I think it's telling to look at what the design goals of the AK were when it was first conceived:
1) It was to be the primary weapon of the World Wide Socialist Revolution. That means it had to operate reliably in every environment on Earth, from the Siberian tundra to the jungles of Central America to the deserts of the Middle East. It would have to work flawlessly in a -50C blizzard and a +50C sandstorm, as well as in near 100% humidity while caked in mud.
2) It was to be cheaply produced by the million in not particularly advanced Soviet factories, by people who were not highly trained, then shipped to all corners of the Earth.
3) It was to be used by guerrillas, generally poorly trained peasants, fighting to overthrow professional US-backed armies (see: Cuba). Thus the rifle had to allow untrained fighters to go toe-to-toe with professional warriors, given the constraints of the fight as it was imagined: hit-and-run, ambushes, etc.
When you look at the number of design criteria it had to fulfill that had nothing to do with its merits as a marksman's weapon, it's amazing how well Kalashnikov achieved what he set out to do. The fact that it's still the primary weapon of insurgents, rebels, and terrorists 60+ years later is testament to that. As an engineering feat, it's an absolute marvel.
Slashdot declared the AK-47 one of the top 10 hacks of all time in 1999 (src: http://slashdot.org/story/8804 ) alongside Perl, Bletchley Park, the SR-71 Blackbird, Apollo 13's recovery, and Future Crew's "Second Reality." It's a little strange to see a PC demo on that list, but I would definitely put the AK-47 on there.
Minor correction: in 1947, when the AK was developed, World Wide Socialist Revolution, as you put it, was not on the agenda for quite some time. The idea of Soviet autarky (“establishing socialism in one particular country”) has been adopted by Stalin as far back as in 1924, the World Revolution slogan has been removed from the USSR Constitution when it was revised in 1936, and by 1943 Stalin has done away with Comintern, the organization which was conceived (by Lenin and Trotsky, originally) with the aim of propagating revolution to capitalist countries.
In 1947, USSR was indeed preparing for a possible World War III against the US and UK, but the general idea of this war, at least in the East, was that of a conflict of nations. That said, guerilla tactics and the involvement of irregular fighting forces had proved to be quite effective during WWII, and so, of course, the new weapon had to be designed with such uses in mind.
No pre ww2 research had proved in a number of places that a weapon smaller intermediate cartridge around 7mm was better that the traditional bulky long ranged rifle caliber weapons the SMLE for example - especially for non professional army with little training.
The AK was just good implementation of the concept and influenced by the German STG 44 and the use of SMG's like the PPSh-41 by Soviet forces.
the UK post Ww2 tried to move to this with the EM-2 .280 but was stymied by the USA's instance on retaining the macho full power rifle cartridge.
I have to confess that my knowledge of the history of weapons is rudimentary, so I gladly accede to your point; my previous remark only concerned Soviet geopolitics as it stood in 1947 vs. 1920.
And your point was correct, and sloppy of me. I knew that one of the reasons Trotsky split from Stalin was over Socialism in One Country (in addition to the growing bureaucracy), but I'd thought it was still always the plan to eventually spread socialism globally.
He simply made a good gun, not a weapon of revolution, and not a weapon for guerrilla armies. It was just a new gun for regular USSR army. Kalashnikov was a simple soldier during the WW2, so he knew very well that a new rifle: 1) has to be very reliable, 2) it has to shoot better than your enemies weapons, 3) it should be easily mass-produced in the time of war, when resources (of all kind) are scarce. These are the design goals.
Of course he created it for defence. Few years before he made the design Russia was invaded out of blue by an army with a goal to enslave whole nation. The plans of Nazis executed in Poland included systematically malnourishing nation to break the spirit and physique of young, giving no education to slavic kids except counting to 500 and learning to serve Nazis like gods. And this was actually executed. (add 16% of your population killed for no reason, gas chambers etc.)
Now experience all this like Kalashnikov did, and I guess you would think differently about the role of guns then most people do now in 2013.
Don't forget that the West apparently didn't mind Germany expanding eastward a little bit [1].
Also don't forget that the poor little nation of Poland didn't let the Red Army pass through to defend Czechoslovakia (quite reasonable considering that it took a chunk of the USSR territory not a long before that [4]) and it wasn't shy of getting a piece of Czechoslovakia too [2]. Quoting Churchill: "Poland which with hyena appetite had only six months before joined in the pillage and destruction of the Czechoslovak State" [3].
In this situation expanding the border westward can be viewed as a preventive war on part of the USSR.
If you an American this might remind you of the contemporary Bush Doctrine.
('gdy' is a karma 38 account, posting most of a day later.)
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact has been officially acknowledged by Russia since 1989. It is hardly honest to argue the innocence of USSR by blaming the victims.
"the treaty included a secret protocol that divided territories of Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland into Nazi and Soviet "spheres of influence", anticipating potential "territorial and political rearrangements" of these countries. Thereafter, Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. After the Soviet-Japanese ceasefire agreement took effect on 16 September, Stalin ordered his own invasion of Poland on 17 September.[3] Part of southeastern (Karelia) and Salla region in Finland were annexed by the Soviet Union after the Winter War. This was followed by Soviet annexations of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertza region."
That was about tactical considerations inside Downing Street at a specific point in time for a subset of the invaded countries!? (The access to this was from spying, not from signed documents with Soviet.)
And if the breaking of the pact was so expected, why was Soviet so utterly unprepared with so much of the air force etc standing inside bombing range? And so on.
As for your claim of irrelevance:
I argued against your excuses for invading and occupying countries. As a Western European, it makes me nervous to see these criminal attitudes in modern day Russia. If you want to make all countries within 1000 km of Russia to join NATO, you do a good job. (Except China, which really ought to occupy your interest more...)
This Downing Street's assesment of occupying Baltic countries validates my argument that it made sense from the strategic point of view. The same logic is perfectly applicable to the Poland occupation.
Criminal or not, you do what you've got to do to survive.
As a Western European you are probably okey with the idea of 10 or 20 more million of barbaric Russians dying as the result of not extending our borders to the West, but somehow I can't sympathize with that ;) Moreover, neither should you, for the war could've been lost completely. Unless your grandparents fought on the Nazi's side, that is.
You didn't touch the other expansions -- Finland etc.
So you seriously argue that it is a moral defense to invade countries and do anything, if it makes strategic sense. And you yourself decide how threatened you are... with a review generations later. Shudder.
You're really making a very, very good argument for joining NATO before we find out how non-democratic Russia will end up being. :-(
Considering art/math/etc, I would never call Russians of today "barbaric" so no straw man attacks please. (I implied that you spread typical propaganda to create external enemies for a thieving junta. That is scary from a big neighbor.)
And lots of people were murdered, raped, tortured and in general got their lives destroyed/enslaved by Soviet outside Soviet far after the WW, so don't play the loss card from 70+ years ago after one dictator turned on another. Especially when the Soviet dictator got more citizens killed than the war (hunger, shootings, etc). I really hope the poor Russian population don't get another 1984. :-(
Do you shudder when you think about democratic USA invading Iraq in order to prevent Saddam from passing WMD to terrorists sometime in the future?
I'm afraid right now it is you who is creating an external enemy (out of modern Russia). Can't argue about 'thieving' part, though ;)
How big is your 'lots' compared to a single Nazi concentration camp? Anyway, giving up the buffer countries on the western border after a devasting war had just ended would've been stupid from the strategic point of view.
Finland border was too close to Leningrad, as you might know, and the same logic applied there. The international law didn't defend any country from Nazi occupation and only few armies did.
Is it your argument that a country should obey international law, be occupied by Nazi's, get its population decimated in order to look good 70 years later? If not then what is it? How do you think things would have turned out if Nazi's offence had been just a bit faster? Would have the USSR lost Moscow and Leningrad? Would have Germany got access to the Caucasus oil?
Ok, let's compare your 'lots' to a number of people killed in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. The upper bound for it was 600000 in 2006[1]. By now it is much more, because violence there haven't stopped so far.
In case you are wondering, my position is that 1917's revolution was a tragedy and Russia would've been better off if it didn't happen, Stalin is a criminal etc. But the logic of moving border westward have nothing to do with it because I don't see any alternative scenarios not leading to bigger casualties on part of Russia.
BTW, you insistence on rightness of ignoring reality of German militarization only 20 years after the WW1 looks, well, strange too.
Finland was Soviet's, according to Ribentroff-Molotov. Soviet tried to invade. Far before Soviet was surprised by the attack from their Nazi allies, so you can't use that as motivation. Without Soviet's attack, Finland wouldn't have been in the war (read up on Wikipedia if you don't believe me).
It is just not defensible, even with your tolerance for preepmtive invasions.
I hope you troll when you argue it is correct to invade and enslave peaceful democracies, because a junta feels threatened... If you are paid to increase NATO supporters, you do a good job.
(I only read the first sentence, where you for the third time in a row ignored what I wrote re Finland and other areas not covered in your reference.)
As for the rest of my comment, I assume you just don't want to start thinking about these questions lest they cause cognitive dissonance and endanger your precious fixed point of view.
Your link does not support your claim that little Finland was planning an invasion of Soviet. Only that Soviet claimed to feel threatened(!) and faked a Finnish artillery attack (just like the Nazis did with Poland, btw) so they could declare war.
Sorry, you're just a dishonest apologet for one of the worst dictatorships in history or a troll.
Moreover, Finland right-wing government was supported by Germany in 1918 and prospect of Finland allying itself with German once again seems quite probable.
I can only repeat myself:
In case you are wondering, my position is that 1917's revolution was a tragedy and Russia would've been better off if it didn't happen, Stalin is a criminal etc., but the logic of moving border westward have nothing to do with this because I don't see any alternative scenarios not leading to bigger casualties on part of Russia.
They did, and so Great Britain and France pacted with Nazis to give in Czechoslovakia in "Munich betrayal" Czechoslavakia was an ally with Fr/GB agreeing to defend each other and they were much better prepared for war. In WW2 none of the main actors were innocent.
Similar situations, but different in the sense that Russia took Poland from a position of power, while GB/Fr gave up Czechoslovakia from a position of weakness and didn't make any territorial gains from it.
Another difference is relations to annexed territories.
Territories, annexed from Poland, had majority of population Eastern Slavs (Ukrainian and Belarussian), not Poles, were part of Russia for hundreds of years (except Galicia) and were annexed by Poland from Russia (Galicia from Austria) 20 years before.
The same is true of the Soviets - they were also hastily arming themselves. They were still training secret, massive armies in Siberia as the Germans approached Stalingrad, a city ridiculously deep in Soviet territory. They also had the massive officer purge of the late 30's to recover from.
That's true, in 1938 Britain wasn't ready to fight. Probably not in May 1937 when Chamberlain became PM either. But Chamberlain was a high government official (arguably #2 overall) from 1931. The fact that the British military was where it was, and the German military was where it was, in 1938 was partly his responsibility.
I'm biased by being a gun enthusiast and AK-variant owner myself, but I quite admire him as an engineer. It is an excellent design: simple, robust, time-proven, and easy to manufacture. Always a shame when great engineering is shadowed by violence, however. He has said that it should have been a weapon of defense, not offense. "It is painful for me to see when criminal elements of all kinds fire from my weapon".
A defensive weapon is typically designed to provide suppressive fire. Suppressive fire is typically high volume (think machine gun) and aimed over a larger area, with the intent of keeping the enemies heads' down (thus not firing), providing covering fire so that friendly forces can maneuver.
Fancy words there, but I wonder if you have any idea what you're talking about. The best way to stop someone is not to fire Rambo style over their heads and scare them away. The best way to stop someone is to land a bullet where it counts. I've never heard of a general retreat because they were shooting too many bullets over their heads. Armies don't advance in linear form. A squad formation isn't likely to be stopped by "suppressive" fire. And in urban combat, it seems like it would be an utterly useless strategy.
The difference between a well trained soldier and rabble is that soldiers don't lift their guns over their heads and fire. They look at what they shoot and they aim to hit the enemy.
I carried an M249. You do not hold the trigger down and shoot randomly with it aka "spray and pray". You shoot 2 to 3 round bursts for accurate shots. Also I think the original post I replied to was edited, but I'm not sure. It seems a lot more sane than what I originally remembered it to be when I replied to it yesterday.
The AK still is an assault rifle and will be used in such way. You seem to referring to heavy machine guns like German MG 1 or 2 which have far bigger magazines.
Also suppressive fire is not only an defensive strategy. It binds enemy troops and gives your troops the freedom to prepare an assault.
An old instructor of mine who was in logistics in Vietnam used to use suppressive fire to get his butt out of trouble. In fact, he used to say it was best to scare the enemy and not kill anyone in that particular situation. (His purpose was not to directly kill anyone.) He thought that killing someone's best friend was a great motivation for an enemy to go hero-mode on you, but instilling fear always worked out to his advantage.
Your instructor was so close as makes no odds to stating the only workable doctrine for a nation involved in a guerrilla war. Kill a man's brother, and he'll spend every breath from then until his last looking to kill you back; show him convincingly that his cause is hopeless, and you open the way to, if not friendship, then at least the possibility of coexistence without either side feeling it needs to engage in sporadic attempts at murder.
Funny you should say that. We used to think of him as jolly but affably mushy in the head. In retrospect, he was pretty wise, but he made no attempt to come across as being especially smart. I later related what he said to a retired Marine, who responded to the effect, that must've been an Army story -- his family had been joining the Marines for 3 generations to kill.
I recommend reading "on killing", a book about effects that killing has in soldiers and how it has evolved since WW2. The modern warrior-killer mindset and training is responsible for a great part of the PTSD.
Before this comment gets sniped a third time, I'll note that suppressive fire can just as well cover a unit disengaging from action as it can a unit preparing to move into closer contact.
I'll go further, and state that "defensive weapon" is a contradiction in terms and semantically null however applied. A weapon is a tool; offense and defense are perhaps the two broadest categories of the ways in which such a tool may be employed.
Nothing of the sort! A minefield makes a lousy area denial weapon, because it's consumable; every mine that goes off is one fewer between the attacker and the objective. It's a considerable obstacle, sure, but it won't stop an attacker; at best, it'll slow him down for a while. If he's really determined, it may not even do much of that; he might just order his infantry to march through the minefield anyway, which is a very effective if rather expensive clearing method. If he's really determined and also short of soldiers, he might do the same, but with a regiment of children -- Iran used this method during their war with Iraq in the 80s. Horrifying as it is, it does work.
No, the point of a minefield is to funnel attackers into predefined areas where you've arranged to bring your heavy weapons, specifically artillery or machine guns, to bear with best effect. These areas rejoice in the name "killing zones", and their purpose is to maximize the effect of said heavy weapons by concentrating their targets in a single compact mass which can be saturated with fire. Granted, being a static emplacement, a minefield can only be effective when someone has to go through it or find a way around it; that said, and while the point is certainly arguable, I have a hard time considering a weapon, whose sole purpose is to make it as easy as possible to slaughter one's opponents en masse, as being particularly "defensive".
Well, defense is simply killing your enemy when they're the ones who are attacking. It's hard to imagine using land mines to attack, while you nicely described how effective they can be to defend.
I suppose it depends on the scope in which you define the terms 'attack' and 'defend'. If I lay a minefield ahead of a position, so that it may better absorb and break a counterattack intended to slow or halt my invading army, then am I attacking, or defending, or both at once?
I'd say that you're defending at the tactical level, attacking at the strategic level, and then it all comes down to how much context you want to include when looking at the weapon. I could certainly see arguments for both.
Whether you are defending or attacking a gun's function is to fire rounds and kill or injure the target. With the exception of certain scenarios like riots, it gets that job done, and that's why armed forces, swat teams, and gangbangers all use them.
At a civilian level, AIUI law enforcement and the like tend to prefer shorter-range, more accurate weapons than the AK47. In a war situation I'm not sure how much difference there is.
Depends on the war. As I understand matters from the perspective of a civilian who reads a lot of history, the purpose of an assault rifle is to combine at least decent accuracy at medium to long range, so that on a battlefield you can shoot the fellow who's trying to shoot you while he's still a couple hundred meters thataway, with the sort of concentrated firepower previously only available from a machine gun proper, so that you can clear rooms in house-to-house fighting and otherwise deal with close-in situations which call for more firepower than a semi-automatic battle rifle can provide.
Violence is a key part of the human experience and unsurprisingly we devote tremendous intellectual resources to the task. Much of the history of engineering is devoted to facilitating violence. I never got engineers who tried to distance themselves from that aspect of the profession.
Excuse me if I'm too forward but I find that hard to believe. Do you really not get, i.e., not understant their position, as opposed to merely disagreeing with it?
I don't get how they do it. So much of engineering is just driven by the necessities of war. My degree is in aerospace engineering, a field that wouldn't be anything like it is today without war. Heck, we're communicating over the internet, a defense research project developed to help the U.S. military maintain communications in the event of nuclear war.
I can understand the wish to disassociate from that aspect of the profession--I don't understand how people do it successfully.
The situation into which you were born and the condition of your life are/were shaped by violent action. Ask yourself what your life would look like had the World Wars not happened, or had the UK not built an industrial empire based on forceful colonization, or had the American civil war never happened, as examples.
I'm not sure what your point is. A lot of negative factors contributed to the state of the world that we were born into. Are we supposed to accept these as essential elements of life and keep the status quo?
The point is that violence is key to your experience. You (and most of us postimg here) are just lucky enough to reap the benefits from a safe distance.
If he has set out to prematurely end yours, then it's certainly key to whether your experience continues beyond the point of decision or is abruptly truncated at that juncture, to say the least of the matter.
I designed parts for the cluster-bombs that ultimately were dropped on Libyan beaches and when I saw them "staked" into the ground, my hope was that they'd prove their worth as a deterrent - and that the beaches would remain empty of humans until they had all "gone safe".
I dunno, if I tried to do your job, I'd just feel like I was just flicking matches onto gasoline. I mean, it might just be possible that you guys are overdoing it on the defense and could spend a bit less time on the gun designs. I understand that things that go bang are fun, but you already have a reasonable number of different cluster munitions and have a large enough army to take on all the others at once, so I am not sure I see the excess utility to your society in spending too much time in designing a new one.
No ... this was in the late '80s or early '90s. We were a contract engineering shop and these were the only weapon parts we ever made. Most of my work was much more rewarding (Controllers for thermal storage systems, Opthalmic Ultrasounds, Controllers for nuclear reactors, etc).
Did you regret doing it beyond hoping that civilians didn't stray into the affected areas? Cluster bombs can be pretty indiscriminate and are often a major contributor to child injuries, while adults are less likely to go and play with random metal objects in a war zone, kids just aren't wary enough.
edit - I just don't know that the principle of deterrence works that well unless the person being deterred is sufficently informed, otherwise they are not deterred, they just end up dead.
There's still far more engineers out there building bridges than there are who work out how to blow them up. On balance, I think that is a good thing as otherwise there would be a shortage of bridges.
Another fine example of how smart people can also be so achingly naive and unworldly. Gee, who would've thought criminals would use a machine gun for offensive purposes.
At the time Gospodin Kalashnikov designed the weapon which brought his name to the world's attention, his nation had just suffered an invasion of Germans, which was repelled only at the cost of roughly twenty million of his countrymen's lives -- an invasion, moreover, against which Gospodin Kalashnikov himself fought, and was wounded, as part of a T-34 regiment -- and was by no means certain it would not soon suffer an invasion of far more numerous Chinese. In light of that, perhaps it's not so hard to understand how he could have conceived of his weapon as one of defense.
(It is, though, rather difficult to understand how you, or indeed anyone, could with a straight face describe such a man as "naïve and unworldly". Ignorance is the kindest explanation I can devise.)
I've seen it used, albeit not often, in a sense precisely parallel to that of the German Herr or the Spanish Señor, and it is that sense in which I use it. I have never found myself troubled by being regarded as old-fashioned, but if you know a term which would better serve my purpose, I'd be obliged to you for making me aware of it.
Salutations are just not that common in modern Russian. It used to be Gospodin or Sudar (сударь) before the Revolution, but these were forcibly replaced by Tovarish (comrade, or rather - friend). Then after collapse of Soviet Union tovarish died out and neither of old salutations came back.
In day to day life if you need to attract someone's attention, you'd use an equivalent of "excuse me", "hey" or "hello". In rare cases people would use "man" (мужчина) or "woman" (женщина), but that's very impersonal and frequently antogonistic, so most people avoid it.
In press and written language, it's just the last name, preceded by the position when appropriate. Sometimes they will use gospodin, but that would typically be reserved for pompous occasions and when referring to people at important positions, e.g. a president of a bank. And yet it still looks odd and catches the eye.
So in the context of your post it's just Kalashnikov. No gospodin.
Maybe. Criminals used guns even in USSR. There was little chance for a regular person - unless he's in the military or militia or like that - to use a gun for self-defense. Of course, that meant that many criminals didn't need to use gun - if the victim is completely defenseless, it is easy to overpower her without the need for a gun. But the criminals got the guns if they needed them, or made them - making a crude gun requires only basic tools.
Crude homemade are a problem in China, and producing is a capital crime (but they still get made). Suffice it to say, gun control is not a major issue in the PRC.
He was working for Stalin. The man is on a very short list for worst person of the entire 20th century, and it's a tough competition! The "criminal elements" are pikers in comparison.
His country had just been invaded by Nazis. Not to imply that Stalin was any better, but if Hitler invaded your country, killed a bunch of people and devastated the land, you might feel the urge to design weapons.
It was a no-holds barred war for survival from the POV of both sides; both sides being totalitarian states with fanatics in their ranks. A lot of the bad mojo of the 20th century is basically the fallout of that unimaginably violent and brutal war -- that is the "eastern" front between Germany and the USSR. Hitler's army was there to flat-out exterminate the populace to make room to support a growing population.
Battles where a huge chunk of a million men died in just a few days happened again and again and again. Of all the dying that happened in WWII, the Russians did a huge chunk of it.
However, pride in his invention was tempered with sadness at its use by criminals
This makes me wonder if when I am 94, people will look at me, a data scientist, in much the same way: "well of course AK-47 was not only used to defend Russia's border but also by criminals and militant countries to kill a ton of people"
:s/AK-47/your favorite AI algorithm/
:s/defend Russia's borders/some harmless ad targeting platform/
:s/criminals and militant countries/aggressive BigCo/
:s/kill a ton of people/something really evil/
Clearly, it's a lot easier to see the evil consequences when you design a rifle. And yet, maybe I'm just being blind too.
</technophobic comment. back to work on some convolutional neural network implementation, and back to job hunting at companies that promise "don't be evil", rather than "won't be evil">
Its comparative simplicity made it cheap to manufacture, as well as reliable and easy to maintain
I'd highly recommend "The Gun", a history of the Kalashnikov by New York Times journalist CJ Chivers. [his blog and articles are also excellent].
Kalashnikov-like guns are maybe comparable to the shipping container: relatively simple mass-produced objects that have transformed the world in all kinds of ways. Kalashnikov the man was only a small part of that (he was more figurehead than sole creator).
Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002
that over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed
metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated
while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when
guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been
buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili, a stretch of desert just
outside Shibarghan.
If I were to do it again, I'd use autonomous drones with buggy firmware, or just change the Rules of Engagement so that it was a free fire zone until I decided it wasn't.
We? Who is the "we" you're referring to? If you're an afghani, or a relative of Dostum, you can say "we." But this was an afghani atrocity, not one perpetrated by the West. And before you say that the CIA is connected due to their aid to the Northern Alliance, correlation doesn't mean causation.
Ask the hazara how well they were treated by the Taliban. This neck of the woods is full of people who make it a game to kill off their rivals. I wouldn't be surprised if the translation of "compromise" in pashto means "wait til we can kill all of them."
Thanks for the book recommendation, read it recently and liked it.
Also, for a more hollywood version (but still worth a watch), go see the "Lord of War" (2005) film. It touches upon a lot of topics in that book and impact of AK's on our world.
Interesting comparison, as shipping containers may also be used for nefarious purposes the world over, but it's not a thought that immediately comes to mind unless it's invited by comparing them with a cheaply mass-produced gun.
The difference between shipping containers and small arms is obvious. The potential for causing grave bodily injury and death is part and parcel of the primary intended use of a Kalashnikov. Other uses are simply byproducts.
The design and intended use of a shipping container stands in exactly the opposite relationship to the means of delivering violence.
I was just thinking aloud, rather than trying to make a compelling point. Just because the differences are obvious doesn't mean that the end use of a shipping container can't negatively affect a massive amount of people.
Title is slightly misleading...he invented the widely used AK-47. The first assault rifle was the Sturmgewehr 44 (StG 44) invented by the Germans during WW2.
Pretty much. Submachine guns had been around for years, and WWII saw millions of them, but it apparently never occurred to anyone to scale them up to use rifle cartridges. There were 4.5 million of this weird thing,
In street fighting, I can't imagine it being much worse than an AK 47 (at least in close contact)...and they cost 1/8th of an M1 Garand, so presumably a lot cheaper than what an assault rifle would cost.
As far as I know, the submachine gun has a somewhat different and simpler operating principle.
The assault rifle key invention is piping gas from quite far downstream the barrel to a piston that pushes the receiver back and makes it pick a new round. So you get delayed pushback. In a submachine gun with immediate receiver recoil you either lose a lot of gas or have to make the receiver heavy.
That's also why the AK47 looks like it looks, it has a "twin barrel" part way, that's where the gas piston is.
We live in a strange world. I guess because we are a strange species. Humans have been good at killing (each other) since the dawn of time (well... since we were able push, hit, bite, etc. each other). So I don't doubt that if it wasn't for AK-47 then something else would have taken its place but it is, nonetheless, a very creepy thing to have your name becoming popular thanks to the one of the most popular killing tools/machines out there.
He did mention in an interview once that he wished he had become famous for inventing an agricultural machine instead: "Blame the Nazi Germans for making me become a gun designer. I always wanted to construct agricultural machinery."
The BBC article I read on this mentioned something similar although it was more along the lines of he said didn't make any money from the gun, he would have been better off (made more money) by designing a lawn mower.
I'm pretty sure it didn't have anything to do with the money, but his desire to improve production rather than destruction. Here's an article with the lawn-mower comment you're thinking of: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jul/30/russia.kateconn...
Another comment of his (quoted in the thestar.com article above) suggests that he didn't think much of making money from inventions: "At that time in our country patenting inventions wasn't an issue. We worked for Socialist society, for the good of the people, which I never regret".
According to TallGuyShort's comment, he thought it could be used for defensive violence and was pained at the thought it was being used for offensive violence.
In the abstract, the Kalshnikov is interesting as a design which scaled well and that provided the right set of design trade-offs to remain a viable choice among small arms for more than half a century.
Indeed! By accounts Korobov's 1946 rival ( the TKB-408 ) was technically more sophisticated with more potential, but that ensnared it during testing and the AK passed. Excellence vs good enough.
Ten years later Korobov tried again with the 517 rifle, but again Kalashnikov prevailed with the AKM because of its commonality with the vast installed-base of AKs.
> By accounts Korobov's 1946 rival ( the TKB-408 ) was technically more sophisticated with more potential, but that ensnared it during testing and the AK passed. Excellence vs good enough.
TKB was prone to jams and had worse accuracy than the AK prototype. It also looked ugly. So the better design won, although it sounds dull ;)
It's pretty tough to reliably stop/disable somebody without at least a risk of killing them. Tasers still kill people every now and then, and their effectiveness is low enough that police usually only use them against unarmed people or with lots of backup armed with lethal weapons.
There is a trade-off, there, however. Someone is more likely to use a non-lethal weapon than a lethal one, including police, etc - but non-lethal weapons are still very intimidating.
With enough non-lethal weapons, it might make abuse of government power more likely, not less - training mace sprays and tazers on protesters is more acceptable than just mowing them down with bullets, but disperses crowds just as well.
Napoleon changed war with interchangeable people. Eli Whitney changed war with interchangeable parts. Kalashnikov changed war with interchangeable nations.
While I respect Kalashnikov and his rifle (very simple, among the best weapons in the world IMHO), the design was taken from the Germans, just like it was with the Makarov pistol.
The MP43 and MP44 saw action right at the end of WW2, when the Russians stormed Berlin. Just like the Walther PP, Russians basically copied and (slightly) improved upon the design.
From a mechanical action standpoint, the AK looks more like the American M1 Garand than it does the MP43/44.
> Just like the Walther PP, Russians basically copied and (slightly) improved upon the design.
You probably have a stronger case here, though, again, when it comes to the specifics, the Makarov has a parts count nearly half that of the Walther.
Really, firearms design is incredibly iterative. If we're talking service handguns, for example, there are really fewer than a half-dozen designs that nearly every modern, full size service handgun made today derives from in some manner.
I am not an expert on this area, but I have got impression, that the German WW2-era assault rifles had quite complex design and they were expensive to manufacture. I think AK47 was exactly the opposite.
While the two are somewhat similar in external appearance, the STG44 and AK47 are very different rifles internally. Basically the only thing they have in common mechanically is that they both use a long stroke gas piston, along with many other contemporary small arms (Garand, BAR, Bren, DP, etc).
It seems that the AK-47 invention is very similar to our open source software: open design (a lot of copy cat and improvement), no royalty pay, work everywhere , etc...
I think you're drastically overestimating how much action weapons see. Consider the amount of rifles belonging to collectors, military, how many are used in training, how many are in weapons stockpile.
Maybe 1 in 5 rifles have even been used in action. Probably 1 in 5 of those rifles have ever hit someone. It's going to be a number several orders of magnitude lower than 200 million that's for sure.
Even 2 million people is a loss of life hard for me to comprehend. The only way I can come to terms with that number is by thinking of it like: If I meet one new person each day, then I'll meet about 1000 people every three years. If I die 30 years from now, then I'll have met 10k people. In that circumstance, 2 million people is 200x more souls than I'll meet in the rest of my life. I'd have to meet two hundred new people each and every day for 30 years.
Kind of strange trying to wrap my head around such numbers. Maybe nonsensical looking at it that way, but it's the only way to look at it that hits me how each of these people who died were people with hopes and dreams and fears and loves. Some of those people were vicious wild animals; others may have been poets caught in a bad situation.
The Great Purge by the NKVD during Stalin's time was directly responsible for the death of almost 1.5 million people. Those killed indirectly (starved to death because of poor decision making by collectivist workers because the more intelligent people were jailed/killed) vastly exceeds that figure.
Zero; a firearm has neither agency nor volition. The question, in order to be sensible, would have to be one of how many people were killed, by other people, who used a firearm of Gospodin Kalashnikov's design to do so.
I proposed no interpretation in my earlier comment; I identified the fallacy in the comment to which I responded, and restated the intended question in terms which made sense.
"Killed by an AK-47" implies that, had the weapon been made unavailable beforehand, the killing would not have occurred. This has been tried many times in history. It has never worked. As I discuss in a comment elsewhere in this sub-thread, the range of human ingenuity is far too broad, and the human carcass is far too easily rendered inanimate, for the prohibition of one particular class of tools to bring about an end, or even a meaningful reduction, in killing. Banning firearms to save lives is precisely as absurd a proposition as banning hammers to prevent carpentry -- indeed, in a nation as historically awash with firearms as the United States, even more so.
Indeed not; implication does not depend on interpretation; it seems to me that p => q implies !q => !p regardless of any opinion I might venture to hold on the subject.
Perhaps I misunderstand. If so, perhaps you'll formalize the matter closely enough that I'm able to spot where I have gone wrong.
This is not formal logic; it is human language. Deciding that a particular sequence of words implies something is interpretation.
Yes, p => q implies !q => !p regardless of any opinion you hold. But you have decided that the original phrase means p => q, and that is interpretation. And one which is rather wrong, since everybody, including yourself, who reads the original phrasing will understand it differently.
You'll forgive me, I hope, for having tried to weasel out of this discussion without having to introduce the term 'propaganda', which is so loaded down with connotations at this point as to be practically useless.
I hope it's uncontroversial to state that the most effective way of steering political opinion is to establish a method of determining the terms in which political discussion is undertaken. (It should certainly be uncontroversial to state this to a progressive, whose political movement has more precisely formalized the concept than any other in recent history!)
In this line, one might promulgate a formula by which human agency is as much as possible elided from discussion of one particular method by which humans have been known to kill one another, in favor of the unstated but strong implication -- yes, that word again -- that the essential problem lies in the method, rather than in the untrammelled urge to kill. "Killed by an AK-47" is a sterling example of the type.
You argue that "everyone knows" what is meant by that formula, and I wouldn't presume to disagree with such a trivially obvious statement. But, in that case, I'm forced to wonder why anyone bothers with the obfuscation at all! What does it add, to the attempt to reason as accurately as possible about a phenomenon in order to enact laws intended to control it to the benefit of all, to use a form of words which suggests by its structure the absurd thought of a firearm floating around willy-nilly shooting people of its own accord? To whose benefit is this absurdity deployed?
It's not "obfuscation", it's idiomatic English. It's simply how people say things.
In another reply to me elsewhere, you said that you have no political purposes here. Why, then, are you so convinced that this phrasing is used for the purposes of steering political opinion, and why are you so offended by that notion?
I need not have political purposes of my own to recognize a device commonly employed in their advancement by those who do have them. Nor need I have political purposes in order to have desiderata with regard to those fields of human endeavor in which politicians, both amateur and professional, exert themselves. I've simply learned through unpleasant experience that there's no point arguing with the weather, or with City Hall. "Offense" isn't really the correct term; "resignation" is much closer. The rest is just bandying words around, a pastime I greatly enjoy for all its ultimate pointlessness.
* This has been tried many times in history. It has never worked.*
I am a supporter of the 2nd amendment, but for the sake of accuracy, gun violence in Australia was indeed reduced when they made gun ownership a lot harder there.
The societal cost of gun ownership is still a lot less than the societal cost of car accidents. I'm more concerned about the societal cost of playing fast and loose with amendments to the constitution.
That old saw. Okay, if you wanted to restrict the cutting of grass, you could do this by raising the hassle and expense of owning lawnmowers. Would this then result in an increase of other kinds of gardening and lawncare? Maybe. I'm not sure that's relevant.
The real harm that comes out of the so-called "gun debate" is a polarization of American society and a failure of both sides to recognize our legal and societal framework as a treasure everyone holds in common. Instead, both sides vilify each other and only talk to their own to showboat their intransigence.
As a programmer, I can certainly understand the frustration of pro-gun side. I'm very familiar with the ridiculousness of laws trying to restrict technology written by clueless politicians. Many gun laws fit into this category. I just can't see this situation being resolved in an attractive manner the way things are going now.
The solution? Get people actually talking to each other.
> The solution? Get people actually talking to each other.
Agreed, but at the same time, disparaging the OP for having to address rhetoric (that old saw) seems antithetical to that aim.
Yes, gun violence decreased in Australia when they banned guns. Violence did not. Violence, to me, seems to be specific enough an objective that specialization isn't needed. I understand why oncologists specialize in curing cancer, as that is their field of expertise. I do not understand why gun control advocates feel that specialization is necessary with violence, if the net effect is the same with or without them.
I believe that is the point that aaronem was trying to make; not that he was trying to be pithy.
For what it's worth, I'm pretty hard-line on the second amendment, and I see value in the second amendment as a tool for the preservation of freedom. If a law were passed that banned possession of a firearm that I already owned, and/or required a mandatory buyback of that firearm, I would probably become a felon for violating that law as I would deem that law unconstitutional. That said, if the 2nd amendment were repealed, I would cede my firearms. That doesn't necessarily say anything on its own, but frames the rest of what I'm about to say; which is that presumably, every responsible gun owner would also like to see a reduction in gun-related crimes, even more so than the average gun control advocates, and it boggles my mind that gun control advocates seem to focus on gun crimes specifically, to the detriment of all other forms of crime, while gun rights advocates seem to do the exact opposite. You'd think the tables would be turned, as gun owners have the most vested interest.
> and I see value in the second amendment as a tool for the preservation of freedom.
I hear that often. How do you see that happening? What is the reasoning? I wasn't born here and I keep hearing this point touted often. Maybe it is something obvious, I haven't learnt yet. They way I see it presented is "we have guns so we can preserve our Freedom". Freedom from who? Some seem to think it is from criminals taking our possessions, some think it is from government. Which one do you think of when you think "freedom".
If it is the later (and probably the more common interpretation), doesn't seem unreasonable that for guns to be a viable threat or worry-some thing for the government to fear, it would have to match the parity guns had in, oh I don't know, early 1800s? A group of 1000 militia men armed with guns vs 1000 government soldiers armed with guns. I can see that play out well. 1000 men armed with AR-15s vs a nuclear arsenal, tanks, helicopters, machine guns, an intelligence apparatus, total media and public transportation control, satellites, 100s and 100s of billions of dollars in budget. Why are guns even mentioned as a "protection of freedom" when Government is that one freedom is protected? Seems rather like a joke to me (but again maybe I am missing an obvious argument here).
Counter-arguments I can think of and heard before -- "oh but this would be a guerrilla warfare that is why AR-15 and hunting rifles and pistols would be effective", so "need a nuclear arsenal" doesn't apply here. My response to that is "how would guns help". Wouldn't it then be more about guerrilla tactics (or maybe terrorist tactics, depending which side is talking about it). IEDs, poisoning water supplies, sabotage, home-made rockets etc. And again there having or not having legal guns seems to make little difference. What am I missing?
> How do you see that happening? What is the reasoning?
There are numerous stories throughout history wherein firearms were used to protect against oppression. In some cases, those firearms were used against governments, nation-states, guerrilla forces, insurgents, etc. In other cases, they have failed. Regardless, the odds are dramatically skewed when one side has guns and the others don't.
Reductio ad Hitlerum, before "Germany" became "Nazi Germany", there was far less in the way of gun control. The regime prior to Hitler had made gun control a priority, so the citizen was generally not armed. Before Hitler began committing genocide against Jews, he actually loosened gun control regulations... for everybody that wasn't Jewish. I'll spare you the remainder of the details, with which I'm sure you're at least somewhat familiar.
Before Hitler, there was a Revolution in the 1700s from some would-be sovereigns that claimed Independence from Britain. Before that revolution, the redcoats attempted to seize the arms that would later become the implements of war by the militia. In some cases they were successful. In either case, Americans found that they hadn't been armed enough, and later had to entreat with France for more arms to be provided. Long story short, then America was born.
These are not particularly unique stories. There are many stories where governments have committed genocide en masse. There are less stories where those governments enacted gun control and disarmed citizens prior to committing that genocide. There are fewer still stories where those citizens were not disarmed, and of those, there are stories where the citizenry was able to escape from, defray, deter, or even prevent those catastrophes from occurring.
> doesn't seem unreasonable that for guns to be a viable threat or worry-some thing for the government to fear
Quite probably, yes. That doesn't mean that the gun will be the only implement. It's probably even more so now, but let's not forget how out-gunned we were compared to Britain. But despite the improbability, we won that. It's also worth noting that you might not be fighting against the federal government, but perhaps a local government, or rogue police officers. The "Battle of Athens"[1] occurred in the 40s, and was fought against a corrupt county level government.
> And again there having or not having legal guns seems to make little difference. What am I missing?
That the objective need not necessarily be "to defeat the US military". A successful outcome might be to defend against slaughter just long enough to escape, as some Jews did in Germany that had hidden their firearms from confiscation. A successful outcome might be to simply highlight that the US government is waging war to the general populace. There are a variety of successful outcomes between "die" and "successfully defeat the entire armed forces with my shotgun" that could be attained.
An all-out war between the federal government and the US citizenry is definitely a lop-sided battle. Drones operate out of range of being shot down, and even the assaultiest assault weapon does little damage against a tank or armored vehicle. That said, that's the least likely type of skirmish to occur. For 1) the US government isn't likely to declare any such type of war, nor could they easily justify it, even with media control. What is more likely to happen is something like the Japanese Internment, or a WACO style of incident. Even in those cases, our odds are slim of obtaining an outright 'win', but holding off attackers long enough for the media to catch on that the government is trying to kill you might be? Etc.
If your intent is to raise the hassle and expense of owning lawnmowers, then the effect of so doing on gardening and lawn care is entirely irrelevant. If your intent is to reduce the extent to which gardening and lawn care take place, it's entirely relevant. In such ambiguities originate the suspicions of the pro-lawnmower faction.
As regards the rest, I think you've got cause and effect mixed up; it seems to me not so much that the "gun debate", and similar "debates", polarize American society, as that what we call American society, and in particular the politics of the United States, revolve around a conflict between two fundamentally irreconcilable perspectives on -- well, on everything, more or less. A century and a half ago, this conflict erupted into open warfare, which concluded in a decisive victory for one of the two factions; while neither side has taken up arms in any meaningful way since, the conflict itself remains unresolved, and has simmered under the surface ever since.
On the other hand, the side which won that war I mentioned has done a sterling job of consolidating its gains and pushing to expand them, to the extent that it would be all but impossible for their opponents to pull off an upset by any conceivable means -- and God be thanked for that! It's the only thing which stands between our comfortable lives here in the United States, and chaos.
So, on the whole, I'm satisfied. Of course, I'd be happier still if I thought the winning side had a program with a snowball's chance of actually working when implemented on a platform of some three hundred million or so human beings, but I figure that, by dint of careful neglect of my health, I can more or less ensure that I won't be around to see anything worse than, at most, the initial stages of the collapse which I expect, in the fullness of time, will arrive. Sure, I could be wrong about that, but I don't think I am -- and, in the meantime, there's Calvados, and good fellowship among friends, and even a few programming languages to work in which aren't as terrible as the rest, and who can say fairer than that?
Not sure where you were going at the end there, but for what it's worth: modern day conservatives are not equivalent to the confederacy in the civil war. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.
The issues that polarize Americans today are very different from what they were 150 years ago.
What polarizes Americans today is exactly what polarized Americans then. Any given "issue", for example gun control, means precisely as much, in the context of that conflict, as Afghanistan meant in the context of the Cold War.
But you will note that at no point, in the comment to which you replied, did I give a name to either faction of which I spoke. This was quite deliberate. I have names for those factions. So do you. So does anyone who might take part in a discussion like this one. But those names aren't all that often the same, and even when they are, it usually turns out that each party has his own idea of precisely what they mean. Throwing names around, in my experience, tends very strongly to confuse the matter, rather than to clarify it.
That said, I'll grant I did not expect a comment like yours. Where did you happen upon the remarkable idea that "Republican", a century and a half ago, meant anything remotely similar to what it means today?
Doesn't seem weird to me — I sure as heck would be less inclined to assault someone carrying a firearm! I'd be surprised if "assault with a firearm" wasn't down, though.
"Killed by an AK-47" implies that, had the weapon been made unavailable beforehand, the killing would not have occurred.
This must be why all the armies of the world don't bother supplying their soldiers with firearms, since they're just as able to kill people with other methods, like perhaps a knife. Knives, of course, are much cheaper and easier to maintain. Facilitating something generally makes that thing more common.
It's curious that you've retreated into a polysyllabic fortress of formal logic, yet rely on absurdist analogies like banning carpentry, as if there's any demographic that even slightly wants that. The reason why it's hard to find something appropriate to compare in the common modern experience is because there's nothing else like firearms; nothing where the general public can have one member exert their will so forcefully over another. There's no such analogy to be fairly made.
"It's curious" is a polite way of opining that that which you call "curious" is foolish, ignorant, wrongheaded, evil, or some combination thereof. I'm curious which you mean in this case.
You strike to the heart of the matter when you describe a firearm as a means for one person to work his will upon another. This is true, but only in conjunction with the unstated assumption that the other so described has no similar means of defending himself. A man is not helpless against his enemy so long as both are similarly armed, but you render him quite thoroughly so when you disarm him -- which is precisely what you do when one man is an honest citizen, the other is a criminal, and you pass a law prohibiting the ownership of firearms.
The "it's curious" line is basically saying that anyone familiar with rhetoric and flowery terms is aware of the gaping holes in the formal logic arguments you're making. The floweriness is to throw off people not familiar with this kind of discourse. I understand that it's also for fun, though.
A man is not helpless against his enemy so long as both are similarly armed, but you render him quite thoroughly so when you disarm him
Here is a fundamental difference between how we see the world. You see the world through the eyes of the beseiged, us and them. Those people out there want to get me. They are my enemy. I must be able to destroy them, I must be able to project my power and keep what is mine. There are 'honest citizens' and 'criminals' and never the twain shall meet.
I see the world as 'we're all in this together'. People do shitty things, but we can reduce the total number of shitty things by working to improve everyone's lot. If someone does a shitty thing, instead of treating them like a criminal and making them worse, work towards rehabilitation.
I pay my taxes. I show up 9-5 for my work. I don't get in people's way. If someone has a turn for the worse in the street, I usually step in and help. This morning I evaded my public transport fare, as I did last night. Am I an 'honest citizen'? Am I a 'criminal'? If I were to obtain a firearm, would the 'honest citizens' around me be right to feel threatened? People are not separable into these two polar groups.
There is hysteria on both sides of the gun debate - and the pro-gun side's version is to paint the world in this ridiculous shades of the brightest white and the darkest night. Either for us or against us. It's a particularly weirdly conformist point to push, given that the same people are usually the same folks trumpeting personal freedom (not that you have been here)
Thank you for explaining to me how I see the world. I always appreciate it when someone goes to that effort on my behalf, especially unasked. I must concede I'm no logician, but then I never know quite how to approach these debates; as you've noticed, I greatly enjoy rhetoric and incline very strongly in that direction, but it's a form which has been roughly handled of late by the partisans of what is called "social science", and the trappings of rigor are frequently necessary in order to have a conversation with that sort at all. (Though I wonder whether "conversation" is really the word.)
The use of "honest citizen" and "criminal" was an instance of extreme imprecision on my part, brought about by unnecessary haste to reach my point, and you're right to pick on that. I could much more usefully replace those terms with "one who seeks to contribute to society" and "one who seeks to parasitize society". While still imprecise, those phrases come much closer to the heart of the distinction I draw.
You will no doubt take exception to that latter phrase in particular, and I don't blame you; "parasite" in description of any person is an extremely loaded word. Let me respond in kind by noting that "rehabilitation" is the wrong term for your meaning. To rehabilitate someone is to restore him to an ability which he previously lacked. But someone who is not able to obey the law, be he willing or otherwise, is not someone our society generally regards as criminal, because he cannot accurately be said to have possessed mens rea -- in other words, he lacks the capacity to know that what he is doing is unlawful. For some who break the law, this is true. For many, many more who break the law, this is not true in the slightest; most who break laws choose to do so, whether they conceive of themselves as having done so or otherwise.
Such a person need not be "rehabilitated", because his problem is not that he is unable to behave in accordance with the requirements of society, but rather that he chooses to do otherwise. The process through which he needs to go, in order to be restored to society's good graces, cannot therefore be accurately called rehabilitation; unfortunately, I'm not sure that our modern vernacular has a word which does describe that process. In days gone by, this process was considered one of penitence, hence the old name "penitentiary" for that institution which we now call a "prison".
Moreover, I consider the rehabilitative model a grave insult against the human dignity of most who commit crimes -- specifically, all those who commit crimes while being able to behave otherwise should they so choose. You seem to regard these people, more or less, as though they were ill, or perhaps mentally disabled; in other words, you consider them as bereft of either the necessary volition to behave other than in a criminal fashion, or of the necessary reason to differentiate behavior which accords with society's requirements from behavior which does not.
The Soviet travesty of criminal justice, for at least a considerable part of its existence, regarded its dissidents in precisely this fashion, and labeled them with a variety of pseudo-psychiatric diagnoses in an effort to explain the supposed insanity which rendered them unable to recognize the obviously ongoing triumph of dialectical materialism. You may have heard the phrase "sluggish schizophrenia"; in this enormity it has its origin, and I'm sure you can imagine what life became for those misfortunates who fell foul of the Soviet state in this fashion. Years prior, during the eugenics fad in the United States, a family history of criminal behavior was considered grounds for sterilization, in order to prevent whatever genetic traits led to such misbehavior from propagating further.
Do I seek to slander you by these invidious comparisons? I do not. I seek merely to place in sharp relief some historical consequences of the way you look at criminal behavior, in order to help demonstrate the essential difference between my attitude toward that subject and yours. Specifically, where you by default regard someone who has committed a crime -- "done a shitty thing", in your formulation -- as being unwell or mentally disabled and therefore in need of custodial care to restore him to full health, I by default regard him as having made a choice to behave as he has, and, until he demonstrates otherwise, being just as fully equipped as anyone else to choose to behave otherwise. The former, if I may borrow a term from the vernacular of the social sciences, dehumanizes him; the latter instead exalts that sine qua non of humanity, the ability to make moral choices, that which Catholics call the indwelling Holy Spirit, which Quakers call the Inner Light, and the existence of which even those au courant with the most modern atheistic agnosticism recognize, even if they tend to lack words with which to name it.
Let me finally address the siege mentality under which you seem wrongly to believe I labor. When I speak of "enemy", I refer not to some nebulous Lacanian Other, but instead to the man who is not satisfied merely to mug someone on the street for his wallet, but feels it necessary to answer any resistance with a knife, or a gun, or worse indignities still. I've been fortunate thus far in never having fallen foul of such men myself, despite having lived in some of the less delightful areas of a city generally regarded as not particularly safe. Not all my friends and acquaintances have had the same good fortune. I acknowledge that this somewhat prejudices my perspective on the matter. No doubt firsthand experience would prejudice my perspective still further. Should it not be so? Do you ask that I not merely vow allegiance to your principles, but value those principles more highly than I value my own life and unpunctured carcass? You are of course welcome to make whatever decision in that regard you find meet, inasmuch as it concerns your own meat; I'll thank you not to tell me how to dispose of mine, it being the only one I've got and a whole life's worth of use to get out of it.
Perhaps you believe it is possible to render firearms unavailable to men of such ilk. While that belief seems optimistic at best given the commonality of firearms in the United States, we need not stipulate in either direction to acknowledge that, be he able or unable to lay hands on a gun, he will certainly have no difficulty in finding a knife.
Perhaps you believe it is possible to empanel a sufficiency of police officers to ensure that such men are unable to pursue their fell trade. This has been tried. It has never worked. I see no reason to imagine it will ever work. The police we do have, God protect them, have among themselves a saying: "When seconds count, the police are there in minutes." And even if it were possible so to multiply their ranks, it is inherently enfeebling of self-respect and self-determination to be dependent, for such a basic need as the integrity of one's own corpus, on another human being -- the condition of a child, not that of an adult.
I have no general fear of my fellow man; as far as I can tell, everybody's just trying to get through the day, the same as me, and why not? But if my fellow man should start to think that the best way for him to get through his day might be to interrupt mine with a demand for my wallet and a weapon at the ready should I presume to demur, I am very much in favor of the idea that he should be afraid of me -- not because I mean him harm, which I do not, but because he recognizes that, should he offer me harm, I'm just likely to see him and raise him.
Is this an ideal state of affairs? Of course not, but no ideal state of affairs is attainable in any case -- that's what "ideal" means. But I greatly prefer the situation I describe to one in which, should my fellow man take it in mind to behave toward me with fell intent, he feels free to do so unencumbered by any shadow of concern that his intended victim might ventilate him, instead. Were that state of affairs more general, I misdoubt I'd have fewer friends with scars.
When you say things like this:
Thank you for explaining to me how I see the world. I always appreciate it when someone goes to that effort on my behalf, especially unasked.
it behooves you not to say things like this:
You seem to regard these people, more or less, as though they were ill, or perhaps mentally disabled; in other words, you consider them as bereft of either the necessary volition to behave other than in a criminal fashion, or of the necessary reason to differentiate behavior which accords with society's requirements from behavior which does not.
The modifying word 'seem' is merely a weasel word. Here what you are doing is telling me how I see the world, something that you will not accept about yourself, 'especially unasked'. Each of us has stated how the other person appears to see the world - you take exception to this being applied to yourself, though.
To rehabilitate someone is to restore him to an ability which he previously lacked
Much of your argument rests on this faulty definition. 'Habilitate' means 'to make fit or capable'. In a legal context, a person is a capable member of society until they perform an antisocial act, a criminal act. Re-habilitation means making that person a capable member of society again. Your definition doesn't even make internal sense, because you can't restore something that has not yet existed ('previously lacked').
Antisocial behaviour is also not limited to crimes. Someone can become an alcoholic, cutting off their loved ones, and undergo rehabilitation to restore them to their previous capacity. Hence why I formulate it as 'done a shitty thing' rather than focus simply on criminals.
I by default regard him as having made a choice to behave as he has, and, until he demonstrates otherwise, being just as fully equipped as anyone else to choose to behave otherwise.
This statement betrays your near-complete lack of understanding of human psychology, and also mental illness. One part of rehabilitative work is to help the person understand how they're making patterns of bad decisions without realising it, in an unconscious way. The idea that everything we do is a conscious, premeditated choice is pure pablum. Simple evidence that people have trouble choosing to behave a certain way by simple fiat lies in the low success rate of diets.
It's really quite a bizarre point for anyone familiar with the topic (myself formally trained, also worked in neurology) to see put forward. People are not capable of making decisions to the same degree, for a host of reasons, even simple education. People often don't see the harmful patterns in their lives because sometimes they're simply unaware of the existence of such a thing. One example might be yellow journalism - it's harder to fall prey to it once you've been educated in statistics, journalism, or one of a few similar fields. But if you don't know the tricks they use, you can't really counter them since you're not aware of them.
Do you ask that I not merely vow allegiance to your principles, but value those principles more highly than I value my own life and unpunctured carcass?
Criminology is actually pretty clear on the point. If you rehabilitate people rather than ostracise them, there are fewer punctured carcasses overall. The problem with your argument style is that it's similar to the pro-gun lobby: it focuses solely on the individual situation. "If X happened, I'd want a gun!". The thing is, with a better, more inclusive society, "X" happens far less frequently.
By making histrionic personal appeals as the pro-gun lobby does, you distort decision-making. It's an open secret that prisons in the US take minor offenders and make major offenders out of them; making decent jobs harder to get, exposing them long-term to harder criminal contacts, and reinforcing the social divide between your 'honest citizens' and 'criminals'. Sure, if someone came at me with a knife, I'd like a gun. But I'd rather them not come at me with a knife in the first place. Stop crime at the source, the motive, rather than at the last step before it actually happens. An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
Perhaps you believe it is possible to empanel a sufficiency of police officers to ensure that such men are unable to pursue their fell trade. This has been tried. It has never worked.
When, in the US? "Never worked" suggests multiple attempts. It's certainly worked outside the US, in Australia.
And even if it were possible so to multiply their ranks, it is inherently enfeebling of self-respect and self-determination to be dependent, for such a basic need as the integrity of one's own corpus, on another human being -- the condition of a child, not that of an adult.
This is patent nonsense. We are a society, and we are all in this together. The only way I would accept this comment from you is if you were a fully self-sufficient recluse living in the woods somewhere. Do you live only on food you grew yourself? Drink only water you collect yourself? Clothe yourself only in self-made clothes? Use only your self-made fuel for heating, should the climate require? Self-treat all medical issues, from headaches to broken bones? Transport yourself using only your feet or self-made items? If not, then by your own definition, you dependent on another human being for a basic need and are therefore a child, with thoroughly enfeebled self-respect and self-determination. And even if you are such a self-sufficient person, pretty much everyone else in the developed world is not, along with pretty much everyone who isn't a subsistence farmer/fisher in the developing world.
The short form of the argument is that the US currently does exactly what you're claiming is the right way: fuck the criminals and arm the populace. It doesn't work. 1% of US adults are in prison. The US has an incarceration rate of 750/100k - all other Western democracies are between 70 and 150, except for New Zealand at 200. The US is a clear outlier. It still has a higher violent crime rate. Its murder rate is four times that of its contemporaries. It's creating a hardened underclass that doesn't have access to the self-respect and particularly not the self-determination you so value. The extreme demand on the public purse for prisons stops beneficial infrastructure projects from being developed. You try to make me sounds Soviet in my outlook, hoping that the reflected anti-glory taints what I say, whereas I am more "other western democracies" in my outlook.
You have excellent rhetoric, but the underpinning arguments are faulty to their core. I would also encourage you though to drop the every-example-person-is-a-man thing, particularly when you're making the argument that everyone should be master of their own destiny.
Edit: cut out a few quote/response stanzas to shorten things
Phrasing it that way puts the weapon in the foreground of the reader's mind and the shooter in the background. That may be the the grandparent's intent, but if not, "with" might be preferable to "by".
Given that there would be no discussion to be had about this or any weapon absent there being people ready and willing to employ them, it hardly seems sensible to argue about weapons as a proxy for arguing about the uses to which people put them.
So, should we never talk about things without also talking about the people? Do we need to word every discussion about computers as, "When a person using a computer accesses the hard disk..."?
You would be surprised. There's a lot of politicians and regular people campaigning about "gun violence" and making guns, or even specific types of guns - not people using them - the centerpiece of their position. It seems to me, they think those guns posses some quality that make them - and not persons using them - evil.
That's nonsense. It merely implies that they think focusing on the tools is more effective than focusing on the people using the tools. That may or may not be good strategy, but it hardly implies that they think the guns are "evil".
Roughly nobody thinks that guns go out and murder people all alone. There is a person pulling the trigger, and everyone knows this. The only reason people pretend as if other people somehow "don't know" this is because they want to shape the conversation for political purposes by painting their opponents as morons.
Morons may be too harsh a word, but I've encountered a number of people that think removing a tool and leaving everything else intact would solve the problem.
>>> Roughly nobody thinks that guns go out and murder people all alone.
Oh, of course nobody thinks literally that. But many think if they said "guns are not allowed", there would be no people murdering other people using guns. And they concentrate their efforts on guns, not murderers, to the point of sometimes ignoring the murderer altogether.
Thinking that removing all guns would solve the problem of violence, or that outlawing guns would actually remove all guns, is a completely different notion from the question of whether people think guns are "evil" or they somehow kill absent someone holding them.
I appreciate your attempt at slander, but please allow me to offer my assurance that I have no political purposes, here or anywhere else. The politics of the United States are degenerate in the extreme, in the technical sense of 'degenerate' meaning roughly 'disordered beyond the point of self-regulatory mechanisms to repair'; having found in the past that my participation in them redounds to no benefit for anyone including myself, I no longer involve myself.
I still like a good argument, though. In fact, that's no small motivation for my disengagement from politics -- in that realm, you can't have a good argument! Everyone takes everything so personally -- it was when I lost a second friend to political differences that I started to suspect a problem with the entire enterprise. In any case, a good argument is all I'm here for; if you've got some sort of political point you'd like to make on the topic, please, by all means, don't let me get in your way.
Now that you mention it, I forgot a second category of people who act like people think guns go out and kill by themselves: those who treat human discourse as a purely logical exercise and who legitimately think that "killed by a gun" implies that the person who pulled the trigger was superfluous.
> It seems to me, they think those guns posses some quality that make them - and not persons using them - evil.
This proposition is entirely uncontroversial among a quite large segment of the polity. I'm afraid I must confess to a certain poverty of imagination in that I have never understood, and never hope to understand, why this is. I do, though, from my experience with people who consider the proposition tautological, recognize a strong correlation between holding that opinion and not having any personal experience with firearms of any sort.
This contrasts with my own experience in that, having grown up rural, I have known since earliest childhood that firearms are useful tools, no more dangerous if handled according to elementary safety rules than any other power tool, and further that shooting is a skill whose acquisition and maintenance can be quite enjoyable for its own sake -- in short, firearms have never had any mystique for me, and I have the strong impression that that's the distinction between those who can reason about firearms as they can about any other tool, and those who consider firearms to inhabit some magical special category of their own, which is not meaningfully comparable to any other.
> Approximately nobody who reads "killed by an AK-47" understands this to mean anything besides "killed by a person firing an AK-47".
To be fair, there are people like Piers Morgan and such that are effectively making statements that all but insinuate the gun as the responsible party.
I don't disagree that the OPs distinction is unnecessary to reasonable people, but on both sides of the argument, where guns are concerned, arguments are not necessarily reasonable, and I wouldn't fault him too terribly for trying to enforce clarity in the discussion.
You are wrong. It is not even a question of perspective or moral position. For something to kill me that something does not need to have agency or volition, it simply has to cause my death. A volcano or an asteroid certainly have neither, and yet they are quite capable of killing. 'To be killed by something' can imply a relation of causality just as much (or more) than one of moral responsibility.
Stop trying to distort the meaning of natural language to suit your specific political agenda.
You are yourself partaking in distortion by downplaying the original question's implication of moral responsibility.
Why does it matter how many death this particular design has caused, in particular in the context of its inventor dying, as opposed to the myriad of other gun designs, if not to imply moral responsibility?
In days gone by, such events were described as "acts of God"; today, they might be called the result of random chance, or of emergent behavior in a system seeking the lowest energy state available to it. Either way, they are not germane to the point under discussion here.
Sounds like a BS way to change the argument. I don't think the parent poster was suggesting that these guns somehow rose up and chased down another person to have them killed. We all understand people were the root cause. Guns don't cause violence but they definitely help.
I've spent time in Iraq as a soldier and a contractor. I've personally used a blade and a firearm against another human being. As a civilian I own an assault rifle and a pistol because I am very confident in their abilities over knives and my hand to hand skills.
I do not wish to seem disrespectful or presumptuous in arguing with one who has so much more experience in these matters than I. But does it matter, to a dead man, precisely how his carcass came to be rendered inanimate? Does it matter to the man who killed him, beyond perhaps the degree of effort required, what sort of tool he used to do so?
That's such a BS comment that gets trotted out every time something like this is discussed. It's meaningless. The invention of the AK47 and its ease of manufacture led to its proliferation which led to more people being able to kill than would otherwise have been possible. Don't wilfully ignore the underlying message by using bullshit quips.
This (the "no difference between AKs and machetes" stuff, which you seem to have edited out) would be a telling response, except that the Hutu had AKs; they did their killing with machetes not because machetes were all they had, but because machetes were what they preferred.
Thank you, all the same, for helping me boil down this argument to its very bones. I'm talking about killing; y'all are talking about guns -- but there doesn't seem to be a general recognition of the distinction between the two. I've flailed in the direction of recognizing that distinction before, but thinking about your response was just what I needed to put my finger squarely on it. Thanks again! I greatly appreciate that.
So, in absolute, nothing is good or bad, until you decide how to use it. So nothing should be banned, illegal, etc. until somebody does something wrong it it. Then we can catch and charge that person. This doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
You're not going to use a fire-arm to water your plants. You know its purpose when you see/buy/own one. Fair enough, one doesn't need a fire-arm to kill someone but making the killing much easier with a fire-arm cannot be considered innocent or neutral.
You will find, sir, that the challenged party is universally given the privilege of selecting the weapons to be used in a duel; otherwise, it would be far too simple to challenge someone to duel with a weapon with whose use you are supremely competent and he is entirely unacquainted, the result being no sort of contest at all but rather a sort of murder under color of long-cherished custom.
Of course, yours isn't intended to be taken as a genuine challenge, but rather as some sort of rhetorical point. I fear, though, that said point entirely escapes me. You seem to be attempting to argue that a firearm makes a more effective weapon than a human carcass, a point on which I cannot imagine there is any controversy; I do not, though, see how that bears upon the statement that no weapon aims and fires itself, independent of human agency -- or do you contend that the AK-47, in addition to all its other fine qualities as a weapon, can do this as well?
Can a duel really be considered murder, though? At least, assuming the case where both participants voluntarily agree to participate, it seems an open question to me.
Today, an honorably executed duel would be considered murder, no matter who won. Two hundred years ago, such would not be the case. I can't say which style of jurisprudence on the matter is better; I can't even define a standard of 'better' against which to evaluate them. But a duel certainly seems like a decisive method of settling an otherwise irreconcilable point.
Chicken or the egg is quite easy to solve. It's the egg.
"Since DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) can be modified only before birth, it can be argued that a mutation must have taken place at conception or within an egg such that a creature similar to a chicken, but not a chicken, laid the first chicken eggs."
I cannot downvote you enough. This is a bullshit line of thought that detracts from the actual discussion. "Guns don't kill people... Toast toasts toast..." Please. Stop.
We can discuss whether guns as a concept have a place in our society, but you spun up a discussion on semantics when none is warranted.
Can you downvote me more than once? If so, please feel free.
A gun is a tool, not a concept. You seem no less inclined to argue semantics than I; the difference is that I don't consider a semantic argument, and a meaningful argument, mutually exclusive. Perhaps I'm wrong in that.
The problem is that your initial comment is a rephrasing of an often repeated cliche that "guns don't kill people, people do". This then leads to a giant discussion of what is really meant by this. We start comparing guns to forks, saying that "forks can kill people! Should we outlaw forks?!" Someone then points out that forks have other uses, while guns have only one use.
The problem is that a whole lot of breath is wasted on this straw man argument just to get to where we were before: that guns are a very effective tool for killing humans and nothing else.
Personally, I am as you may have guessed for outlawing nearly all gun ownership. Outside of muzzle loaded hunting muskets nobody, not even the police should carry guns. The second amendment does not, as I read it, apply the way that the NRA interprets it, and even if it did, I would argue that it is in the 21st century a terrible idea. The original intent, defending against a tyrannical government, no longer applies as the government can now simply use a drone and a hellfire missile to take out any rebel force. And guns do more harm than good on US soil just as surely as CO2 does for global warming. I do not believe that any amount of education would prevent tragedies like Sandy Hook, and the NRA will not allow anyone to impose any type of compulsory background checks, etc. the solution it seems is to eliminate the single point of failure of this system: the guns. Australia did this and their mass shootings have decreased to zero or nearly zero since.
You, sir, stimulate my stunted capacity for amazement at the blithe and careless foolishness of which my fellow men are capable -- no mean feat, that, and I salute you for it.
Let us proceed from there to demolish your argument. You declaim as follows:
> guns are a very effective tool for killing humans
This is quite true.
> and nothing else
This, on the other hand, is false to the point of absurdity.
There are many, many people, in parts of the United States where the endless cornucopia of Uncle Sam's largesse unaccountably fails for the most part to reach, for whom a few hundred pounds' worth of venison in the freezer means the difference between a winter depending on whatever scant charity happens to be available, and a winter free of worries about where the kids' next meal will come from.
(I realize, of course, these people are neither fashionable nor well represented in any debate on this subject, but they are my family and the people among whom I grew to adulthood, and they mean considerably more to me than, for example, you do.)
In any case, this leaves your point, to borrow Artemus Ward's delightful phrase, in "ruther a shattered state." It hinges, after all, on the assertion that "guns have only one use," which I concede would greatly simplify the matter, were it only true. Since it is not, the concession means effectively nothing.
I could leave the matter thus, but I can't quite resist picking out one more howler, in order to demonstrate how little it does to improve your argument:
> muzzle loaded hunting muskets
Have you ever tried to hit what you aimed at with a muzzle-loader? Have you ever tried to shoot your supper with one? For that matter, have you ever fired any sort of firearm? Had you done, you'd likely have a better grasp of the fact that muzzle-loaders have precisely the same relevance to modern hunters as, say, a TI Explorer might have to a modern full-stack web developer -- specifically, they are far from common and mostly owned by collectors, and their competent use is a niche skill which mostly nobody bothers to attain any more, because there are much more expedient means available to produce the same result. Whether you recognize the existence of these drawbacks, which inhere in the act of discarding a century and a half of innovation in hunting technology, has no slightest effect on the reality of them -- not, of course, that they would affect anyone you care about, am I right?
And in closing, a cavil, but an amusing one: If you're so red hot on the subject of banning guns, then why describe yourself in your HN profile as a "gun for hire?" Is your ultimate desire that you should put yourself out of business, sir?
I appreciate the lengthy response and the wit you put into it. You are right on some points but not others. First, muzzle loaders are having a quiet comeback. My state has recently added them to the hunting season. I am in fact looking to get into hunting for various reasons and believe that we should support hunters as they provide a valuable and ethical service. And perhaps restricting hunting to muzzle loaders is taking things too far. Instead, maybe specific types of hunting rifles, bows, and crossbows should be allowed.
However, you would have a very hard time convincing me that assault rifles, grenades, hand guns, SMG's, and other such weapons have anything to do with hunting. Those are the things that must be outlawed to prevent or at least reduce the number of mass shootings in the US.
I had some concern that my rhetoric, in my comment preceding yours, was a bit overheated. I stand by it, but I am nonetheless nigh unto delighted that you look past the form to find the substance -- to say nothing of the fact that you seem willing to give that substance honest consideration, something I've found regrettably rare in discussions of this nature. For all of this I thank you very kindly; many, many others, who in general share your opinion of the matter, would do very well indeed, in discussions such as these, to model their behavior upon your sterling example.
Now, then: For a private citizen to possess grenades, bombs, or other such weapons, is already felonious under the "destructive devices" provision of the National Firearms Act. Explosives in general have industrial use, but are not much less tightly regulated all the same; however, taking a lawfully obtained explosive and fashioning it into a weapon, such as a grenade or bomb, brings it under the auspices of the NFA.
The NFA also very strictly regulates fully automatic weapons to the extent where legally coming into possession of one is, for most purposes, effectively impossible. Manufacture of such weapons is similarly restricted, and the law on this point is quite uncompromising; should a weapon in your possession, even through malfunction, fire more than one round on a single squeeze of the trigger, it is considered to be an automatic weapon, and your possession of it therefore necessarily in violation of law.
I'd argue that these provisions do a great deal to demonstrate the effectiveness of the gun laws we have. The use of improvised explosive weapons is rare, albeit often striking when it does occur (e.g. the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma federal building); the use of automatic weapons in mass shootings is practically unheard of.
Handguns, believe it or not, actually do have some application in hunting. I mind me of a man I once knew who used one to hunt wild boar, which is sort of a porcine equivalent of the wolverine, only larger, nastier, and a lot harder to kill. To hunt boar, you find one, attract its attention, and induce it to charge -- something which I gather boars' general disposition makes fairly trivial. Then, ideally before the creature approaches closely enough to disembowel you, you shoot it in the head. As you may imagine, this requires an easily maneuvered weapon which throws a heavy round: "What happens if you miss?" I once asked him. "Well," he said, "then you're fucked."
Amusing anecdotes aside, from the perspective of the current discussion, handguns do admittedly pose a somewhat stickier problem.
For one thing, I'm not sure anyone really has need for items such as the 33-round magazine Jared Loughner used in the Tucson shooting two years ago; such high capacities strike me mostly as a sop to relatively incompetent shooters. (A competent shooter should be able, having spent some effort developing the skill, to reload a semiautomatic handgun and resume fire in something like two or three seconds. That capability doesn't render magazine capacity irrelevant, but it certainly renders it less so.)
In fact, I'd almost be willing to consider practicable a general ban on semi-automatic handguns (i.e., not revolvers). The trouble is that such a ban would of necessity be uneven in application; lawful handgun owners desirous of continued compliance with the law -- which is to say, more or less all lawful handgun owners -- would turn in their handguns, while those not so concerned would retain them.
This problem generalizes well, I think, across any sort of law prohibiting firearms of a certain type, class, &c.; specifically, there is a strong correlation between someone being likely to use a firearm in the commission of a crime, and someone who will not comply with a legal requirement that he turn in the firearm he would otherwise use in the commission of a crime.
There are, for better or for worse, a lot of handguns in this country. To not only ban them, but have any assurance of collecting most of them from legal and illegal owners alike, would require the sort of police action which would set civil liberties hardliners howling from now until the Last Trump, and not incidentally would itself require either an enormous expansion of police forces, or a nationwide deployment of National Guard and regular Army forces of the sort more ordinarily employed, in much more strictly limited scope, for suppression of civil disorder on the scale of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. And I'd be entirely unsurprised to see such action provoke riots, and nasty ones at that, among those who, we might euphemistically say, see their firearms as a way to enforce the redress of social inequality. Speaking as one who lives near to, and works nearer to, an area in which such riots would occur if anywhere, I'd just as soon avoid them, thanks.
Practicalities aside, though, even many hardline gun-rights advocates agree that a revolver is in many ways more serviceable for personal defense than a semi, for several good and sensible reasons. But that's just the trouble: I see no sensible way in which to set practicalities aside, in this case. If I thought it were possible to implement something like a semiautomatic handgun ban, without unreasonably curtailing lawful self-defense and without doing our nation's already threadbare social fabric far more harm than the status quo, then it's not something to which I'd feel any need to object. But, as with any social engineering project, the essential trouble is that you don't get to start from a clean slate -- and, that being inescapably the case, I find it impossible to imagine how any such program could be implemented without doing far more harm than good. (All of which assumes the political will to implement such an even-handed program, which I cannot imagine existing in the modern United States; I think it a much more likely result that those lobbying for the ban would be satisfied to disarm legal owners and leave well enough alone in the case of all others.)
I am very much for having a sensible and reasoned conversation about guns and gun control. The reason I am replying to you is in part to set an example for potential readers. Having said that, it is late so I will try to keep my response short.
First, the laws regarding assault rifles do not seem to be nearly as strict as you imply. I live one town over from Sandy Hook, where a year ago a deranged man with a history of mental disease used multiple automatic weapons to gun down an elementary school. The guns were all legally acquired by his mother for his use. This must not happen. I do not see a way to prevent this via background checks. We cannot get into people's heads and getting access to medical records would even be in my book a greater violation of privacy than this is worth. So my conclusion is that we must ban the sale of all automatic and semiautomatic weapons to civilians; ban them at gun stores, online stores, gun shows, private sales, etc. (two years ago I went to a gun show in North Carolina where I saw people simply walking around with two assault rifles, one over each shoulder). I would go so far as to criminalize all possession of automatic and semiautomatic weapons.
Second, handguns are a plague on large cities, where lots of people get hurt or killed using them. I do not see their use in hunting as a great way to justify their sales. This use is rare, and I am certain there are other ways of killing wild boars, etc. Your original point about hunting was that to take away a hunter's rifle will leave him/her hungry. It does not seem to me that taking away a semiautomatic pistol would do the same. Revolvers are different in some ways. They are simpler, easier to care for, and even possibly safer to handle. However, we should look at the numbers here (which I naturally do not have handy) to figure out what should be done here.
In general, as far as hunting is concerned, I would like to see hunting safety classes tied more closely with the gun licensing process. Also, making the use of hunting guns legal strictly for hunting would help here. For example, if you cannot hunt after sunset, then your gun must be locked and the rounds separate from it. This would surely not be a problem for a full time or a serious amateur hunter, but would hinder a criminal who is trying to carry a rifle.
Lastly, enforcement is often brought up. The argument goes that the good guys will give up their guns, while the bad guys will still have them. I do not buy this as a reason not to try. First, the status quo is very broken as many mass shootings as well as deaths via hand guns show us. The anecdotes are heartbreaking but the numbers do not lie. Second, there are precedents. Australia had a gun buy back and it worked. German police fired something like 45 rounds last year. We can get there too. Non-lethal weapons are getting better and better, and for self defense are more than sufficient. We can and must try to change the current state as the current state is not in anyone's best interest. Realistically, no, not everyone will give up their guns for a buy back, but lots of people would. Those that have guns for self-defense would feel better knowing that there are less guns out there and some criminals would definitely jump on the opportunity to exchange a firearm of questionable origins for a few hundred dollars. Over time the number of guns possessed by non-hunters can be reduced to nearly zero.
I appreciate this discussion. I did learn something from you. Also, it is very late and the Christmas Eve is almost here so I doubt I will be able to contribute much more. So in that spirit, Merry Christmas if you celebrate it. If not, Happy Tuesday!
I wish it noted for the record that Lanza's weapons were a semiautomatic Bushmaster M4 clone and a semiautomatic Glock handgun; he had no access to fully automatic weapons, so did not use them in the perpetration of his infamy. I acknowledge this makes no difference to your argument, but for the sake of the audience, who might not know better, I point it out nonetheless. Readers interested in learning more about the nature of regulations around fully automatic weapons in the United States are directed to the Wikipedia page describing the National Firearms Act.
Perhaps you did learn something from me. If so, I'm glad of it. In any case, thank you for your felicitations on the season, and I wish you and your family a most merry Christmas as well.
If we presume that the AK-47 is a very well-designed firearm, and 50+ years of its use would seem to indicate that it is, then your response incorrectly presumes that the person who acted with volition would have been equally successful when using a firearm of an inferior design. A death that occurred solely because the weapon allowed a kill by an otherwise insufficiently-skilled marksman can be attributed to the gun rather than its firer.
The number of deaths attributable to the AK-47 would then be the number of total people killed by people using AK-47s minus the number of people who would still have been killed with the best available alternative weapon. It's a much smaller number, but it's a positive number none the less.
You place yourself in the position of attempting to quantify morality. I can only wish you the best of good fortune in so doing, and recommend that, should you succeed, you lose no time in applying for what would surely be a more thoroughly earned Nobel Peace Prize than any before or since.
Oh come on, pull your head out of the sand. Guns are a complicated issue, and pretending it's this simple makes you sound like a caricature of an American conservative.
Even most automatic firearms are relatively simple, as machines go; what's complicated are the politics of the modern United States on the subject of this particular class of machine.
Is it somehow "conservative" to say that I've never really understood why that should be? One person, who wishes badly enough to kill another, will invariably find some tool to use in the attempt, and firearms are far from the only tools which can be used to inflict lethal injury on a human being. There is no more inherent controversy in this statement than in the statement that, should you find yourself with a nail to drive and no hammer with which to do so, you'll find some other expedient and drive your nail with it -- perhaps you'll hit it with a crowbar, or half a brick, or so forth.
Using a hammer is the easiest way to drive a nail, but the variety of means by which to do so is, if not necessarily infinite, then certainly bounded only by the limits of human ingenuity. If you wish nails not to be driven, why then does it make sense to ban hammers, rather than to place nail-driving beyond the pale of law -- and then enforce that law, as firmly as you find necessary to discourage whatever recalcitrance you encounter on the part of inveterate carpenters?
It actually is that tractable. Plenty of murders are 'heat of the moment' things, where a lowered bar is significant. You seem intent on casting all gun violence as serenely premeditated. It very much isn't.
Nor need it be for my point to stand; unpremeditated murder of the sort you describe is precisely the sort in which the nature of the weapon employed is of least significance, and the difference between a firearm and, say, an improvised bludgeon, has only to do with the amount of effort required on the part of the murderer to satisfy the urge which drives him.
Am I the only one who thinks it's a little distracting how artificially formal this guy is?
Anyway, it's freakin obvious how much easier it is to pull a trigger with only a little hesitation than to get a brick out and beat somebody to death. I don't understand how you don't see that. It's like you've already made your decision and no matter what anyone says, you're 100% confident you can explain it away before you even see it.
I do delight in the use of formal language, and thank you for the compliment inherent in the adverb you chose; the best things in life, after all, are the result of artifice.
It's obvious enough that killing someone with a firearm is easier than doing likewise with a brick. For a civilized, i.e. domesticated, human, acting upon the urge to kill at all is harder than either; a large part of what we call "civilization" consists in overcoming our murderous heritage. (Or did you think we humans have ended up our entire planet's uncontested apex predator, so much so that many of us never even have to hunt, because we're just so nice?)
And have you considered the possibility that, once you've clobbered somebody in the head with a brick the first time, your perspective on the matter might change? God forfend I should ever find myself in such a position! But I think it reasonable to imagine that, once there, it might seem at least as sensible to keep going as to stop. "Escalation of commitment," I think it's called.
Why, you flatter me, sir! I am just a half-bright reader of old books who feels himself moved to imitate, however poorly, the gracious use of language he finds therein -- but I thank you very kindly, all the same.
I get you're being rhetorical, but your point deserves challenge, so I'll mutate it by raising the point that, for the question to be sensible, we must ask how many of those killed would not have been were it not for the robust, cheap, easily mass-produceable nature of the gun.
We can assume these individuals would still have wanted to kill each other one way or another, but the availability of such a gun made it "more" feasible.
A potentially interesting counterfactual, to be sure. Can you define it closely enough to support further discussion?
Given that the AK-47 has found its most extensive use in conflicts well below the level of open warfare between nations, and given further that the 20th century saw plenty of people killed with sticks, axes, machetes, or bare hands, merely to conserve ammunition in such conflicts where the AK-47 was available and indeed extensively used, I tend to consider that the null hypothesis involves all or most of those, who died with 7.62x39mm rounds in them, having otherwise still died by whatever means their killers found convenient. I grant that the absence of that particular weapon would have necessitated the use of others; I grant further that this difference, in the aggregate, might have affected the ultimate outcome in at least some cases; I do not grant, however, without compelling argument, that there would be a meaningful difference in the total number killed.
Obviously when you get to this level, it becomes difficult to tease out variables, as now you're dealing with individual cases. By and large, you could draw comparisons between guns and other methods/means of killing:
Gun advantages
+ Lets you kill from a safe distance
+ A lot of killing potential (potentially 1 death for every bullet)
+ Also useful for other methods of killing (you can certainly bludgeon someone to death with a gun just as easily as shoot them)
+ An individual can potentially kill many more people per unit of time through the use of tactical advantage (sniping, guerrilla warfare, etc.)
All of these benefits are lost by having to use something more primitive, and all of them aide directly in the extermination of life. I think it's fair to say, at the least, that `gun` is far more potentially deadly than `!gun`.
Let's say, for instance, I saw a caravan approaching. Four people, in close proximity to one another. If I was equipped with even a semi-automatic weapon, I might not chance a guerrilla encounter. Forget hand-to-hand combat. Four on one would almost certainly lead to my death. Encounter averted.
Now let's say I'm equipped with an AK. Fully-automatic. At the very least, I can kill one immediately and then create chaos in the caravan by laying cover fire. If they are not similarly equipped, it would probably be a slaughter.
Before dismissing this scenario as contrivance, consider that if we are to assess individual interactions with such a device, we have to consider what it would mean on the fringe cases. If avoidance of violence is the ultimate goal, which of these scenarios would get us closer to that goal?
Your categories are muddled; for example, guerrilla warfare belongs to the realm of strategy, not that of tactics. But that's surmountable; what is not so is that your counterfactual hinges on the assumption that, as you put it, "avoidance of violence is the ultimate goal." This hopelessly complicates the matter, as I know of only one possible means of achieving that goal, and not a tremendously pleasant one as it involves the annihilation of the human species entire -- perhaps the ultimate extent of human violence, I grant you, but think of all the peaceful centuries to follow!
Leaving that aside, though, let me address your points in the order you make them:
> [Guns let] you kill from a safe distance
Not so! Not when the other fellow is armed roughly as well as you are. You don't use automatic fire from a range of more than a few feet, as it makes impossible the careful aiming necessary to score hits at range; while one semi-automatic rifle isn't exactly as good as another, the difference between them is negligible for our purposes. Your "safe distance", then, isn't anywhere near so safe as it seems, especially once your target knows someone is shooting at him and roughly where the fire is coming from. True, if you've got a rifle and all I have is a knife, the situation changes -- but I'm not sure how you intend to support the assertion, should you choose to make it, that that's the usual situation when a rifle is involved.
> A lot of killing potential (potentially 1 death for every bullet)
By this metric, a knife, which requires no consumables, is indefinitely more dangerous than any firearm; a talented soldier armed with an AK-47 and a full magazine might kill thirty people, one for each round, whereas a similarly talented soldier with a knife and no need for a magazine has no inherent limit on the number of people he might kill.
> Also useful for other methods of killing
So is a baseball bat. I'm not sure how this has anything to do with the point under discussion.
> An individual can potentially kill many more people per unit time [with a gun]
Ah! Now we reach the crux of the matter; the question is not that of whether one man may more easily kill another with a rifle than with an axe, but rather that of whether one man may more easily kill a number of other men given the same difference in armament.
At this point, it becomes useful to consider once again your assumption that the purpose of the exercise is "[the] avoidance of violence". Warfare, of course, is perhaps the ultimate refinement of the human talent for violence, or at least it will serve that role until we come up with something that's like warfare only more so. Let us further assume that warfare exists as a necessary consequence of the human condition -- not much risk in so assuming, I think, that being if not the single most ubiquitous fact of human history then certainly among the top three. Humans will always find a reason to make war on one another; with reason in hand, method follows as surely as noon follows sunrise. That's what we always have done, and while perhaps it's not always what we will do, then certainly it's fair to say no one has anything remotely resembling a plausible way to "get there from here." Taking warfare as a fact of life, then, "[the] avoidance of violence" may best be defined as the termination of warfare in the most expedient possible fashion.
You will of course note at this point that I don't consider the avoidance of death, or of killing, in my definition of the avoidance of violence. One of those other ubiquitous historical lessons is that everyone dies, sooner or later, and indeed that only the most fortunate among us are privileged to choose the time and manner in which we do so. Moreover, death is not only inevitable, it is the ultimate method of avoiding violence; desecrate a carcass however you may, you cannot possibly touch its former inhabitant, who has "departed this vale of tears", as it is so poetically said, and gone to a place beyond any which violence can hope to reach. (Whatever your opinion on the subject of "afterlife", this remains equally true -- for a person who no longer exists can no more be subjected to violence than one who has gone to Heaven, or returned to the Godhead, or permanently vacated the premises in whatever fashion your faith prescribes.)
The avoidance of violence, then, must revolve not around the avoidance of death -- which, at risk of unduly belaboring the point, I reiterate that no one can ever avoid -- but instead around the preclusion of warfare in as efficient and expedient a manner as possible. This being the case, it becomes plain that a weapon such as an AK-47 does not increase the probability of violence -- quite the contrary, it decreases that probability, to exactly the extent that it improves upon the most expedient previously available method of bringing warfare to a close.
This principle generalizes quite well. Consider, for example, the W87 thermonuclear device, which fixed to the business end of an intercontinental ballistic missile gives the nation which owns it the power to rain down death and destruction, beyond anything ever before seen and barely even within the realm of human imagination, upon any nation at whom its owner pleases to launch it.
A horrible thing, you say? An abomination, a monstrosity, an atrocity in abeyance, awaiting only the press of a button to unleash enormities untold? Not so, I say! Not so -- and obviously not so, when you consider that nothing in the history of the world has done more to bring about "the avoidance of violence" than the existence, and readiness, of these weapons so universally reviled.
"But," you might say, "the Cold War proves that nothing of the sort is true -- we and the Soviet Union spent fifty years stepping warily around one another like two old toms, and all the while, at any instant, a single mishap could have brought about the Final War!"
Again I say 'Not so!' True -- the strategic calculus of that period was much the same as that in existence between two men, standing at arm's length, each with a shotgun aimed at the other's brisket and a finger wired to the trigger. True, neither is a particularly comfortable situation -- and also true, though, that while matters remain in that state, no violence can be said to have occurred. Violence enters the situation only when a trigger is pulled -- and, until that happens, it is always possible for men, or nations, to back down from the precipice in such fashion that no application of violence becomes necessary.
Moreover, just as an alert man with a shotgun need not fear attack from a sane man armed only with a knife, a nuclear-armed nation need not fear attack from anyone who lacks a nuclear arsenal of his own but has the sense to recognize the disparity between his own arms and those of his would-be opponent. While this is no more perfect protection against attack than would be anything else, it certainly serves to deter the vast majority of potential attackers -- consider the example of Israel, whose leaders have wisely assembled a nuclear arsenal more than equal to the purpose of deterring her regional enemies. Her neighbors may express as fervently as they desire the wish to "push Israel into the sea"; knowing, as they do, that the obliteration of their capitals would follow instantly upon the commencement of any attempt to make good on their threats, they are content to let mere words remain mere words, and thus does Israel in large part accomplish "the avoidance of violence".
Of course not; to do so would be foolish. The blame in that case would accrue either to the negligence of the person who stacked them, or, if they were blamelessly well stacked, to the carelessness of the person who brought them crashing down around his ears.
Just like napalm, mustard gas and nuclear weapons, yep, no volition there either. Just can't figure out why people misuses weapons to harm others... such a mystery.
I agree, that number does sound kind of high. The number of deaths per rifle would likely follow a heavy-tail distribution: a few rifles would have extremely high numbers, and most would be have extremely low numbers. So the average would be a lot higher than the median. That doesn't rule out 2/rifle on average as a possibility. But the average is a misleading statistic if you're talking about the common case.
Very much bullshit, adding all war victims since WW2 don't ever come close to that number. And I doubt her are more than one or two millions murder victims since 1947, and that's already an enormous number....
The definition of war victim is debatable, but I'm pretty sure any sensible definition will result in casualties much higher than 2 million since 1945. The number of soldiers of the North Vietnamese forces who died seems to be around 1 million, for example. If you include civilian casualties -- and why wouldn't you -- it seems that the Vietnam War alone cost almost 2 million people their lives.
The number of murders seems to be around 450000 per year, world wide, with, I assume, lower numbers in the past due to a lower overall population. Still, easily more than 2 million since 1947.
I'm not saying that in either of those figures the AK47 (or, in fact, any small arms) were significantly involved, but that wasn't the question.
Over the past decade, the US has had between 11-18k murders per year. Back-of-the-enveloping it to a bit less than 10k/year for 66 years gives us around half a million murders in the US. The US has a depressingly world-average rate of murder, and is only 5% of world population.
Would probably be easier to estimate the number from getting number of killed in all wars in last 60 years. Separating by type of war and then applying fraction killed by small arms
As a scale for the guess: 65 million people live in the UK. Around 313 million people live in the United States. Between 60 and 85 million people, including civilian casualties, were killed in World War 2.
An estimated 1/5th of all firearms in circulation around the world owe their design to Kalashnikov.
You could tally all firearm deaths since 1947, divide by 5 and get a reasonably good estimate.
To get even closer, exclude 95% of suicides and exclude 95% of homicides in the USA (along with plenty of other countries) since killers in countries not at war or in conflict tend to use handguns 20 times more often.
The point on handguns is the most underrated part of the US debate on gun control. Assault weapons are a mere blip on the annual murder chart. Two-thirds plus of murders in the US are done with handguns. The remaining third are longarms and other methods.
Assault rifles are visible because they're occasionally used in spree killings, but the problem is handguns.
There's no way to know the answer to this, of course. But something important to recognize about the AK is the high number of civilians killed by its fire. It was designed for street fighting. At least 4 out of 5 infantrymen bearing AKs don't even bother to aim the rifle. Probably 90% of deaths by AK are civilian.
We had it studied at secondary school back on the USSR. AK47 was an ecosystem of assault rifle, heavy machine gun and shorty mod. You had to assemble-disassemble it in seconds to get respect at school.
This weapon changed the history of humanity, and benefits far outweight losses. It is true weapon of freedom.
1) It was to be the primary weapon of the World Wide Socialist Revolution. That means it had to operate reliably in every environment on Earth, from the Siberian tundra to the jungles of Central America to the deserts of the Middle East. It would have to work flawlessly in a -50C blizzard and a +50C sandstorm, as well as in near 100% humidity while caked in mud.
2) It was to be cheaply produced by the million in not particularly advanced Soviet factories, by people who were not highly trained, then shipped to all corners of the Earth.
3) It was to be used by guerrillas, generally poorly trained peasants, fighting to overthrow professional US-backed armies (see: Cuba). Thus the rifle had to allow untrained fighters to go toe-to-toe with professional warriors, given the constraints of the fight as it was imagined: hit-and-run, ambushes, etc.
When you look at the number of design criteria it had to fulfill that had nothing to do with its merits as a marksman's weapon, it's amazing how well Kalashnikov achieved what he set out to do. The fact that it's still the primary weapon of insurgents, rebels, and terrorists 60+ years later is testament to that. As an engineering feat, it's an absolute marvel.