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This is the first in Somerset’s catalogue of bad ideas. In reality, wars were not run by riflemen. In the Franco-Prussian war, for example, victory was won by the army with inferior rifles but superior artillery and logistics. The myth spread anyway, and became personal — nobody pushed the rifleman around. If you had a perfect right to be somewhere, and somebody disputed that, you were entitled to take a stand — armed if need be. American states are currently putting this stand your ground philosophy into law, and people are getting needlessly killed as a result. “All of these killers are immune because each is standing his ground, or at least claims to be,” Somerset writes, in reference to real life cases of people shooting each other for no good reason. “And with no witnesses to tell us otherwise, the word of the survivor stands. You shoot a man and walk free, as long as you make sure he ends up dead and can’t tell his side of it.”

A short step conveys us from this stand your ground mentality to the myth of the Western hero — notably embodied by the beleaguered sheriff, Will Kane, in the movie High Noon. In this drama, Kane wipes out the bad guys, no thanks to the cowering citizenry. This represents a very potent bad idea, enacted many times over in movie, television and novel form — the lone warrior who must protect the otherwise defenceless, law-abiding folk.

To intensify the fantasy, its creators sound the deep note of paranoia. No streets are safe, no dwelling protected against vicious gangs, no stores free from armed robbers. Bad men lurk around every corner. The NRA therefore is right. You need to be packing heat because no one is going to protect you against all this concentrated menace — certainly not the police.