What If We Replace Guns and Bullets with Bows and Arrows?
lowtechmagazine.com
lowtechmagazine.com
For example:
> Finally, replacing the firearm with the bow would reduce the damage done by missile weapons in a civilian setting, such as mass shootings, accidents, and suicides. In theory, a mass shooting could happen with a bow and arrows. However, it would take an archer years of dedicated practice, while a gunner can start out of the box. Bows are also much less likely to cause lethal accidents when not in use.
I mean... what? That is true. But that's not the reason people buy guns. I don't even like guns but I hardly know where to start with this. "True but it will never work" is probably the easiest one-line response. Support gun control if you want to reduce gun violence in this manner, at least that's more realistic from a political pass-the-laws point of view.
> Even if you agree that reverting to the bow and arrow would bring advantages, you probably find it unrealistic. That may well be true, but in that case, it’s also unrealistic to make a transition to a more sustainable society.
No! Just no. We could be more sustainable. We can't revert to bows & arrows. Please.
But you know what? I don't think having a serious argument was ever really the point. It was supposed to be a wild line which gets you to click. And for that, bravo. In a way, if you can enjoy it, it's a masterpiece of the genre.
The main problem with gun control is the inability of our society to honestly talk about who is doing the shooting and why. This eliminates any chance of enacting reasonable policies. The point of sale gun control favored by Democrats observably has little actual effect on gun violence, because, obviously, it only affects people who are already inclined to abide by laws, such as the ones against shooting people without good reason. On the other hand, the point of use gun control favored by Republicans demonstrably and significantly reduces murders with guns by discouraging people who are prone to shooting other people over trivialities from carrying their illegal firearms.
Sorry can you clarify what "point of use" gun control is being advocated by Republicans?
Learning and practicing how to correctly pull the trigger is probably the single biggest improvement to accuracy a new shooter can make. The difference between the right way, and the way everyone is born doing it, particularly with pistols, is HUGE. And it does take practice.
> Because bullets travel much faster than arrows, a gunner can aim in a straight line, which is easy.
Outside of being right next to your target, knowing your bullet drop and compensating for it is absolutely a part of shooting.
The article lost me pretty early with these glaring oversights.
When I did my conscript service, we were encouraged to hit target 300m away, and generally people learn to do this quite fast (with a high quality AK-47 copy in this instance). Learning to hit a target with this engagement distance is infinitely easier with rifle than bow, especially if you need to train riflemen en masse.
Descriptive is that english longbowmen had to practice continusously. I would probably hit a target with a rifle two decades after my service without much firing range practice.
Automated rifle has enabled industrialized utilization of civil population as easily trained effective combatants like nothing else.
I was under the impression the draw weight[1] was a large part of that[2].
Finland has a pretty good conscript army even according to the professional Nato troops who train with them, so I would not discount effectiveness of conscript armies out of hand. Of course, it's the quality of training that matters, and that may be harder to institute on a national scale unless there is a long continous tradition of doing that.
Also to my understanding current Ukrainian army is holding it's own with a mostly conscript force (unless I'm mistaken) against a professional army (yes, on paper...).
Thanks, I will change that sentence.
The major difference between car vs bicycle and bow vs gun is that, with the right infrastructure and lifestyle, riding a bicycle really is a major life improvement over driving a car. When I live two miles from work and there are protected bike lanes, I would much rather ride my bike than drive, even in a cold northern city. Driving two miles in a dense city is way more miserable than biking in a protected lane, even in the cold, and the savings from even one of the two parking spot pays for a lot of additional luxuries (or entire years off of my working life).
There is literally no situation where an army with bows and arrows will defeat an army with modern weaponry.
The author concludes:
> If we cannot imagine low-tech warfare, we cannot imagine a low-tech, sustainable, and fair society.
Bad news: war isn't fair. We can't even prevent nuclear proliferation, which really does post an immanent and existential threat to human civilization (if not the species itself). Let's at least focus on that first...
On top of that, we don't need to imagine low-tech warfare. We used to have it. It wasn't sustainable or fair, and low-tech isn't a virtue by itself.
If I'm shooting for fun, give me a bow: the experience is much more involved and tactile and immediate. There's more room to learn, more room to have fun. Everything archery teaches you about handling your body and the ballistics of projectile weapons also transfers usefully to other activities.
If I need something to die, then I want the firearms. I'm glad to have my little .22 rifle whenever I need to eliminate varmints chasing chickens etc. When I forget to grab it and find myself facing something with nothing but a machete in my hand it's always ugly. And more effort and danger.
I think one of the things this naive/dumb snippet (if taken at face value) is that the American obsession with the personal firearm is an arbitrary categorization in its own right, as arbitrary a line in the sand that bow/arrow would be.
Your instinctual desire for "no, I want a firearm" is just a reflection of cultural values, not any practical need. If you want firepower, use any of dozens of approaches that are more potent, some easier and requiring less industrial base than a rifle/handgun. For example, a sling/catapult that flings a bomb/makeshift grenade, you just need gunpowder and rocks for that.
I didn't even get into chemical weapons. Or biological weapons.
But yeah whatever, your .22 cal fits in the "strict constructionalist" interpretation of the second amendment. The fact the court interpretation of the second amendment aligns with the gun industry's sweet spot of profitable convenient consumer products is just a magic, mysterious coincidence.
Another interpretation is that it would make violence the monopoly of physically robust young men, again. There are many stories of brave peasants resisting predation by roving gangs of bandits -- banditry is the norm throughout history as far as I can tell and not the exception -- but in reality peasants who resisted usually just all got slaughtered. They faced absolutely no chance against strong young men who had trained with weapons their whole lives. See any of the medieval peasant uprisings. Put down efficiently and brutally, every time. With firearms, other factors like organizational skill becomes more dominant in winning such a fight, rather than pure physical strength.
If there are firearms, the government has bigger firearms. Artillery, explosives, tanks/cavalry, air power. At least medieval peasantry required raising, transporting an army, and sometimes losing on the battlefield. Modern militaries would just dispatch a cruise missile or worse, 100% success.
Modern peasantry doesn't get slaughtered by modern armies in the same manner because modern armies and technology need modern society and values to sustain a large enough civilization to produce those products of war. Modern restraint on slaughter enables guerilla warfare to be effective, not modern technology or some fundamental weakness of modern militaries.
My point was more that people tend to see hunting in a different way depending on the weapon used (I don't).
It's not the noise. It's a safety issue -- setting off firearms within city limits is a lot more dangerous than bows. They will often close off a park or wooded area to the public during hunting; managing the area where a stray arrow might end up is a lot easier than managing the area where a stray bullet might end up, especially with well-trained archers.
I've never heard of commissioning, though. Usually there are more than enough volunteers.
I first assumed this would be about criminality and/or war, but the first part of the article surprised me pleasantly. However, it did go into this in the end.
Remember that replacing something involves removing the existing thing, and then adding the new thing.
This would involve DEweaponizing criminal and/or war-able factions, and then arming them with the likes of bows and arrows.
I would argue that we are unable to reach even the first step. In fact, if we could do that, there wouldn't be any need of arming people with bows and arrows. Problem solved!
Most of the article is dubious, but this is flat out wrong. The Mongols, with just their bows and arrows, killed tens of millions of Chinese, Middle Easterners, and Europeans. They conquered like half the world, and killed more people than died in WW2. "less extensive conflict" indeed.
> The main reason most European armies switched from bows to crossbows and then firearms was the short learning curves of these weapons. Crossbowmen and musketeers required little or no training, while it took many years of practice to build an archer skillful and strong enough to be of use in warfare. The crossbow and the firearm thus expanded the number of people in a given population that could become soldiers.
The musket, and especially the arquebus, was not the lethal and precise kind of firearm we have today. There is a reason the Patriots at Bunker Hill held their fire until they could see the whites of the redcoats’ eyes: if you lost your nerve and shot any sooner than that, you were unlikely to make a lethal hit. The reason musket battles took the form of formations of line infantry exchanging volleys of gunfire is because that was the best way to use the musket, not because Western armies and the men who organized them were stupid.
Which also ties into the training question. Most training at the time focused on close-order formation drills, not on individual prowess. This was true for Napoleonic infantry just as it had been true for pikemen, Roman legions, and Greek phalanxes. Victory depended on line infantry working as a cohesive, disciplined unit that wouldn’t break or shatter easily.
Okay, so what about archers? In the Western context, archers were part of what we today would call “combined arms” to supplement line melee infantry. The idea that “it took many years of practice to build an archer skillful and strong enough to be of use in warfare” is partially true. It was especially true of the English longbow, but that was an outlier in many ways in being an unusually long and heavy bow which could pierce armor. The English longbow requires years of training mostly because of the extreme draw weight, which was atypical among Western bows. It was kind of true for steppe horse archers, except it was less training and more of a way of life for them.
As for “expanding the number of people in a given population that could become soldiers”, training was never a meaningful bottleneck for that in the pre-firearms era. Training time was important for professional soldiers, but the bulk of medieval armies were poorly trained peasants armed with melee weapons, and the bottleneck on calling them up had more to do with the need for farm labor.
For those with means and motivation (money and machine tools), cheap automatic weapons can be somewhat-easily produced from plans and diagrams online, with parts that can be bought from regular industrial suppliers, or sometimes big-box hardware stores.
Not naming the specific plans I've seen, of course. If someone wants to know, they can look for themselves.
Quality is to be suspect, but if you only need to throw out ~20 rounds of 9mm at something that isn't very far away, it'll get the job done.
I can shoot rabbits in my back yard with a bow, but I can't use a .177 air rifle. I can shoot carp from a canoe.
Plus, with arrows being $30-$100 and the broadhead costing nearly as much, I'm not going to randomly fire it into the air on holidays.
A crossbow on the other hand, doesn't work this way.
The author has clearly never shot competitively, even informally.
Pulling the trigger is an essential marksmanship skill that very much improves with practice. A slight error will easily spoil one’s aim. One also must train oneself to not anticipate recoil during the trigger pull.