Zombology Excerpt on the Rational Use of Arms

Below is an excerpt from my book Zombology: Zombies and the Decline of the West (and Guns). 

Understanding the principle at work here, Lewis Carroll said con-cerning the archetype of the hero in his “Jabberwocky”:

The Vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead,
and with its head
He went gallumphing back.

The hero must have a weapon appropriate to the anxieties he or she must face, especially in combating darker archetypal horrors such as jabberwockies and zombies. And the child too must mature into the use of 
arms if he is to carry on the works of his fathers and mothers.

Aristotle used the idea of defense as the major premise to a syl- logism, meaning that it was something that was universally regarded as true. Arms and reason comprised the arsenal of the civil man. His Rhetoric (2154) states:

It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with rational speech, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.

The zombie, while not persuadable by rational speech, succumbs only to the rational use of arms.