Surely the People are Sheep

The people are but sheep. They graze on catch-words, and they go to their slaughter.

~R. A. Lafferty

The other day, I had the misfortune to be entrapped in a conversation I really did not want to be a part of, revolving around the need for USians to have more guns.  As is usual in such conversations, the reasoning for guns was entirely based on fearmongering.  The reason this conversation stood out rather than being the one I'd heard many times before was that my interlocutor maintained that the U.S. is full of sheep at the mercy of armed wolves; the US is the only country in the world in which people don't know how to defend themselves.   Look at those children who are not subject to corporal punishment and never learn to fight back!  

I mentioned most of Europe, as an excellent example of a place where most people don't have guns and yet somehow are not typically subject to mass shootings and made my escape.  I didn't really want to discuss the corporal punishment thing, since I'm not sure what exactly to say.  Back in the 1800s, when it was legal to beat children a lot in school and in other places, there are recorded incidents of children bringing guns to school and retaliating against the corporal punishment from their teachers by shooting them.  Would that be considered by this person speaking to me a non-sheeplike and therefore good thing, as it is teaching children to fight back?   I know there is a school of thought, though the only names I associate with it are those of James Dobson and Michael Pearl, that says that bullying is good because children will naturally form a hierarchy and should learn to be strong in that hierarchy.  I tend to regard this school of thought as barbarity.  And at the end of the day, is this proclaimer of the sheepiness of the U.S. really going so far as to advocate that we arm children?  When Africans do that we call it an outrage and an atrocity, and besides which, it just never ends very well.     

As far as just asserting sheepiness of people who aren't us in general, well, I think XKCD can retort better than I.  

Alan Turing discusses a polite convention in which, although we cannot ever fully know such to be true, we yet assume and act on the assumption that other people think the way we do.  I vote for extending this to a polite convention in which we assume other people both think and aren't sheep.