The Necropolitan Sentinel

The best reason to own a gun is so you don't have to fire it. That's different from using it, an act which ideally entails merely showing it to a brute in order to sap his nasty yet fragile bravery. You'll be safe but probably not on the news. There are all sorts of insurance benefits cashed by people without the general public noticing or even the beneficiary realizing. But we should appreciate the keister-paining steps we take not to waste time and resources but to make life clandestinely tolerable.

What's left unseen are bad things that never happened. Unnoticed wonderfulness has not been a hallmark of the current administration, which offers no benefits either tangible or abstract. In a presidency where we're halfway through expecting bad news, we can sustain ourselves by remembering a time when preventative measures led to a lack of negative results. We will just need to try to appreciate it more next time that we're joyously experiencing nothing.

Prevention is tough to qualify, but that shouldn't lead to the end of manning the anti-demon barricades. For one, it may just be faulty reasoning to that that, since nobody has broken into your house, you may as well stop locking the door. It couldn't be that the safety measures are precisely what keeps your flat screen safely in your living room.

As for a broader perimeter, cutting Pentagon spending because we haven't been attacked recently would be an example of false economy, especially considering how we've recently walked away from two wars instead of winning them. Slashing and sequestering is a great bargain until our enemies realize we let the alarm monitoring subscription lapse.

No matter how vast the scale, the goal should be to keep bad guys confused. Specifically, right-to-carry keeps everyone safer, including those who don't exercise said carrying right. Criminals are skilled at making very basic economic calculations, and they are much less likely to take out a felony against you if they know you might possess the capacity to shoot back. Assault rates drop without confrontations if potential targets are potentially armed, but try measuring the crimes that didn't happen.

There's no need to TSA our schools: we could make classrooms safer without issuing every single teacher a holster. They don't necessarily have to carry guns as long as they're allowed to do so. Potential monsters can be spooked by knowing they might face return fire from behind the biggest desk. As for a more regular benefit, mouthy delinquents might reform themselves if they think teachers could be holding more than chalk.

Widespread heat-packing keeps our government in line, too, although those who are scared of bang boom guns refuse to accept the possibility that the government could ever act not nicely. There has never been an American tyranny, so why do we need the Second Amendment? In the woeful way of theirs, they miss how the government has never gone full bully precisely because there's a Second Amendment. All of life may not a coincidence.

There's no need to revolt against a government that knows the populace is not only armed but loves shooting bowling pins, delicious animals, and bad people. The right to bear arms implies that our system trusts those who are really in charge, namely the people. And that's why liberals hate it.

It's hard to calculate what never happens, especially for a government that can't even calculate how a tax hike will mean less money in the till. On a related note, we'll realize how lucky we are that there are so many fantastically wealthy Americans when there are fewer of them. Raising taxes as a punishment for success will make regular schlubs appreciate having lived among spenders and employers. Of course, by then the river's source will have run dry, but at least we can remember what it was like to not be thirsty.

The primates in question are quite responsive to negative incentives. Even the naughty-minded know better: letting the virtuous arm themselves is a sort of reverse Russian roulette where hoods have to fear that accosting any random possible victim could lead to a loaded trigger pull. With the costs of conventional stealing so high, hoodlums are forced into lives as union leaders.

A good president would be the proverbial never-thanked guy who kept the dog from barking before it started. So let's find one during this second rotten term. Taking a few years to select a candidate who we don't even notice is doing good can serve as a coping mechanism. For these next trying four years, we don't have to worry about the president failing to get credit for things going well.

Humans are more likely to write a complaint letter than a compliment. The expectation is for smoothness. Things are going well when we're not noticing how things are going. At worst, we should work to establish the kind of world that begets ingrates.

Anthony Bialy is a writer and “Red Eye” conservative in New York City. Follow him at http://twitter.com/AnthonyBialy. Download a free ebook of his 2012 columns at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/270599.

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