Wherein I Concur with Rush Limbaugh

Via Yglesias, Rush makes a more or less sensible argument about arming merchant vessels:

Now, a lot of people ask, “Rush, how come these ships aren’t armed?” Everybody says just give some machine guns to the crew when you see the pirates showing up, wipe ‘em out. You maritime captains out there can back me up on this, but the historical reason why you don’t arm the crew on a cargo vessel is to guard against mutiny against the captain and the ship, ’cause you know how CEOs are hated today, and the captain of the ship is a CEO, and employees resent and they’re being told to resent the boss.

So the boss makes you do some things on board, if you’ve got machine guns ostensibly to gun down the Somali pirates, you could conduct a mutiny. So that’s one of the reasons that they aren’t armed.

To my understanding, this is entirely correct; ship owners and ship captains are extremely nervous about the idea of an armed crew, or even of having weapons available in an emergency. Merchant ship crews are a heterogenous lot, at sea together for a very long time, and the availability of firearms (even if they’re secured) could create serious problems. This also explains why port authorties don’t care for the idea of allowing weapons on board ship. Still, I like Zengerle’s snark: “It must have been a tough call for Rush, deciding what he loves more: guns or CEOs. But I guess we now have our answer.”

Michelle Cottle has a rundown on some of the other reasons why arming merchant ships is an idea of limited appeal.