cjh@csin.UUCP (Chip Hitchcock) (10/04/84)
This is a delusion that Heinlein is very fond of---that an armed society is a polite society. In practice, of course, such a society readily stratifies; you are polite to anyone who could be as good as you are, obsequious to those certainly better, and brusque (at best) with those worse than you (for "good", read "good at the popular weapons form"). Shakespeare catches this perfectly in the swaggering bravos of ROMEO AND JULIET, and Heinlein himself half-admitted it in BEYOND THIS HORIZON, the first of his works to deal with an armed society.