Mutiny on the Ditto

Jason Zengerle points out Rush Limbaugh’s rather odd argument against arming the crews of cargo ships sailing in pirate infested waters:

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.

I’m not sure I understand why this same fear of class warfare doesn’t also apply to gun control on land. At any rate, arming merchant vessels is probably a bad idea, but this would not be the first reason to occur to me.