From Sophie's front desk — Wednesday, August 26
Al Jazeera — read the full story
You've seen this shape before: a tragic event igniting national debate on gun control measures. Australia's New South Wales state is launching a gun buyback program after the Bondi Beach attack, offering cash incentives for firearm surrender. Marcus Aurelius has the first word today, then Benjamin Franklin.
The knife does the killing. The state buys back the gun. You have seen this arithmetic before. After the Marcomannic raids, the prefect at Carnuntum ordered every farmstead within fifty miles to surrender spear and sax , not because the raiders carried Roman steel... but because a frightened populace with weapons turns on itself before it turns on the enemy. The buyback is not safety. It is the state purchasing deniability. When the next blade flashes in a shopping centre, the minister will say we removed the firearms. The ledger balances.
The dead remain dead. A weapon in a citizen's hand is a claim: I will decide when force is justified. The buyback is the state's answer: ... you will not. That is the whole of it. No moral geometry required. The cash incentive is the price of the claim. Some will sell. Some will bury.
The state knows this. It always has. The Danube legions did not disarm the Quadi by offering sesterces per spear , they burned the villages that kept them. Rome understood: monopoly on violence is not negotiated. It is enforced. The buyback is negotiation dressed as policy. You will find, Marcus, that the measure of a state is not what it buys back. It is what it permits to remain in the dark. Do not mistake the transaction for...
the truth.
nothing to do: if I were to give bail for one who has been condemned, and when my friend's goods were advertised for sale I were to give a bond to the effect that I would make restitution to the creditors, if, in order to save a proscribed person I myself run the risk of being pr…
sound that came in from the street below. Helen Hinckley knew at once the meaning of the sound, and said: “I must not delay longer telling you the object of my call.” As these two people (whose souls had sought each other through two other lives and failed utterly to find the oth…
others out of court, and put an end to them at once. II. It is a question whether a benefit can be taken away from one by force. Some say that it cannot, because it is not a thing, but an act. A gift is not the same as the act of giving, any more than a sailor is the same as the …
and if we observe this rule in every act, we shall undertake this act with more security. XXXIX. The measure of possession (property) is to every man the body, as the foot is of the shoe. If then you stand on this rule (the demands of the body), you will maintain the measure; but…
and if we observe this rule in every act, we shall undertake this act with more security. XXXIX. The measure of possession (property) is to every man the body, as the foot is of the shoe. If then you stand on this rule (the demands of the body), you will maintain the measure; but…
The prefect at Carnuntum did not ask twice. When farmsteads along the Danube buried their spears rather than surrender them, the cohort commander took hostages — one son per household — ... until the iron reappeared. Rome did not negotiate with buried steel. It excavated. The Australian state will not send legionaries door to door. It will wait. It will audit. It will make the buried weapon a crime that surfaces only when the next blade flashes and the serial number traces back to a name on the register. The buyback is the invitation. The register is the trap. You will find, Marcus, that the state's patience is not mercy. It is accounting. Do not mistake the delay for forgetting.
A just ruler enforces it through law, not spectacle. At Rome I sat the assizes myself — heard the provincial appeals, the property disputes, the capital cases — because the magistrate who delegates judgment delegates the monopoly. The legions on the Danube do not police; they secure the perimeter so the courts can function. When Avidius Cassius raised the East, I did not send assassins. I marched the army, offered pardon to his legions, let the Senate try the conspirators. Violence answered violence, but the law judged it. The sword serves the codex, not the reverse. You will find, Marcus, that the measure of enforcement is whether the weakest citizen sleeps without a bolt on his door. The rest is theater.
Courage is not the absence of tremor. It is the judgment that the tremor does not command. At Carnuntum I watched recruits freeze at the first horn blast , then watched the same men hold the line at the Danube when they had learned to distinguish the impression "death approaches" from the fact "my post is here." Epickteetus taught me: the tyrant threatens the body, not the will. You cultivate courage by practicing poverty, by fasting, by standing watch when others sleep , small surrenders of comfort that teach the ruling faculty it need not obey the flesh. The populace turns on itself because it believes safety is a good. It is not. Virtue is the only good. You will find, Marcus, that the man who has already rehearsed his own death in the tent at Aquileia does not flinch when the blade flashes in the forum. Train the judgment. The rest follows.
A gunsmith in my Junto once argued that a pistol in every pocket made for a polite society. I asked him whether the same logic would have us all carry lit matches into a powder magazine. He had no answer, though his apprentice snorted into his ale. The colony of New South Wales — a place I know only from Cook's charts and Banks's botanical letters — has declared a great purchasing of firearms from its own people. A massacre at a place called Bondi Beach was the spark. The government offers coin for every piece surrendered. November is the month appointed. Here is the shape beneath the news: a people who once turned their plowshares into swords now pay to have the swords melted back into plowshares.
They did this before, after Port Arthur in ninety-six. The repetition is the lesson. A society that must keep buying back its own peace has not... yet learned to keep it. I have seen this arithmetic in Philadelphia. The Assembly voted funds for the frontier forts after the Paxton boys rode in. Money for powder. Money for lead.
Money to bury the dead. Each purchase was a confession that the earlier economy — the one built on treaty and trade — ... had failed. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Poor Richard said it. The Australians are buying the cure by the pound. The young tradesman knows this: you do not wait for the roof to fall before you mend the timbers. You mend them because the storm is always coming.
may it not? A. Suppose a military force sent into America, they will find nobody in arms; what are they then to do? They cannot force a man to take stamps who chooses to do without them. They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one. [84] Q. If the act is not repealed,…
13: A ship from Baltimore at Cadiz reports Congress has reduced $200,000,000 in currency to a fortieth of its former value. Several warships from Lorient and Rochefort have arrived at Brest. Construction of a frigate has begun. (VII) St. Malo, June 15: Two British frigates are in…
Sir, Philadelphia, 27 January, 1748 I have not yet found the book, but suppose I shall to-morrow. The post goes out to-day, which allows me no time to look for it. We have a particular account from Boston of the guns there. They are in all thirty-nine, Spanish make and new; fifte…
papers. The parliament is up and the nation in a ferment with the new elections. Great complaints are made that the natural interests of country gentlemen in their neighbouring boroughs, is overborne by the monied interest of the new people who have got sudden fortunes in the Ind…
English subjects have suffered in Florida & Canada by a simular course of war; & may still again suffer, either there, or in the West Indies.— There are suspicions, however, that these late confiscations, are made chiefly as a substitute for taxes, which have only lately begun to…
Thomas Godfrey, our mathematician, observed that politeness born of fear is not politeness at all... but a species of slavery , and he proved it with a diagram on the tavern table. William Coleman, ever the merchant, calculated the cost of arming every householder versus the cost of a night watch; the watch won by three shillings a head. Joseph Breintnall said nothing, only tapped his pipe stem against the hearth until the silence grew heavier than any argument. The gunsmith, a man named Richardson who mended fowling pieces on Second Street, left the Junto within the month. I learned that a proposition survives not by the force of its logic... but by the company it keeps. The Junto taught me to test ideas against men who would not flatter me.
The story ran in Al Jazeera. A cash incentive gun buyback reflects a pragmatic approach to public safety, echoing historical responses to similar crises. That's Old News for today.