Raymond's Rant Repulsive

Eric Raymond's missive on the attacks is simply repulsive. The writing is a case of taking a good meme to bad extremes. The meme is decentralization, and the extreme is that decentralized everything is good. To see the absurdity of this line of thought one need only read the end of Raymond's piece, although the whole piece is available here - http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/668.

">Perhaps it is too much to hope that we will respond to this shattering tragedy as well as the Israelis, who have a long history of preventing similar atrocities by encouraging their civilians to carry concealed weapons and to shoot back at criminals and terrorists. But it is in that policy of a distributed response to a distributed threat, with every single citizen taking personal responsibility for the defense of life and freedom, that our best hope for preventing recurrences of today's mass murders almost certainly lies.

"If we learn that lesson, perhaps today's deaths will not have been in vain."

Arm every citizen and encourage them to shoot back at criminals and terrorists? This is Raymond's lesson? This is what we want to become -- a people living in fear and violence, a country based on instant reprisal and mutually assured destruction on a personal level? This is what decentralizing computer resources teaches us about how to run a society?

That would be a very regrettable "lesson" to learn.

What are the lessons, if any?