7 ms·

What If We Replace Guns and Bullets with Bows and Arrows?

23 points by CTOSian 4y ago

joosters 4y ago
I read a long way through this article before realising that it wasn't actually a parody of a lowtechmagazine.com story.
h2odragon 4y ago
Bring back the sling stones and atlatl too. If I'm shooting for fun, give me a bow: the experience is much more involved and tactile and immediate. There's more room to learn, more room to have fun. Everything archery teaches you about handling your body and the ballistics of projectile weapons also transfers usefully to other activities. If I need something to die, then I want the firearms. I'm glad to have my little .22 rifle whenever I need to eliminate varmints chasing chickens etc. When I forget to grab it and find myself facing something with nothing but a machete in my hand it's always ugly. And more effort and danger.
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 4y ago
  Came for random violence, appeased by imagery of tech wizards chasing wildlife with machetes!
  - meepmorp 4y ago
    merely a form extreme debugging
    - tornadofart 4y ago
      Maybe this guy should apply for a job at twitter as he obviously is extremely hardcore.
- Loughla 4y ago
  If I'm shooting for targets, give me a pcp air rifle (also cheaper than a decent bow). There is so much to accurately shooting those that it's not even funny. They're spectacularly fun to work with.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Why not artillery? Hand grenades/explosives? Rocket propelled grenades? Air incendiary bombs? Fully automatic machine guns? Nuclear weapons? Lasers? I think one of the things this naive/dumb snippet (if taken at face value) is that the American obsession with the personal firearm is an arbitrary categorization in its own right, as arbitrary a line in the sand that bow/arrow would be. Your instinctual desire for "no, I want a firearm" is just a reflection of cultural values, not any practical need. If you want firepower, use any of dozens of approaches that are more potent, some easier and requiring less industrial base than a rifle/handgun. For example, a sling/catapult that flings a bomb/makeshift grenade, you just need gunpowder and rocks for that. I didn't even get into chemical weapons. Or biological weapons. But yeah whatever, your .22 cal fits in the "strict constructionalist" interpretation of the second amendment. The fact the court interpretation of the second amendment aligns with the gun industry's sweet spot of profitable convenient consumer products is just a magic, mysterious coincidence.
aliswe 4y ago
... would bring us less extensive conflicts. It would decrease the number of people in a given population who could become effective soldiers I first assumed this would be about criminality and/or war, but the first part of the article surprised me pleasantly. However, it did go into this in the end. Remember that replacing something involves removing the existing thing, and then adding the new thing. This would involve DEweaponizing criminal and/or war-able factions, and then arming them with the likes of bows and arrows. I would argue that we are unable to reach even the first step. In fact, if we could do that, there wouldn't be any need of arming people with bows and arrows. Problem solved!
foobarian 4y ago
There are various towns in New England that occasionally commission archers when there are too many deer, because the residents dislike the gunshot noises. This is with the fancy high-tech bows with various pulleys. Pretty well paid as I understand it.
- greatpatton 4y ago
  Is noise really the reason? You can have firearms with subsonic bullet that are almost completely silent.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    How many hunters are using subsonic bullets? Back when I used to live close to/in the wilderness with many hunters around during hunting season, we heard gunshots almost every day, doesn't seem too popular to use those types of bullets if they are "almost completely silent".
    - sigzero 4y ago
      None. But I think what he was trying to say is that they could have used firearms and used subsonic bullets by town mandate.
      - capableweb 4y ago
        Sounds like a typical HN idea, do something more complicated, "transformative" and expensive rather than just using what works and worked for a long time :)
    - leeroyjenkins11 4y ago
      That's usually because hunters are prohibited from using suppressors. Subsonic ammo isn't ideal for big game because you do have a a reduced range and speed. And because of the NFA, every suppressor needs a 200dollar tax stamp and several months of waiting, this also drives up the price of suppressors. In PA they tried to pass a bill to allow deer hunters to hunt with suppressors, but it was voted down because you don't need to know things to vote against something.
danielvf 4y ago
> Pulling the trigger of a firearm does not require any skill or practice. Learning and practicing how to correctly pull the trigger is probably the single biggest improvement to accuracy a new shooter can make. The difference between the right way, and the way everyone is born doing it, particularly with pistols, is HUGE. And it does take practice. > Because bullets travel much faster than arrows, a gunner can aim in a straight line, which is easy. Outside of being right next to your target, knowing your bullet drop and compensating for it is absolutely a part of shooting.
- zulu-inuoe 4y ago
  Not only that, but you can definitely apply modern style zeroing equipment to bows so you "just have to aim in a straight line". The article lost me pretty early with these glaring oversights.
- pupppet 4y ago
  Nearly half of all shootings are within 5 feet, you’re reaching.
  - danielvf 4y ago
    Not military combat, which is the subject of the article.
    - fsloth 4y ago
      I think the point was that training riflemen en masse is easy and cheap, whereas bowmen need far more intensive training - I would find it hard to contest this assessment. When I did my conscript service, we were encouraged to hit target 300m away, and generally people learn to do this quite fast (with a high quality AK-47 copy in this instance). Learning to hit a target with this engagement distance is infinitely easier with rifle than bow, especially if you need to train riflemen en masse. Descriptive is that english longbowmen had to practice continusously. I would probably hit a target with a rifle two decades after my service without much firing range practice. Automated rifle has enabled industrialized utilization of civil population as easily trained effective combatants like nothing else.
Koshkin 4y ago
We have, in some cases. In some nature preserves in the US hunting is only allowed with a bow and arrows. (And you still need a license, of course.)
poulpy123 4y ago
That's a lot of cherry picking, but the author doesn't really explain why according to him the inferior guns replaced the superior bows
- danielvf 4y ago
  Around the halfway point of the article: > The main reason most European armies switched from bows to crossbows and then firearms was the short learning curves of these weapons. Crossbowmen and musketeers required little or no training, while it took many years of practice to build an archer skillful and strong enough to be of use in warfare. The crossbow and the firearm thus expanded the number of people in a given population that could become soldiers.
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    He's sort of omiting the part of history where the non skilled farmers who got pressed into the military just beat each other to death with sticks and swords whilst archers shot arrows into the mix.
    - ch4s3 4y ago
      Not to mention the advent or heavily armored pike formations that shrugged off arrows. Muskets we’re after som trial na error able to punch through the best plate armor.
  - philwelch 4y ago
    This is not very good history. Firearms didn’t replace bows and crossbows, nor did crossbows ever fully replace bows. Almost all premodern and early modern Western armies predominantly used melee weapons; eventually, they standardized on the pike. Most Western armies first used firearms in pike-and-shot formations that combined pikemen and arquebusiers. Over time, especially as the arquebus gave way to the flintlock musket, the relative proportions of pikes to firearms shifted towards firearms more and more. The invention of bayonets, which allowed the musket to be used similarly to a pike in close combat, led to the end of pikes. The musket, and especially the arquebus, was not the lethal and precise kind of firearm we have today. There is a reason the Patriots at Bunker Hill held their fire until they could see the whites of the redcoats’ eyes: if you lost your nerve and shot any sooner than that, you were unlikely to make a lethal hit. The reason musket battles took the form of formations of line infantry exchanging volleys of gunfire is because that was the best way to use the musket, not because Western armies and the men who organized them were stupid. Which also ties into the training question. Most training at the time focused on close-order formation drills, not on individual prowess. This was true for Napoleonic infantry just as it had been true for pikemen, Roman legions, and Greek phalanxes. Victory depended on line infantry working as a cohesive, disciplined unit that wouldn’t break or shatter easily. Okay, so what about archers? In the Western context, archers were part of what we today would call “combined arms” to supplement line melee infantry. The idea that “it took many years of practice to build an archer skillful and strong enough to be of use in warfare” is partially true. It was especially true of the English longbow, but that was an outlier in many ways in being an unusually long and heavy bow which could pierce armor. The English longbow requires years of training mostly because of the extreme draw weight, which was atypical among Western bows. It was kind of true for steppe horse archers, except it was less training and more of a way of life for them. As for “expanding the number of people in a given population that could become soldiers”, training was never a meaningful bottleneck for that in the pre-firearms era. Training time was important for professional soldiers, but the bulk of medieval armies were poorly trained peasants armed with melee weapons, and the bottleneck on calling them up had more to do with the need for farm labor.
julianeon 4y ago
I'd like to call your attention to the way in which this article is a masterpiece of the clickbait genre. It doesn't even try to be realistic! It just serves the clickbait in a heaping portion and says, "There you go. It's your problem now." For example: > Finally, replacing the firearm with the bow would reduce the damage done by missile weapons in a civilian setting, such as mass shootings, accidents, and suicides. In theory, a mass shooting could happen with a bow and arrows. However, it would take an archer years of dedicated practice, while a gunner can start out of the box. Bows are also much less likely to cause lethal accidents when not in use. I mean... what? That is true. But that's not the reason people buy guns. I don't even like guns but I hardly know where to start with this. "True but it will never work" is probably the easiest one-line response. Support gun control if you want to reduce gun violence in this manner, at least that's more realistic from a political pass-the-laws point of view. > Even if you agree that reverting to the bow and arrow would bring advantages, you probably find it unrealistic. That may well be true, but in that case, it’s also unrealistic to make a transition to a more sustainable society. No! Just no. We could be more sustainable. We can't revert to bows & arrows. Please. But you know what? I don't think having a serious argument was ever really the point. It was supposed to be a wild line which gets you to click. And for that, bravo. In a way, if you can enjoy it, it's a masterpiece of the genre.
- bliteben 4y ago
  I might even click the follow ups where he un-invents the internet and then the printing press
- User23 4y ago
  > Support gun control if you want to reduce gun violence in this manner The main problem with gun control is the inability of our society to honestly talk about who is doing the shooting and why. This eliminates any chance of enacting reasonable policies. The point of sale gun control favored by Democrats observably has little actual effect on gun violence, because, obviously, it only affects people who are already inclined to abide by laws, such as the ones against shooting people without good reason. On the other hand, the point of use gun control favored by Republicans demonstrably and significantly reduces murders with guns by discouraging people who are prone to shooting other people over trivialities from carrying their illegal firearms.
thwayunion 4y ago
I could sit and consider a reasoned argument for replacing firearms with bows and arrows in civil society, but this article is arguing for "low-tech warfare" as a sustainability initiative, and compares this to replacing cars with bicycles. The major difference between car vs bicycle and bow vs gun is that, with the right infrastructure and lifestyle, riding a bicycle really is a major life improvement over driving a car. When I live two miles from work and there are protected bike lanes, I would much rather ride my bike than drive, even in a cold northern city. Driving two miles in a dense city is way more miserable than biking in a protected lane, even in the cold, and the savings from even one of the two parking spot pays for a lot of additional luxuries (or entire years off of my working life). There is literally no situation where an army with bows and arrows will defeat an army with modern weaponry. The author concludes: > If we cannot imagine low-tech warfare, we cannot imagine a low-tech, sustainable, and fair society. Bad news: war isn't fair. We can't even prevent nuclear proliferation, which really does post an immanent and existential threat to human civilization (if not the species itself). Let's at least focus on that first...
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > If we cannot imagine low-tech warfare, we cannot imagine a low-tech, sustainable, and fair society. On top of that, we don't need to imagine low-tech warfare. We used to have it. It wasn't sustainable or fair, and low-tech isn't a virtue by itself.
dahfizz 4y ago
> then reverting to bows and arrows ... would bring us less extensive conflicts. Most of the article is dubious, but this is flat out wrong. The Mongols, with just their bows and arrows, killed tens of millions of Chinese, Middle Easterners, and Europeans. They conquered like half the world, and killed more people than died in WW2. "less extensive conflict" indeed.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  Not to mention that bleeding out from a arrow or lance wound is probably really fucking miserable and potentially quite slow.
retrac 4y ago
> It would decrease the number of people in a given population who could become effective soldiers Another interpretation is that it would make violence the monopoly of physically robust young men, again. There are many stories of brave peasants resisting predation by roving gangs of bandits -- banditry is the norm throughout history as far as I can tell and not the exception -- but in reality peasants who resisted usually just all got slaughtered. They faced absolutely no chance against strong young men who had trained with weapons their whole lives. See any of the medieval peasant uprisings. Put down efficiently and brutally, every time. With firearms, other factors like organizational skill becomes more dominant in winning such a fight, rather than pure physical strength.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  You're regurgitating the pro-gun fantasy of a bunch of pea shooter firearms resisting "the gubberment". If there are firearms, the government has bigger firearms. Artillery, explosives, tanks/cavalry, air power. At least medieval peasantry required raising, transporting an army, and sometimes losing on the battlefield. Modern militaries would just dispatch a cruise missile or worse, 100% success. Modern peasantry doesn't get slaughtered by modern armies in the same manner because modern armies and technology need modern society and values to sustain a large enough civilization to produce those products of war. Modern restraint on slaughter enables guerilla warfare to be effective, not modern technology or some fundamental weakness of modern militaries.
  - retrac 4y ago
    You've got me right backwards. My point was that the firearm made the state's absolute monopoly on violence (which you note) far more feasible, by substantially negating physical strength as a factor in deciding who has the monopoly on violence. That's probably a good thing.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
bediger4000 4y ago
Archery co-existed with firearms in Chinese armies for a long time: https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.1677 https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.1677
hanafudafan 4y ago
What if we replace Hacker News with The Guardian?
parkingrift 4y ago
There will always be firearms. You can make them illegal but you can't make them stop existing. This is the fundamental problem with these types of suggestions. Switch to bow, it's safer! ...but the criminals (and anyone else) will keep using firearms. Comically absurd idealism about society and the world.
- ToniCipriani 4y ago
  And precisely what is wrong with gun control and mixing it into partisan politics. It's easier to address the means but not the root cause on why the crime was committed in the first place.
- gigaflop 4y ago
  Pandora's box was blown open with black powder. For those with means and motivation (money and machine tools), cheap automatic weapons can be somewhat-easily produced from plans and diagrams online, with parts that can be bought from regular industrial suppliers, or sometimes big-box hardware stores. Not naming the specific plans I've seen, of course. If someone wants to know, they can look for themselves. Quality is to be suspect, but if you only need to throw out ~20 rounds of 9mm at something that isn't very far away, it'll get the job done.
User23 4y ago
> Pulling the trigger of a firearm does not require any skill or practice. The author has clearly never shot competitively, even informally. Pulling the trigger is an essential marksmanship skill that very much improves with practice. A slight error will easily spoil one’s aim. One also must train oneself to not anticipate recoil during the trigger pull.
bluedino 4y ago
In the US, bows are usually not regulated. I can shoot a bow and arrow in my backyard, I don't have to be 150 yards from a building. I don't need a license, I don't even need to take a class. I can keep it in my car, carry it around with me, etc. I can shoot rabbits in my back yard with a bow, but I can't use a .177 air rifle. I can shoot carp from a canoe. Plus, with arrows being $30-$100 and the broadhead costing nearly as much, I'm not going to randomly fire it into the air on holidays. A crossbow on the other hand, doesn't work this way.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  Emphasis on the usually, though -- check your local laws before setting up an archery range on your back patio :)
sbate1987 4y ago

23 points by CTOSian 4y ago

I read a long way through this article before realising that it wasn't actually a parody of a lowtechmagazine.com story.

h2odragon 4y ago

Bring back the sling stones and atlatl too. If I'm shooting for fun, give me a bow: the experience is much more involved and tactile and immediate. There's more room to learn, more room to have fun. Everything archery teaches you about handling your body and the ballistics of projectile weapons also transfers usefully to other activities. If I need something to die, then I want the firearms. I'm glad to have my little .22 rifle whenever I need to eliminate varmints chasing chickens etc. When I forget to grab it and find myself facing something with nothing but a machete in my hand it's always ugly. And more effort and danger.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn 4y ago
Came for random violence, appeased by imagery of tech wizards chasing wildlife with machetes!
- meepmorp 4y ago
  merely a form extreme debugging
  - tornadofart 4y ago
    Maybe this guy should apply for a job at twitter as he obviously is extremely hardcore.
Loughla 4y ago
If I'm shooting for targets, give me a pcp air rifle (also cheaper than a decent bow). There is so much to accurately shooting those that it's not even funny. They're spectacularly fun to work with.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Why not artillery? Hand grenades/explosives? Rocket propelled grenades? Air incendiary bombs? Fully automatic machine guns? Nuclear weapons? Lasers? I think one of the things this naive/dumb snippet (if taken at face value) is that the American obsession with the personal firearm is an arbitrary categorization in its own right, as arbitrary a line in the sand that bow/arrow would be. Your instinctual desire for "no, I want a firearm" is just a reflection of cultural values, not any practical need. If you want firepower, use any of dozens of approaches that are more potent, some easier and requiring less industrial base than a rifle/handgun. For example, a sling/catapult that flings a bomb/makeshift grenade, you just need gunpowder and rocks for that. I didn't even get into chemical weapons. Or biological weapons. But yeah whatever, your .22 cal fits in the "strict constructionalist" interpretation of the second amendment. The fact the court interpretation of the second amendment aligns with the gun industry's sweet spot of profitable convenient consumer products is just a magic, mysterious coincidence.

aliswe 4y ago

... would bring us less extensive conflicts. It would decrease the number of people in a given population who could become effective soldiers I first assumed this would be about criminality and/or war, but the first part of the article surprised me pleasantly. However, it did go into this in the end. Remember that replacing something involves removing the existing thing, and then adding the new thing. This would involve DEweaponizing criminal and/or war-able factions, and then arming them with the likes of bows and arrows. I would argue that we are unable to reach even the first step. In fact, if we could do that, there wouldn't be any need of arming people with bows and arrows. Problem solved!

foobarian 4y ago

There are various towns in New England that occasionally commission archers when there are too many deer, because the residents dislike the gunshot noises. This is with the fancy high-tech bows with various pulleys. Pretty well paid as I understand it.

greatpatton 4y ago
Is noise really the reason? You can have firearms with subsonic bullet that are almost completely silent.
- capableweb 4y ago
  How many hunters are using subsonic bullets? Back when I used to live close to/in the wilderness with many hunters around during hunting season, we heard gunshots almost every day, doesn't seem too popular to use those types of bullets if they are "almost completely silent".
  - sigzero 4y ago
    None. But I think what he was trying to say is that they could have used firearms and used subsonic bullets by town mandate.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      Sounds like a typical HN idea, do something more complicated, "transformative" and expensive rather than just using what works and worked for a long time :)
  - leeroyjenkins11 4y ago
    That's usually because hunters are prohibited from using suppressors. Subsonic ammo isn't ideal for big game because you do have a a reduced range and speed. And because of the NFA, every suppressor needs a 200dollar tax stamp and several months of waiting, this also drives up the price of suppressors. In PA they tried to pass a bill to allow deer hunters to hunt with suppressors, but it was voted down because you don't need to know things to vote against something.

danielvf 4y ago

> Pulling the trigger of a firearm does not require any skill or practice. Learning and practicing how to correctly pull the trigger is probably the single biggest improvement to accuracy a new shooter can make. The difference between the right way, and the way everyone is born doing it, particularly with pistols, is HUGE. And it does take practice. > Because bullets travel much faster than arrows, a gunner can aim in a straight line, which is easy. Outside of being right next to your target, knowing your bullet drop and compensating for it is absolutely a part of shooting.

zulu-inuoe 4y ago
Not only that, but you can definitely apply modern style zeroing equipment to bows so you "just have to aim in a straight line". The article lost me pretty early with these glaring oversights.
pupppet 4y ago
Nearly half of all shootings are within 5 feet, you’re reaching.
- danielvf 4y ago
  Not military combat, which is the subject of the article.
  - fsloth 4y ago
    I think the point was that training riflemen en masse is easy and cheap, whereas bowmen need far more intensive training - I would find it hard to contest this assessment. When I did my conscript service, we were encouraged to hit target 300m away, and generally people learn to do this quite fast (with a high quality AK-47 copy in this instance). Learning to hit a target with this engagement distance is infinitely easier with rifle than bow, especially if you need to train riflemen en masse. Descriptive is that english longbowmen had to practice continusously. I would probably hit a target with a rifle two decades after my service without much firing range practice. Automated rifle has enabled industrialized utilization of civil population as easily trained effective combatants like nothing else.

Koshkin 4y ago

We have, in some cases. In some nature preserves in the US hunting is only allowed with a bow and arrows. (And you still need a license, of course.)

poulpy123 4y ago

That's a lot of cherry picking, but the author doesn't really explain why according to him the inferior guns replaced the superior bows

danielvf 4y ago
Around the halfway point of the article: > The main reason most European armies switched from bows to crossbows and then firearms was the short learning curves of these weapons. Crossbowmen and musketeers required little or no training, while it took many years of practice to build an archer skillful and strong enough to be of use in warfare. The crossbow and the firearm thus expanded the number of people in a given population that could become soldiers.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  He's sort of omiting the part of history where the non skilled farmers who got pressed into the military just beat each other to death with sticks and swords whilst archers shot arrows into the mix.
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    Not to mention the advent or heavily armored pike formations that shrugged off arrows. Muskets we’re after som trial na error able to punch through the best plate armor.
- philwelch 4y ago
  This is not very good history. Firearms didn’t replace bows and crossbows, nor did crossbows ever fully replace bows. Almost all premodern and early modern Western armies predominantly used melee weapons; eventually, they standardized on the pike. Most Western armies first used firearms in pike-and-shot formations that combined pikemen and arquebusiers. Over time, especially as the arquebus gave way to the flintlock musket, the relative proportions of pikes to firearms shifted towards firearms more and more. The invention of bayonets, which allowed the musket to be used similarly to a pike in close combat, led to the end of pikes. The musket, and especially the arquebus, was not the lethal and precise kind of firearm we have today. There is a reason the Patriots at Bunker Hill held their fire until they could see the whites of the redcoats’ eyes: if you lost your nerve and shot any sooner than that, you were unlikely to make a lethal hit. The reason musket battles took the form of formations of line infantry exchanging volleys of gunfire is because that was the best way to use the musket, not because Western armies and the men who organized them were stupid. Which also ties into the training question. Most training at the time focused on close-order formation drills, not on individual prowess. This was true for Napoleonic infantry just as it had been true for pikemen, Roman legions, and Greek phalanxes. Victory depended on line infantry working as a cohesive, disciplined unit that wouldn’t break or shatter easily. Okay, so what about archers? In the Western context, archers were part of what we today would call “combined arms” to supplement line melee infantry. The idea that “it took many years of practice to build an archer skillful and strong enough to be of use in warfare” is partially true. It was especially true of the English longbow, but that was an outlier in many ways in being an unusually long and heavy bow which could pierce armor. The English longbow requires years of training mostly because of the extreme draw weight, which was atypical among Western bows. It was kind of true for steppe horse archers, except it was less training and more of a way of life for them. As for “expanding the number of people in a given population that could become soldiers”, training was never a meaningful bottleneck for that in the pre-firearms era. Training time was important for professional soldiers, but the bulk of medieval armies were poorly trained peasants armed with melee weapons, and the bottleneck on calling them up had more to do with the need for farm labor.

julianeon 4y ago

I'd like to call your attention to the way in which this article is a masterpiece of the clickbait genre. It doesn't even try to be realistic! It just serves the clickbait in a heaping portion and says, "There you go. It's your problem now." For example: > Finally, replacing the firearm with the bow would reduce the damage done by missile weapons in a civilian setting, such as mass shootings, accidents, and suicides. In theory, a mass shooting could happen with a bow and arrows. However, it would take an archer years of dedicated practice, while a gunner can start out of the box. Bows are also much less likely to cause lethal accidents when not in use. I mean... what? That is true. But that's not the reason people buy guns. I don't even like guns but I hardly know where to start with this. "True but it will never work" is probably the easiest one-line response. Support gun control if you want to reduce gun violence in this manner, at least that's more realistic from a political pass-the-laws point of view. > Even if you agree that reverting to the bow and arrow would bring advantages, you probably find it unrealistic. That may well be true, but in that case, it’s also unrealistic to make a transition to a more sustainable society. No! Just no. We could be more sustainable. We can't revert to bows & arrows. Please. But you know what? I don't think having a serious argument was ever really the point. It was supposed to be a wild line which gets you to click. And for that, bravo. In a way, if you can enjoy it, it's a masterpiece of the genre.

bliteben 4y ago
I might even click the follow ups where he un-invents the internet and then the printing press
User23 4y ago
> Support gun control if you want to reduce gun violence in this manner The main problem with gun control is the inability of our society to honestly talk about who is doing the shooting and why. This eliminates any chance of enacting reasonable policies. The point of sale gun control favored by Democrats observably has little actual effect on gun violence, because, obviously, it only affects people who are already inclined to abide by laws, such as the ones against shooting people without good reason. On the other hand, the point of use gun control favored by Republicans demonstrably and significantly reduces murders with guns by discouraging people who are prone to shooting other people over trivialities from carrying their illegal firearms.

thwayunion 4y ago

I could sit and consider a reasoned argument for replacing firearms with bows and arrows in civil society, but this article is arguing for "low-tech warfare" as a sustainability initiative, and compares this to replacing cars with bicycles. The major difference between car vs bicycle and bow vs gun is that, with the right infrastructure and lifestyle, riding a bicycle really is a major life improvement over driving a car. When I live two miles from work and there are protected bike lanes, I would much rather ride my bike than drive, even in a cold northern city. Driving two miles in a dense city is way more miserable than biking in a protected lane, even in the cold, and the savings from even one of the two parking spot pays for a lot of additional luxuries (or entire years off of my working life). There is literally no situation where an army with bows and arrows will defeat an army with modern weaponry. The author concludes: > If we cannot imagine low-tech warfare, we cannot imagine a low-tech, sustainable, and fair society. Bad news: war isn't fair. We can't even prevent nuclear proliferation, which really does post an immanent and existential threat to human civilization (if not the species itself). Let's at least focus on that first...

robertlagrant 4y ago
> If we cannot imagine low-tech warfare, we cannot imagine a low-tech, sustainable, and fair society. On top of that, we don't need to imagine low-tech warfare. We used to have it. It wasn't sustainable or fair, and low-tech isn't a virtue by itself.

dahfizz 4y ago

> then reverting to bows and arrows ... would bring us less extensive conflicts. Most of the article is dubious, but this is flat out wrong. The Mongols, with just their bows and arrows, killed tens of millions of Chinese, Middle Easterners, and Europeans. They conquered like half the world, and killed more people than died in WW2. "less extensive conflict" indeed.

ch4s3 4y ago
Not to mention that bleeding out from a arrow or lance wound is probably really fucking miserable and potentially quite slow.

retrac 4y ago

> It would decrease the number of people in a given population who could become effective soldiers Another interpretation is that it would make violence the monopoly of physically robust young men, again. There are many stories of brave peasants resisting predation by roving gangs of bandits -- banditry is the norm throughout history as far as I can tell and not the exception -- but in reality peasants who resisted usually just all got slaughtered. They faced absolutely no chance against strong young men who had trained with weapons their whole lives. See any of the medieval peasant uprisings. Put down efficiently and brutally, every time. With firearms, other factors like organizational skill becomes more dominant in winning such a fight, rather than pure physical strength.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
You're regurgitating the pro-gun fantasy of a bunch of pea shooter firearms resisting "the gubberment". If there are firearms, the government has bigger firearms. Artillery, explosives, tanks/cavalry, air power. At least medieval peasantry required raising, transporting an army, and sometimes losing on the battlefield. Modern militaries would just dispatch a cruise missile or worse, 100% success. Modern peasantry doesn't get slaughtered by modern armies in the same manner because modern armies and technology need modern society and values to sustain a large enough civilization to produce those products of war. Modern restraint on slaughter enables guerilla warfare to be effective, not modern technology or some fundamental weakness of modern militaries.
- retrac 4y ago
  You've got me right backwards. My point was that the firearm made the state's absolute monopoly on violence (which you note) far more feasible, by substantially negating physical strength as a factor in deciding who has the monopoly on violence. That's probably a good thing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

bediger4000 4y ago

Archery co-existed with firearms in Chinese armies for a long time: https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.1677 https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.1677

hanafudafan 4y ago

What if we replace Hacker News with The Guardian?

parkingrift 4y ago

There will always be firearms. You can make them illegal but you can't make them stop existing. This is the fundamental problem with these types of suggestions. Switch to bow, it's safer! ...but the criminals (and anyone else) will keep using firearms. Comically absurd idealism about society and the world.

ToniCipriani 4y ago
And precisely what is wrong with gun control and mixing it into partisan politics. It's easier to address the means but not the root cause on why the crime was committed in the first place.
gigaflop 4y ago
Pandora's box was blown open with black powder. For those with means and motivation (money and machine tools), cheap automatic weapons can be somewhat-easily produced from plans and diagrams online, with parts that can be bought from regular industrial suppliers, or sometimes big-box hardware stores. Not naming the specific plans I've seen, of course. If someone wants to know, they can look for themselves. Quality is to be suspect, but if you only need to throw out ~20 rounds of 9mm at something that isn't very far away, it'll get the job done.

User23 4y ago

> Pulling the trigger of a firearm does not require any skill or practice. The author has clearly never shot competitively, even informally. Pulling the trigger is an essential marksmanship skill that very much improves with practice. A slight error will easily spoil one’s aim. One also must train oneself to not anticipate recoil during the trigger pull.

bluedino 4y ago

In the US, bows are usually not regulated. I can shoot a bow and arrow in my backyard, I don't have to be 150 yards from a building. I don't need a license, I don't even need to take a class. I can keep it in my car, carry it around with me, etc. I can shoot rabbits in my back yard with a bow, but I can't use a .177 air rifle. I can shoot carp from a canoe. Plus, with arrows being $30-$100 and the broadhead costing nearly as much, I'm not going to randomly fire it into the air on holidays. A crossbow on the other hand, doesn't work this way.

thwayunion 4y ago
Emphasis on the usually, though -- check your local laws before setting up an archery range on your back patio :)

sbate1987 4y ago