What is a Pacifist 2?

Posted on April 6, 2003 in Peace

“I’m a pacifist,” an NRA enthusiast once told me. “That’s why I carry a gun.” He’d just finished calling me “one of those people” when I described to him my activities in former Yugoslavia. I felt like an earwig in a pest exterminator’s brochure.

Your standard “how to win people over” guide would advise me to somehow not position myself “against” this fellow. But how can it be done when the topic is so narrow as “what is and isn’t a pacifist?” It seems to me that to find a middle ground means to give up my conscience entirely and, worse, to allow for pollution of the language where clarity is so desperately needed.

Sometimes there just isn’t a middle ground. Sometimes the only truthful response is “No. You’re wrong.” Pacifists don’t carry guns for self defense. The overwhelming majority will not do it for sport. (I can count the number of gun-owning pacifists that I know on two fingers and neither of them keeps the gun for self defense. On the contrary, they lock them up so that nobody can get to them in a hurry. There’s not much you can do, under normal circumstances, with a .22 target shooting pistol anyways.) Pacifists make stands every day against the paranoia which goes well past simple necessities such as locking your doors at night and, maybe, installing a burglar alarm system in your house. A pacifist is no coward: he/she does not keep a gun as a kind of security blanket. He or she sleeps soundly because he/she trusts her or his neighbors.

No one who keeps a gun for self defense or worse — active rebellion against the People of the United States as many extrajudicial militia members do — can call her or himself a pacifist. It’s like saying that promiscuity is chastity. The only way for the one to become the other is to end the lifestyle and the frame of mind that defines the difference.

To seek a “middle ground” where the meaning of words are concerned is to discard a valuable, sensible judgement. Let us not allow our desire to please everyone to lead us to stands that erase the good we’re seeking to achieve.