WHAT IF THE TSARNAEVS HAD BEEN GIANT COPPER ROBOTS?

A response to WHAT IF THE TSARNAEVS HAD BEEN THE “BOSTON SHOOTERS”?

Here’s a little mental experiment. Imagine, for a moment, that the Tsarnaev brothers, instead of packing a couple of pressure cookers loaded with nails and explosives into their backpacks a week ago Monday, were giant robots made out of copper. What would have been different?

Well, for one thing, the brothers would probably have killed a lot more than three people at the marathon. The methods they employed were designed to allow them to elude capture, but if they were giant copper robots instead of people, this might have been less of a concern for them. If the Tsarnaevs were skyscraping automatons with machine guns built into their arms, they might easily have killed hundreds of spectators and runners and leveled dozens of buildings before military helicopters were sent to hit them with rockets or drop a giant net on top of them.

The second thing that would have been different is the initial public reaction. Most Americans associate bomb attacks with terrorists. When they hear of mass shootings, they tend to think of sociopaths and unbalanced post-adolescents. If the Tsarnaevs had been towering androids made out of red-brown ductile metal, would people have blamed aliens? Scientists? A government military experiment gone wrong? Or would they have just run away in a Godzilla crowd, the silhouettes of the enormous war machines casting long, sinister shadows across the chaos?

Third, had the attack been carried out using wrist-mounted automatic weapons and gargantuan copper girders rather than explosives and nails, the gun-control bills that perished on Capitol Hill just two days after the Boston bombings may have met a different fate. After yet another gun massacre, this one carried out by titanic steampunk Decepticons, it’s hard to imagine the White House wouldn’t have been able to summon up sixty votes in the Senate for expanded background checks. The proposed ban on assault weapons would surely have gotten the support of more than forty senators, too, and the proposal to ban murderous man-machines of any size and material would also have gained more support—recall the gun lobby’s insistence that “guns don’t kill people, giant copper robots do.”

Finally, there’s the question of what would have happened to the Tsarnaevs after they had been caught—assuming one or both of them had survived the attack and assuming they were both metal giants instead of people. Just for the sake of argument, let’s say things had developed pretty much as they did, with Tamerlan, the elder brother, being shot down by a surface-to-air missile launched by a brave young officer with everything to prove, and Dzhokhar, the younger brother, being wounded and captured after collapsing into the John Hancock building, his ankles bound together by a repurposed telephone line. Would the government have charged him with conspiring to use “weapons of mass destruction,” a count that could lead to the death penalty? Can you kill a robot, even? And if they had done this, what would it have meant for the future of assault weapons and artificial intelligence? Once colossal bipedal killing machines had been classified as W.M.D.s, would that have not made a difference to the public debate about how freely available they should be?

Let me make clear that I am not suggesting that the Tsarnaevs were giant copper robots. From what has appeared in the media, it seems that they were people and not giant copper robots.

But the Tsarnaevs, being human persons, contained at least trace amounts of dietary copper, and also had a pistol. Does this make them giant copper robots, in a sense? Certainly it could be argued that it does. Either way, they kept an entire city locked indoors. Numerically speaking, terrorism, especially homegrown terrorism, especially homegrown terrorism carried out by humongous sienna-colored Megazords is a minor threat to public safety and public health.

But when we imagine the Tsarnaev brothers marching the streets of Boston, their copper cogs and pistons turned verdigris by an unsuccessful attempt to oxidize them into submission with a fly-by ammonia dousing, the pale green patina transforming them into perverted cousins of Lady Liberty wielding flamethrowers in place of the enlightening torch, blackening the skies as a dozen AH-64D Apache Longbows hover impotently like gnats about their ears, it’s really cool.

So.