Curbing the pirate menace

Over at the Plank, Michelle Cottle asks:

But even if you don’t want a pirate sighting to result in the captain’s handing out Kalashnikovs to every able-bodied sailor on board, would it be worth hiring a handful of sharp shooters to travel on ships headed for hazardous waterways? The number of weapons needed to outfit these dead-eyes would be limited, so you wouldn’t have to worry about your ship being seen as a floating gun store and you’d have a better shot at negotiating permission to dock at all but the most restrictive ports.

This is an eminently reasonable point. And I think there’s a pretty simple, elegant solution here: Blackwater. Look, some people get all worked up about having mercenaries involved in active battlefields — sometimes for good reasons, sometimes because the people complaining about Blackwater have no idea what they’re talking about. But can’t we all agree that putting some well-trained mercenaries on every ship traveling in those waters would be a good move? It’s probably an expensive option — Blackwater doesn’t work cheap — but it seems to me that the deterrent of putting well-armed mercs on merchant ships would cut down on piracy by a lot.