Going Armed to a Protest: Risk Compensation and the Moral Asymmetry of Nonviolence
In the early 1900s, an elderly aristocratic man living in Russia was observing the rising tide of political unrest around him. He noticed that young dissidents, eager for change, were increasingly arming themselves against the government's police force. They believed that to protect themselves, and to be taken seriously, they needed weapons.
But the old man saw a fatal flaw in their logic. He began writing essays arguing a completely counterintuitive point: bringing a weapon to a standoff doesn't protect you; it makes you a target. He warned that the moment a dissident picks up a gun, they validate the tyrant’s use of violence. They trade their most powerful weapon—moral asymmetry—for a game they will ultimately lose.
His contemporaries thought he was hopelessly naive. But one of his essays found its way to a young, relatively unknown lawyer organizing protests in South Africa. The young lawyer read it, abandoned his initial thoughts of armed resistance, and went on to change the course of the 20th century.
The young lawyer was Mahatma Gandhi. The old man… was Leo Tolstoy.
Fast forward to January 2026, in Minneapolis. An ICU nurse named Alex Pretti was observing a federal immigration enforcement action. He was peacefully and lawfully carrying a concealed handgun. Tensions escalated, and tragically, Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents.
The incident has completely scrambled the modern political script. The Trump administration pointed to his gun as evidence of dangerous intent. Meanwhile, gun-control advocates like Giffords surprisingly rushed to defend Pretti's Second Amendment right to peaceful, armed assembly.
But both sides are missing the deeper, invisible dynamic at play—the very same dynamic Tolstoy tried to warn us about.
I explore this in my latest piece for the Firearms Research Center's Forum, titled "Going Armed to a Protest." As a pacifist, I look at the practical and moral pitfalls of bringing guns to demonstrations, and I found that modern behavioral science actually backs up that old Russian novelist.
Behavioral scientists call it “risk compensation” or the Peltzman effect. It’s the phenomenon where people unknowingly take bigger risks when they feel protected. (Think of how drivers subconsciously drive faster when they wear seatbelts). When you carry a gun to a protest, you feel safer and more confident. But that subconscious sense of invulnerability can make you more assertive. It takes just one misunderstood gesture from an agitated person in a tense crowd to trigger a deadly fight-or-flight response. The safety mechanism itself becomes the hazard.
Then, there is the theater of public persuasion. When unarmed citizens stand before a line of heavily armed state agents, the moral asymmetry is absolute. The sheer defenselessness is blinding. It worked for Gandhi. It worked for the unarmed wives staring down the Gestapo at the 1943 Rosenstrasse Protest. It worked for the early Society of Friends who endured relentless persecution.
But the moment a gun is introduced—even a legally permitted, perfectly holstered one—that moral clarity evaporates. You forfeit the power of persuasion and validate the state's premise that physical coercion is the legitimate language of power. In the eyes of the government, you cease to be a witness to truth and simply become a combatant.
It is incredibly natural to imagine that being armed makes us secure. But history and psychology suggest a strange, enduring paradox: sometimes, true power comes from being completely defenseless.
And now you know… the rest of the story.
(You can read my full essay, “Going Armed to a Protest,” over at the
