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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting if they made this legal again. Maybe there'd be less people caught up in gang shootings etc if you had them dual it out in a controlled space... assuming they aren't cowards.

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> Maybe there’d be less people caught up in gang shootings etc if you had them dual it out in a controlled space…

Probably not. While a small part of gang violence deals with situations that might otherwise be handled by duels, a lot of it is more like war between factions which don’t happen to be states. Duels aren’t going to replace turf wars, even if they are legal.

Why would someone who is willing to plan a surprise attack on an enemy instead agree to a formal duel?

Well no legal liability in the duel

Dueling was largely illegal, which means lots of legal liability for the combatants as well as any one who facilitated the event.

Gang members tend to prefer to exist outside all forms of legality. A formal duel would probably just be seen as cop shit.

Because these are not mostly disputes over money or material goods. They’re over honour. If the broader society showed some sign of caring about honour the way petty thugs who do drive by shootings to receding slights do they’d shift to the societally airbed way quickly. In the bourgeois society we have where dignity not honour is how worth is ascribed there’s no script for them to follow. Insofar as society is becoming victimhood based on how it conceived worth that’s equally unappealing.

https://scholars-stage.org/honor-dignity-and-victimhood-a-to...

As crazy as it sounds, I cant easily disagree with you .

Every boiling pot needs to relieve pressure. People need an outlet for their frustrations. Wars are far rarer, quite impersonal, and harder to shake off (as is the uniform). Even fistfight by consenting adults can get you in trouble. So many turn to crime.

Maybe there is room for a middle layer between anger and crime, between consenting adults with clear rules.

You could always box.

As far as I know there is almost no pre-qualification required for a private sparring session and even the qualification to be a professional is a very low bar (IIRC it is primarily a matter of eyesight, since you can't wear glasses in the ring).

box to the death? that's rough. I imagine that a conflict that warrants a duel has at least one of the parties seeing death of their opponent

You obviously aren't allowed to box to the death and shouldn't be, but it represents a meaningful middle ground between anger and crime.

In my understanding, it wasn't actually a given that someone would die as the result of a duel. While certainly a possibility, the poor accuracy of pistols of the day (if pistols were chosen) and the possibility of the duel being stopped by the physicians after blood was drawn (if swords were chosen) meant that honor was often deemed to be satisfied well short of anyone being killed.

It was also not uncommon for either or both combatants to simply fire their pistols into the air. Again, honor was generally deemed to be satisfied if this happened. This took some courage if you were the first one to fire into the air, as you were still required under the code to stand there and let the other guy take a shot at you if he so chose.

The pistols are not necessarily any less accurate than a modern one, in my experience. But, of course, marksmanship with handguns at further than a few paces is often difficult.

I'd guess the big danger for duelists would have been damage to internal organs or deep wounds becoming infected. Bullets could do this, as could the smallsword, a purely thrusting weapon which would have been the sword used in the 18th century. McBane (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_McBane) wrote of the difference between cutting and thrusting swords "the smallsword kills, yet you might take fifty cuts and not be disabled".

If McBane was telling the truth he certainly managed to get away with a large number of duels, though.

The pistols are necessarily less accurate than a modern one, as in the pistol duel traditions I've heard of in the 19th and 20th century (location does make a difference, though), the rule was to use smoothbore single-shot pistols which were less accurate than contemporary rifled pistols.

That depends on the distance and the manner of loading. Smoothbore muskets are inaccurate, aren't they? Hence the need for 18th century armies to fire big volleys in order to get any hits. A part of this is that the manner of loading, particularly under the stress of combat, causes variation in the powder charge. The amount of fouling increases as more shots are taken. The loose-fitting ball bounces up the barrel and will leave on slightly-varying trajectories. Hitting a man-sized target at 50 yards is difficul. But, if you take such a musket to a modern meeting (e.g. https://www.mlagb.com/) and load it carefully with a patched ball and well-measured charge, under relaxed conditions, with the bore swabbed for a consistent amount of fouling, then they become sufficiently accurate for tight (a few inches) groups at 50 yards. Pistols are much the same; loaded carefully, as I assume would happen before a duel, and they are very accurate. Of course, if the seconds were sloppy and used an undersized unpatched ball, and the distance was more than 10 paces, I'd expect inaccuracy. Some rascals had their pistols rifled until within an inch or two of the muzzle so it wouldn't be noticed on a casual inspection.

You can endanger yourself (do hiking or parkour or extreme mountain-biking), but there are no legal activities to mutually endanger each other. You can't have a box fighting or chicken race to death legally. But why not?

Anger doesn't need to be relieved via violence to be relieved.

What do you think a lot of inner city shootings are? Two people beef, guns get drawn, and shots fired. Sometimes your second gets involved, and if he thinks you were treated dishonorably he might hunt down you shooter and that man’s second. It’s even the same kind of honor culture, and was brought from the rural south which was the last bastion of high class American dueling.

Dueling has always been an upper class/urban affair, generally between men of wealth and substantial education. Traditionally only the nobility dueled but this was gradually liberalized into all upper class individuals. Even in the article for this thread (which is relatively late in the dueling game), it requires that you view the person you are dueling as a "Gentleman" alongside the all the connotations of such.

You can see a list of some US duels (and the participants involved) here [1]. The article also has some interesting backstory.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_duels#United_States

> Traditionally only the nobility dueled but this was gradually liberalized into all upper class individuals.

Looked at another way, traditionally only the upper class dueled, and that didn’t change when the capitalist class displaced the feudal aristocracy as the upper class.

This is in my opinion far too narrow a view of aristocratic honor culture in the US and how that influenced Southern culture even among lower socioeconomic strata. By the civil war, dueling was pervasive throughout the south[1][2]. Over time this filtered down to "redneck" culture for lack of a better name for lower class southern whites. This in turn had effects on southern black culture and was carried north during the Great Migration[3] to some extent. So what you see in inner city shootings is the direct lineage of early American dueling imported to the south from French aristocrats who fought in the American Revolution. History is truly strange.

[1] https://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/3655

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dueling_in_the_Southern_United...

[3] https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/4/race_crime_and_c...

Yes, that's the problem with gang warfare nowadays, the violence not being governed by a rigid class-based hierarchy of protocols and rituals.

It is though. Lack of a formal structure for who is sovereign in deciding disputes is what gets us the chaos of gang warfare. That’s … why there’s the warfare part.

We have a formal structure for who is sovereign in deciding disputes - civil society and the courts.

The actual problems of gang violence are endemic - poverty, trauma, systemic racism, underfunded education, poor nutrition, easy access to guns, lack of role models, the romanticizing of criminality in pop culture, to name a few. Nowhere on the list will you find "lack of clearly defined rules for setting order of initiative."

> We have a formal structure for who is sovereign in deciding disputes - civil society and the courts.

We do.

But other people reject that system.

And we (in the universal sense, in this case) also have a system of resolving that dispute, and it’s, in practice however much it gets gussied up in theory, to borrow a phrase, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.

For some people, that formal structure has deficiencies, like throwing you in prison if your complaint is "he stole the meth I was going to sell."

I would add an enormously profitable market for illicit substances to the top of your list. If you legalized all drugs, gang violence would evaporate practically overnight.

I think it’s highly unlikely that people who have rejected outright the means by which civil society settles disputes will suddenly embrace them if you take away their mechanism for making an income. I’d expect the opposite reaction, actually, and would imagine a doubling down.

In fairness to your argument, I don’t think gang violence is a problem that can be reduced to zero, and think that there’s probably a low level equilibrium point that’s optimal for both parties (civil and non-civil society, for lack of better terms). So I’m probably not the audience for a total libertarian solution to the issue.

You can already still duel. It's hard for anything to happen if neither presses damages due to respecting the duel.

That's not actually true. The prosecutor and police can still come after you for most charges. For example, if you end up killing the other person, the prosecutor will still come after you for murder. The reason they tend to ignore lesser crimes if someone doesn't want to press charges is because they don't want to waste their time if nobody else is interested in taking it to court, and usually they need the witness testimony from the victim (although not always, and they could hold them as a material witness if they wanted to).

I am very certain that most gang violence is far more complicated than a couple of conflicting egos and cowardice is irrelevant.

Why would they choose to duel?

They can still commit crimes like usual.

They could even duel now, but don’t.

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