Ragnaar is screaming

Here's an excerpt of Mark Steyn's latest at NRO. Before getting to it, though, a word about the pirates, who have now taken a second American vessel, this time a tugboat with 16 people on board. 

I was not aware that merchant ships, due to one treaty or another, have been completely unarmed for some time. This seems rather, um, insane to me, chugging across the Indian or the Pacific with millions of dollars worth of merchandise without a couple of guns, or, I dunno, bazookas. If you want to know the dangers of bad people knowing you are unarmed, you need only to witness the Great Pirate Outbreak of '08-'09. Small vessels carrying savages from a third-world hell-hole are taking over massive ships using, you guessed it, guns. 

The lesson isn't difficult. People with guns, no matter how unrefined, uncivilized and disenfranchised, tell people who don't have guns what to do. This is zero sum. As The Dear Leader dreams of a world without nukes, those of us who are not categorically batshit recognize that nukes did not exist when Adolf Hitler came to power, but it took only two of them to make the Empire of Japan rethink its position. The People's Republic of Korea and Iran certainly seem to understand the joys of nukes, as they are both moving as quickly as possible to get them. 

Weapons keep dishonest people honest, and the absence of guns in the hands of some but not others orders a two-class system: those who prey, and those upon whom they prey. It's quite simple. 

Now, from Steyn:

As it happens, Somali piracy is not a distraction, but a glimpse of the world the day after tomorrow. In my book America Alone, I quote Robert D. Kaplan referring to the lawless fringes of the map as “Indian Territory.” It’s a droll jest but a misleading one, since the very phrase presumes that the badlands will one day be brought within the bounds of the ordered world. In fact, a lot of today’s badlands were relatively ordered not so long ago, and many of them are getting badder and badder by the day. Half a century back, Somaliland was a couple of sleepy colonies, British and Italian, poor but functioning. Then it became a state, and then a failed state, and now the husk of a nation is a convenient squat from which to make mischief. According to Chatham House in London, Somali pirates made about $30 million in ransom and booty last year. Thirty mil goes a long way in Somalia, making piracy a very attractive proposition.