You’ve probably heard about the new bill in the Georgia legislature to allow concealed firearms everywhere from day-care centers to courthouses to college campuses. Maybe, it will get shot down again, but the strength of the concealed-carry advocates within the Republican majority is instructive.

They are pursuing a self-fulfilling prophecy. The world is a dangerous place because there are so many criminals and weirdos that everybody must be armed, that it’s a sanctity of life issue, affirmed by the head of the Southern Baptist Convention. The longer these ideologues rule our state, the further and faster we are pushed into becoming a society radically split between rich and poor, have and have-not. Slashing expenditures for public education while supporting private education with money siphoned from the state budget, refusing federal money to fund Medicare, fighting the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, criminalizing our Hispanic population, disenfranchising the poor, giving public money to corporations while cutting support for the unemployed: Thus is our state accelerated into being one where the majority grows more desperate while a minority grows richer and more fearful.

Their solution is to oppose using the government to push us toward more equality, to lessen the divisions between rich and poor. Instead, they exacerbate the gap, thus necessitating measures whereby the rich can protect themselves against the poor. Hence, their monomania that every good citizen must be armed, since sooner or later, at home or in church or at school, a bad person is bound to appear and attack and only if the good citizens are armed will they be able to survive.

Thus, though it may sound terrible to a liberal, our good, Christian, moral, rational conservatives are clear-eyed about the dangers and have the fortitude to take measures to protect us from the evil that lurks.

In other words, they know that Georgia is a dangerous world, because they are doing everything in their power to make it so. They are creating a world in which the only rational way to live is to go constantly armed against the growing desperation of the poor, just as no rational man would have gone unarmed at night into the streets of London during the Victorian period and no man would have walked unarmed through the woods here while the Creek Indians still roamed, before we succeeded in taking everything they had.

This is not just a question of the right to carry concealed firearms, it also concerns the growing need for gated communities, exclusive clubs and schools and churches. It means a closer and closer approximation to countries like Brazil, where the disparities of income are much greater than we have yet, and where the murder and violence rate is so high that the well-to-do live and work behind walls with bodyguards and venture out only in armored automobiles. At least there’s good news on that front. DuPont has recently developed a lightweight, less-expensive armor for automobiles, which it advertises thus:  “In many parts of the world, violence remains a daily threat for average citizens. In Brazil, the murder rate can reach 40,000 a year—enough to seriously concern middle-class families. Until recently, providing a family car with car armoring, including bullet-resistant panels and protective window layers, was a largely unrealized safety and protection dream. But not anymore.” 

There are no doubt many Georgians already riding in armored automobiles, perhaps even some legislators, and it can only be considered a growth industry here. It would be déclassé, though, for them to live in their cars, so they must be armed for all those moments of public exposure—walking their kids into kindergarten, meeting a friend for lunch, joining the congregation in prayer.

If you think that sounds weird, you are just behind the times. You don’t realize the level of desperation that surrounds us. Our Republican legislators and our governor do very much realize how sick our society has become, and they are determined to guard against the symptoms, instead of treating the disease.