Many Thousands of People Will Die

Put a gun on the table in the first act, someone has to get shot in the second.

That’s a dramatic principle called Chekhov’s Gun. In its simplest form, it means that anything written into a story must be there for a reason. I’ve come to see it as a basic rule of humanity as well: Available tools will always be used. As inherently curious creatures, we will never be able to not use something that we have access to. Think of it personal terms — your eating habits. If you fill your pantry with Doritos and Mountain Dew, you’ll probably eat Doritos and Mountain Dew. If you fill it with healthy, real food, you’ll have a much better chance at eating healthy food.

We heard a lot about Weapons of Mass Destruction in the 2000’s. Our media and politicians demonized Saddam Hussein for creating and stockpiling weapons. Somehow, astonishingly, the citizens of this country didn’t flinch when we used our own weapons to invade the sovereign nation of Iraq to find them.

We have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of weapons. We own the largest arsenal of deadly weapons in history. Drones, assault rifles, explosives. And just like Mike Tyson’s fists, our soldiers are also deadly weapons. As if those aren’t enough, we are building robots that can kill. Has nobody read past the first few pages of all the science fiction stories ever written about deadly robots? The Matrix and Terminator are leaving the screen and entering the world of the real.

So what should we expect in the future, in our second act, if we keep all of these weapons laying around in the first? Many thousands of people will die. Nobody will be surprised. War will always find us, and when it doesn’t for a while, we’ll make it ourselves.

There is a simple answer to this problem.

Stop making instruments of death. Stop building future murder weapons. There will always be bad guys, that is certain. But with a focus on strategic information, cultural and social programming, and preparation rather than blunt aggression, our society could destroy 99% of its weaponry and still be able to prevent attacks across the globe.

It’s not fair to single out the USA — we buy most of our ammunition from China anyway. This problem will require multinational agreement and cooperation. Just like nuclear de-armament. It’s been done, and should be done again. Drones, explosives, and assault weapons are the major culprits. Destroy those, and stop making more of them, and we’ll move towards peace.

Stop broadcasting bad fiction. Words matter. Ideas matter. To be more precise, ideas are the most powerful weapon we’ve ever created. They can spread quickly and widely throughout a society. They can be used to empower life, or inflict destruction.

Nobody wants to read books or watch a TV show about a bunch of happy people sitting around hugging each other. But, should we really be working so hard to invent new ways to kill people? It’s boring, and it’s fucking up our world.

Anything we can imagine can become reality. If enough people believe in something, that something will happen. It’s been proven over and over again in the history of storytelling. So why continue to write childish, violent-for-the-sake-of-violence stories? Television and film are the biggest culprits of this. I would urge all talented writers to consider their pen as the powerful tool it really is.