get scared. Then even a suspicion of bearing arms, say, a cell phone, pellet gun, or a toy truck--even reaching into a pocket for identification--justifies shouting "gun, gun" and summary execution. Self-defense. All of this because people prepare to execute fellow citizens. A misdirected no-knock warrant simulates a home invasion, and, when the resident fires warning shots, police pour bullets into the dark, killing a woman in her bedclothes and barely missing a man in the next apartment. Prepare for self-defense with a gun, and any threat looks like a target. When the police train with APCs, wear body armor, move in formation, and carry long guns (even "non-lethal" but potentially deadly ones), a crowd of peaceful demonstrators looks like an army and soon begins to act like one.*

Executioners create victims who become executioners, driven by fear and despair whenever we answer yes to the question, "Yes or no, do you want to kill or assault?"

Of course, want is a tricky word. We all feel vulnerable from time to time. When I read of horrendous violence in the news, like a mass shooting or home invasion, even if it's a rare occurrence hundreds of miles away, my imagination makes it real and nearby. Even with my sheltered upbringing--my good fortune compared to my children's theatre friend--my heart races, and I imagine having made preparations, "neutralizing" the perpetrator with a pleasant sense of triumph. It's all in the stage of fantasy, all harmless--or very rarely it may be a reasonable call to action if the threat is probable and nearby, like COVID-19 or a tornado warning. But, almost always, when I have played out self-defense in my imagination, my fear and fantasized triumph are so many removes from the real world that arming myself there would be less than sane. If I did arm myself, I would be replicating in the world of real suffering my fantasized pleasure in homicide, entering the feedback loop of victim-executioner. I would be wanting.

For this reason, though I have a rack of air guns and enjoy seeing plastic soldiers jump and pill bottles crack, for years I didn't own a firearm. When I finally bought one, it was a plinker--a .22 cowboy pistol justified as a prop for a video--and I still keep it and my bullets (three: two more than Barney Fife) on separate floors of the house. Unless aimed carefully, it would merely irritate an assailant and would be suicidal in a gunfight. But even if I did own a Sig Saur, there's no way I'd pack it on the street. I don't understand folks who imagine they're good guys with guns. If good is settling disputes with the least damage, not to speak of bloodshed, avoiding the victim-executioner feedback loop, then the mere presence of a gun would make me, if not a bad guy, a less good one. I wouldn't be forced to listen to the other side of a conflict and deal with it flesh-to-flesh without metal tools. God knows, if I'd had a Sig when that dude charged me shouting obscenities over a bumped car door, I might have shown it. I might have been slower to play the contrite old coot, and what if he'd had a Glock and shot first? But even if I had shot first, it would be damned ugly--answering to the police and knowing he had left a widow and orphans.

Don't get me wrong. There are no guarantees. It takes faith to play the odds and respect human life. Maybe the next dude I grovel to will shoot me, but I'll take my chances. Of course, police have to carry guns in a nation where criminals do, and circumstances justify armed guards. If I lived deep in the country, I might keep a .12 gauge. But the shoot-from-the-hip romance of Wild West bang-bang-you're-dead, like the Rifleman who killed a bad guy every week with his trick Winchester, is toxic if imported into the peacetime real world--at least with anything stronger than a Daisy. As Camus tells us, fear destroys human dialogue, leaving us with only intolerable options.

* In the protests of the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown, "The presence of tactical officers with military-style uniforms, equipment, weapons, and armored vehicles produced a negative public reaction." Militarization "served to escalate rather than de-escalate the overall situation" (p. 124). Institute for Intergovernmental Research. 2015. After-Action Assessment of the Police Response to the August 2014 Demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri. COPS Office Critical Response Initiative.Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.

Source

Albert Camus. "Neither Victims nor Executioners" in Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947, edited by Jaqueline Levi-Valensi, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 256-276.