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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I wonder about a worldwide, UN-controlled authority to dismantle any organization and factories that build firearms or other weapons that use powder.

Maybe there will be a day in the future where firearms will be banned worldwide.

Of course firearms will still exist but will be rare, making armed conflict almost impossible, and they would only be produced in very small quantities, to defend against people who make them illegally.

One thing that should be definitely be banned, are long distance rockets mounted on trucks. Those are very inaccurate and should not exist.

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> making armed conflict almost impossible

As China and India have demonstrated recently, this is not the case. Firearms are not the source of conflict.

I also question whether you truly mean all firearms would be banned as it would not be possible to enforce this ban without your UN-controlled authority possessing firearms. So this is yet another proposal for only the government to have a monopoly on weapons.

> a worldwide, UN-controlled authority

How would it enforce it’s authority with non-compliant actors?

"Klaatu barada nikto." You are thinking of "Gort"

> Gort is an eight-foot tall, seamless robot apparently constructed from a single piece of "flexible metal". He is but one member of a "race of robots" invented by an interplanetary confederation (described as "A sort of United Nations on a Planetary level" by Klaatu, who is a representative of that confederation) to protect their citizens against all aggression by destroying any aggressors. Klaatu describes "him" as one of an interstellar police force, holding irrevocable powers to "preserve the peace" by destroying any aggressor. The fear of provoking these robots acts as a deterrent against aggression.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gort_(The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_...

The gunless world will arise when everyone voluntarily puts them down together and they rust along with the factories that made them.

Easier to just kill all humans.

Also, have you considered what the term "authority" means?

But then again, a bunch of people still also think communism or socialism are great ideas, so...

The UN would have to keep guns and other weapons because they have to enforce the no-weapons edict. Sure a realistic side effect is that the UN assumes an ever increasing level of power. But that is just the side effect of utopia.

They are not all very inaccurate. Some of them have GPS guided rockets

> Sometimes I wonder about a worldwide, UN-controlled authority to dismantle any organization and factories that build firearms or other weapons that use powder.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic...

> Sometimes I wonder about a worldwide, UN-controlled authority to dismantle any organization and factories that build firearms or other weapons that use powder.

Well, banning nuclear weapons (and establishing an inspection schedule) would be a good start: https://www.icanw.org/

Unfortunately, NATO is currently opposed to this.

What's unfortunate about that? (Besides, obviously, every other nuclear-armed nation opposing it, not "just NATO")

Moving the needle to zero is vastly more difficult than arms reduction; any leftovers are humongously dangerous which makes me question who actually thinks trying to do this is a good idea.

NATO is currently not, however, engaged in any effort of nuclear arms reduction. As somebody from a NATO member country, I don't care about other countries position on this, as I believe my country should be a moral leader.

I have to say, I consider MAD theory to be completely misguided, and also morally wrong to engage in nuclear retaliatory attack.

However, I understand the worry. It would be possible for NATO to propose an aggressive, world-wide nuclear arms reduction schedule (and possibly even lead it), but they are not doing that (they are rather doing the opposite, expanding).

> NATO is currently not, however, engaged in any effort of nuclear arms reduction.

START I, SORT, and New START (which is currently ongoing) don't count? And INF, though that was shelved due to Russian breaches (Kaliningrad cough), but even without that it wouldn't have had much more of a future due to it being bilateral, with no Chinese involvement.

> I have to say, I consider MAD theory to be completely misguided, and also morally wrong to engage in nuclear retaliatory attack.

MAD is irrelevant for this question. It's about stable vs unstable conditions. When everyone in the room has a gun, there is balance. If everyone in the room provably has no gun, there is also a balance. The former balance is vastly more stable than the latter, because even a fractional gun in the latter scenario changes the picture dramatically, while doing approximately nothing in the latter. Consequently, the value of an individual gun goes up hugely as the total number of guns in the rooms approaches zero. Russia having one more nuke today? Buys them virtually nothing. Someone finding a nuke in the basement in the utopian nuke-free world? They own the world.

It's an inherently unstable setup. Nukes will never go away and trying to do so is the most dangerous thing anyone could try to do. It's perhaps the least probable example of trying to put the genie back in the bottle. The best we can do is multilateral reduction in lock-step and preventing proliferation to more states.

> (they are rather doing the opposite, expanding)

Elaborate

I don't consider START or INF to be progress, it's pretty much an attempt to "prop up" the untenable nature of MAD theory (which, as you point out, completely disregards salami tactics, for instance). It's better but not much.

I disagree with the idea that if everyone has a gun, the world is more stable (with respect to gun use) than if nobody has a gun. We see something similar play out in mass shootings in the U.S compared to other countries.

I also don't think we can't, with diplomatic effort, put genie back to bottle. I think we owe it to future generations to try.

NATO is expanding to Finland and Sweden (which was actually considering to sign nuclear weapon ban), not to mention earlier expansion. They are part of the problem (NATO is pretty much designed as a nuclear pact). There is plenty of countries without nuclear weapons or umbrella and doing just fine.

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