Anarchist, of course, note the state’s claim to a monopoly on violence, and observe that TSA agents are known for things such as racial profiling, sexual assault and other forms of aggression. Their very jobs are facilitated through state aggression. It should come as no surprise, then, that someone reacted with retaliatory violence toward the TSA, as Paul Anthony Ciancia apparently did.

But why is it still wrong?

The violence of the state creates ripple effects across our communities at large. From public schools to the war on drugs, we are surrounded by statism. Its violence pervades our social arrangements. I would argue that at the core of violence in our communities is allegiance to the state. That allegiance creates a culture in which it is considered acceptable, nay virtuous, to aggress against others in order to meet our social and economic ends.  At least, as long it is the political class doing the aggressing. Yet, when people fight back, they are abhorred. This is not to say that what Ciancia was moral or virtuous; it’s just that statism creates a strong layer of cognitive dissonance. The fact that Ciancia committed an act of violence against the state is not, broadly speaking, wrong. But he failed to take into account that the state, being pervasive, can technically make just about anyone, from a teacher to a fireman, one’s enemy. He joined the state in its game of violence, and not only did he lose, but more than likely the TSA will become more violent and aggressive.

Paul Anthony Ciancia has made things worse.

Note that this is not an argument against violence, per se, but rather to the fundamental flaw of violent revolution: The state is simply better at violence.

What could people like Paul Anthony Ciancia do instead of playing the state’s game? I am no techie, but one idea I have is developing open source, black market methods of air travel. If drug dealers can do it, why can’t other people? Perhaps there are people out there smarter than I who could develop cloaking devices for larger planes. The point is, there are plenty of things the state is bad at, and dealing with decentralized workarounds to its systems is one of the areas where it is the weakest.

Put simply, capitalize on something the political class doesn’t understand: Peace.

So if the use of defensive violence is justified against gangsters and terrorists, why not against the TSA too?

As a market anarchist myself, I certainly agree that government agents and private citizens should be held to the same standard. But this is a requirement that cuts both ways. Anarchists tend to be highly critical of the way that government treats criminals and terrorists; we should be careful not to hold private citizens to a laxer moral standard. Thus if the logic of their argument leads defenders of the LAX shooting to compare their own position to that of Obama administration flak Robert Gibbs’ defense of the drone murder of Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, they should take that as a problem with their position, not as a vindication of it.

Market anarchists ordinarily hold that the use of force against person or property is justified only in response to the initiation of such force by others. In other words, fighting back against an aggressor is fine, but starting the fight is not. Initiatory force disrespects others’ basic personhood by invading their autonomy; defensive force merely repels those who seek to invade the autonomy of others.

This “non-aggression principle” doesn’t directly settle the question of what kinds or levels of defensive force are justified; but it does suggest some guidelines. Defensive force can reasonably include the forcible recovery of compensation from the aggressor to the victim, since the invasion isn’t over until the initial harm has been undone. But any use of force that goes beyond what’s needed to end the invasion, is unjustified, because it is no longer grounded in defense of the victim’s autonomy – the only basis that can make force legitimate. And since we have no legitimate jurisdiction over other people’s thoughts, no level of force can be justified against malicious aggressors that would not be equally justified against innocent or inadvertent aggressors. Hence the widespread support, among market anarchists, for restricting the legitimate use of force against criminals to restraint and restitution solely, rejecting additional punishment regardless of whether it is for retributive, deterrent, or rehabilitative motives. The idea that force is justified only to block force implies the further idea that force beyond what’s necessary to block force is not justified.

Similar considerations support a requirement that defensive force not be morally disproportionate to the aggression it’s intended to combat. Why is it wrong to decapitate a toddler, even if doing so should happen to be the only way to prevent the toddler from stepping on your toe? Because it would be unreasonable (a violation of grounds thickness, for those familiar with that concept) to object to one kind of imbalanced response, force that goes beyond defense, but not to object to another kind of imbalanced response, force that is morally disproportionate.

A further restriction on defensive force is that it must be reasonably likely to play a significant role in ending the aggression it combats. Otherwise it’s not reasonably interpreted as defensive and so must be going beyond defense into offense. Another restriction is that defensive force, to be justified, should not be likely to have worse results than the aggression against which it’s defending. Yet another is that force should be targeted on the aggressor and not on noncombatants.

Many of these restrictions – proportionality, likelihood of success, not having worse results, respect for noncombatants – are standard requirements of just war theory, or recognizable variations thereon – requirements that market anarchists are happy to invoke when criticizing state action. We should be just as ready to invoke these requirements when evaluating the actions of private individuals.

Another requirement is that war be waged only by legitimate authorities, by which is usually meant sovereign states. But under anarchist theory, every individual is just as legitimate an authority as any other; so that requirement is easily met. The other requirements matter too, though. The last thing anarchists should be doing is cheering an individual for acting like a government. If in fighting aggression we become the very thing we are fighting, then any victory we might achieve will be, in truth, a defeat.

• Standard TSA procedure constitutes aggression; agreed. But the LAX shooter’s actions cannot plausibly be described as proportionate to that aggression; so there’s the proportionality requirement violated.
• If the shootings were intended as punishment for aggression, they also violated the requirement the restriction to purely defensive force.
• If the shootings were instead intended to make a significant contribution to rolling back TSA tyranny, they were ill-chosen, as their likely effect is precisely the opposite: increased security at checkpoints. Thus the likelihood-of-success requirement is violated.
• So is the no-worse-results requirement, since not only will TSA security probably be beefed up, but the shootings will tend to engender sympathy toward the TSA and increased suspicion of anti-government radicals.
• Nor is much respect for noncombatants shown when thousands of travelers are terrified, have their plans disrupted, and end up subjected to enhanced TSA scrutiny.

So a human being lies dead, and nobody benefits.

Does the LAX shooter deserve “the thanks and support of a grateful populace”? On the contrary – he’s just another war criminal.

Although propaganda of the deed has faded into history as an actuality, it tends to pop up frequently in anti-anarchist demagoguery, and I can’t help but think it’s set to do so once again. Early state and media spin on the killing of Gerardo Hernandez, the first US Transportation Security Administration employee to die “in the line of duty,” already attributes “anti-government views” to his alleged killer, Paul Ciancia.

As an anarchist, I’m not a fan of propaganda by the deed for three reasons:

First, it’s strategically useless. No single act is likely to produce anarchist revolution in an environment not yet primed for such revolution.

Secondly, it’s tactically counter-productive. Anyone with the intelligence and energy to plan such an act could do so much more for the cause in other ways than getting himself killed or imprisoned in this kind of one-off project.

Finally, all such activities carry a heavy risk of “collateral damage” and we anarchists, unlike state actors, actually shoulder true responsibility for our actions instead of seeking excuses for them.

All that said, if Ciancia did what he’s accused of doing, in the manner he’s accused of doing it, whether he intended it as “progaganda of the deed” or not, he deserves the thanks and support of a grateful populace.

Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to US president Barack Obama, justified the Obama regime’s cold-blooded murder of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki —  a 16-year-old American accused of no crime whatsoever — with the claim that if he didn’t want to be murdered, he should have “had a more responsible father” (his father, Anwar al-Awlaki, was in fact accused of crimes, although the evidence seemed pretty weak).

To riff on Gibbs: If Gerardo Hernandez didn’t want to be gunned down in reprisal for he and his fellow TSA employees’ terrorism, he shouldn’t have accepted employment as a terrorist.

Yes, TSA is a terrorist organization. Its entire purpose is to frighten travelers for political purposes — the very definition of terrorism — by subjecting them to unwanted and unjustifiable searches of their property and persons, sometimes assaulting them sexually or otherwise in the process, sometimes abducting them.

By all accounts, Ciancia was extraordinarily careful in his attack. He asked each person he encountered whether or not they worked for TSA. Those who did not were sent on their way unharmed. He shot terrorists, and ONLY terrorists, with no “collateral damage.”

I don’t have to think that’s smart, or particularly useful to my cause, to admire both the morality of the action and the careful restraint with which it was performed.

The world would be a much nicer place if every government employee dreamed dark dreams of Paul Ciancia and his potential copycats every night, arrived at work every morning with those dreams very much in mind, and aspired only to keep a low, polite profile and cause no offense until such time as he or she could leave the life of crime and find a real job.

Like anybody else, I want to be as safe as I can reasonably expect. I certainly don’t want my loved ones to suffer a terrorist attack. But I don’t believe that sacrificing liberty makes anyone safer. Compare the TSA-style measures’ effectiveness in thwarting terrorist plots to the effectiveness of good intelligence, thorough investigation, and the initiative of intended victims.

Government priorities mean that security checkpoints are not mainly looking out for bombs or terrorists. Checkpoint personnel are looking for people with immigration violations, drugs the government doesn’t approve of, weapons carried without government approval, and whatever else will boost arrest stats and revenue. The traveler is confronted by militarized authoritarians who aren’t totally focused on passenger safety.

Security could function on an amicable relationship, since the peaceable traveler and security officer should both be concerned with the safety of the transportation system. But police state procedures foster an antagonistic relationship as the traveler worries about what he might have forgotten to take out of his bag and the officer expects total submission from the traveler he’s investigating. The harm done to communication and trust leaves us more vulnerable to attack. Security from unreasonable searches goes hand in hand with security from attackers.

If terrorists want to take away our freedom, the government is certainly helping them get what they want. But terrorism is primarily a (completely immoral) response to government policies. People don’t like the US government telling them what to do, supporting regimes that oppress them, or killing civilians while trying to stamp out resistance. The security state apparatus is a government solution to a problem that government helped create in the first place. Not surprisingly, the government answer is to deploy more force and insist on more control over the public. If you’re a hammer, everyone else looks like nails.

It should be clear that the loss of freedom doesn’t really make us safer. But we pay for the security state in other ways too. People are made late, travel time is increased and inconvenience leads to marginally less travel. As a result the economy becomes less dynamic. If people avoid public transportation there will be more highway traffic and more car accidents. Increased spending on fuel and road repair comes at the expense of things people would otherwise desire more.

But someone benefits. President Eisenhower warned that the influence of the military-industrial complex could be disastrous to liberty if not held in check by an aware and knowledgeable citizenry. Today Americans suffer under that influence, expanded into a broader security-industrial complex. There’s big money in scanners, prisons, and tools for low-level security personnel. Bureaucrats often view expansion of their department as a key for career advancement. Not surprisingly, a company that manufactures body image scanners invested heavily in lobbying efforts. It looks like their investments are paying off, and Americans are footing the bill. This does not stimulate the economy. It instead forcibly shifts spending away from the productive goods and services of the voluntary sector into the pockets of those favored by the state.

When someone asks how much liberty you’re willing to trade for security, you should ask why they assume there is a tradeoff. What we’re purchasing with our liberty, privacy and wealth is not security. It is a society of submission. True security is founded on liberty at home and abroad.