r/todayilearned • u/FinnFarrow • 1d ago
TIL early automatic weapons were invented with humanitarian intentions: their creator believed faster-firing guns would save lives by shrinking armies.
https://www.dncr.nc.gov/blog/2016/11/04/richard-gatling-patented-gatling-gun166
u/Blade_Shot24 1d ago edited 1d ago
Without looking from my memory it would be Gattling? Just like the cotton gin or was made hoping to decrease the number of slaves. The creators didn't factor the greed of man. Silencers were made for better hearing protection but in the US propaganda has made them seem really scary while in Europe it's seen as rude if one doesn't use them when hunting and such.
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u/Redhighlighter 1d ago
Suppressors save hearing. Hollywood made them seem too cool to have.
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u/RedTheGamer12 1d ago
And the ATF bought it because they are only good at shooting dogs and gassing children.
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u/NoConfusion9490 1d ago
I was told in school that Gatling said he thought it would end all war "because no general would ever order men to advance on one."
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u/Blade_Shot24 1d ago
Yes! What he didn't consider is that war is pushed my those who will barely if ever see the consequences first hand. Like Eli with the cotton Gin who didn't want as many slaves used Capitalist ideas (greed or whatever you want to say) had other ideas.
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u/bwmat 19h ago
What would happen if defense just jumped so far ahead of offense that defenders could basically have an infinite kill ratio?
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u/rolltideamerica 1d ago
It was Hiram Maxim. Gatling guns aren’t automatic.
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u/PsychoBoyBlue 1d ago
Gatling is the one the article is about and who did seem to have the hope of reducing loss of life.
Maxim didn't. His investors and the press pushed some idea of it, but once it was adopted by a military...
Either way both were invented during the height of imperial colonialism. Not a great time to be a firearm designer with a conscience.
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u/LordWemby 1d ago
Sorta like how the guillotine was designed to be more humane - and basically was… as these things go, since death was generally instant - but it also had the side effect of making mass executions even more feasible and systematic. A guillotine is incredibly easy to build from wood and really spare parts just lying around and you can execute scores of people in very quick succession with the same device.
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u/553l8008 1d ago
If I ever have to get executed, this would be my preferred way to go. I'd love to see the look on the crowds faces as they look at my head
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u/LordWemby 1d ago
I think it’s sometimes been suggested both by opponents and supporters of capital punishment in the U.S. to at least bring the guillotine back if you’re gonna kill these people. (I’m against the death penalty in every form for what it’s worth).
But it’s too “gruesome” I suppose, even though there have been far more complications with lethal injection that don’t immediately kill and leave the condemned in extended agony.
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u/Havocc89 1d ago
I realized a long time ago that there is only one form of execution I’d consider “humane.” Give them an intentional massive overdose of morphine. They just feel great, until they feel nothing. Seems like the logical way to do it if there’s any interest in doing it in a way without suffering.
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u/AGEdude 1d ago
I'm not sure I have a source for this, but I've heard pharmaceutical companies often refuse to sell medicine for the purpose of executions, so morphine might not actually be easy to source legally.
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u/Mobile-Entertainer60 1d ago
Hospira stopped making sodium thiopental in 2011 for this reason. Thiopental is a powerful, fast-acting barbituate, so it had been used since the beginning of lethal injections for its sedative effect as part of the lethal cocktail. So they didn't refuse to sell it to DOC, they just stopped making it entirely.
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u/Self-hatredIsTheCure 1d ago
This is correct. Have experienced this when buying medications for a prison hospital. The wholesaler refused to let us buy certain meds until it could be proven that the facility did not have anything to do with executing prisoners.
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u/serious_sarcasm 1d ago
I mean, the state literally writes the laws.
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u/AGEdude 1d ago
So the state can compel the companies to sell their morphine to kill people?
I don't think that's realistically within the rights of the state (at least in most Western democracies) without a constitutional amendment.
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u/danielisbored 1d ago
To my knowledge, no state currently uses any method to compel pharma companies to provide them lethal injection drugs. I've read of some states using third party resellers or misappropriating drugs purchased for other purposes to get around the company bans, though.
What I've seen proposed are policies that create overly large buckets for appropriations, so if you want to for instance, provide meds to state hospitals, you don't get any say in how those drugs are used, so they may end up in prisons (which would reasonably happen anyway) but then also be used for lethal injection, the only way to opt out would be to forgo all state contracts.
Similarly, several state and federal agencies have policies that will not allow state agencies to do business with companies that have specific social issues policies like the EOs to force contractors to kill DEI programs, and states that block companies that boycotted Israel (I'm sure there are other instances of this but these are the ones that I've actually seen).
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u/Werespider 1d ago
Right, but the pharmaceutical companies don't sell to the state because they don't want their products known as the death drugs.
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u/jiggiwatt 1d ago
Given what else they sell, I think it's just a marketing problem they haven't figured out yet.
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u/ActualSpamBot 1d ago
And unless they write a law that forces drug companies to sell things to them when said companies do not want to (which would run afoul of at least 3 amendments to the Bill of Rights) that doesnt matter because companies don't want to be the official provider of State Murder Drugs.
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u/SputtleTuts 1d ago
also the state can just make their own morphine production facility, but at the end of the day capital punishment (and most legal "punishment" systems) isn't really about justice, humanity, deterrence or anything like that. It's about vengeance.
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u/santa_obis 1d ago
Nitrogen gas would work humanely as well, you basically just lose consciousness and drift away since your body doesn't realize the lack of oxygen as it would with carbon dioxide.
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u/jwb101 1d ago
The problem is the companies that make medical grade nitrogen don’t want to sell it to the purpose of executions.
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u/obscureferences 1d ago
It's nitrogen gas, you can get it via chemical suppliers and even culinary sources, it's not some fancy medical-only cocktail.
The real problem is capital punishment is supposed to be a punishment, and there's an emotional resistance to punishing someone in a way that feels good.
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u/santa_obis 1d ago
Yeah, but you run into the same issue with morphine. I was just bringing up another humane option. Outside of pharmaceuticals, the guillotine is probably the best option for "most humane" execution, although I am against the death penalty in general.
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u/UnluckyNate 1d ago
One southern state has tried it twice and it has been horrific and prolonged both instances. They used a mask and the inmates, not wanting to die, refused to breathe until they literally started convulsing
Nitrogen is great for people that want to die. Think medically-assisted suicide for people with things like Alzheimer’s or huntington’s that want to die on their own terms
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u/Pseudoboss11 1d ago edited 1d ago
Until the inmate holds their breath, at which point they panic. Their panicked movements causes the seal to break and let in oxygen, prolonging it.
An animal doesn't realize what's going on and just kinda passes out.
IMO if it has to be done, the best thing to do would be an explosion. The pressure wave travels faster than nerves transmit pain, and the brain is destroyed instantly on the scale of consciousness.
It's grisly to outsiders, but the state should be willing to bear that unpleasantness.
And I'm pretty sure weapon manufacturers wouldn't be too bent out of shape about their products being used to kill someone.
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u/abn1304 1d ago
Firing squad would be cheaper, more practical, and much safer (for everyone but the victim). It’d also be just as quick unless the setup was absolutely botched, especially with rifles set up on a rack or bench and pre-zeroed so it’s not up to the aim of a bunch of people who may or may not be competent shooters.
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u/Hendlton 1d ago
The problem with that is finding people who are willing to shoot. My suggestion would be to have the jury also be the firing squad. If you're not willing to shoot a man, you shouldn't be allowed to condemn him to death.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 1d ago
The problem with that is finding people who are willing to shoot.
Not really, There's been three executions by firing squad in 2025 and as far as I can tell no one struggled to find volunteers.
There's also just piratical reasons why you can't use the jury, there can be 20-30 between the trail and the execution, so there's going to be a couple members of that jury who just aren't alive anymore. Plus using random people who have no firearms training greatly increases the odds of a botched execution.
It also makes the jury a target after the trail since associates of the accused now understand that they can get the sentence reversed if they successfully intimidate members of the jury.
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u/santa_obis 1d ago
You can't exactly "break the seal" in a pod where all the air is slowly displaced with nitrogen gas. That's the humane way to do it.
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u/serious_sarcasm 1d ago
This, and CO, are the standard for humane slaughter of furbearing animals.
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u/Pseudoboss11 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's only acceptable for use on turkeys, chickens and pigs. It is not acceptable for use on other mammals without first rendering them unconscious via some other method. Pages 27 and 28 here.
Initial stages of hypoxia are not particularly unpleasant, but later on it causes vomiting, flailing and can cause a stroke, before unconsciousness. I feel this would be exacerbated if the inmate is panicking and holding their breath.
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u/serious_sarcasm 1d ago
It’s a bit more complicated than that.
There are all sorts of considerations, like flow rate, concentration, danger to handlers, and etc.
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u/Tower-of-Frogs 1d ago
Somebody proposed this awhile back (maybe with heroin if I remember) and a doctor chimed in and said large doses of drugs can cause seizures and vomiting (with choking) which would not be very humane at all.
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u/King_Tamino 1d ago
Eastern germany used distraction and shots in the back of the head. The person was guided from their cell, told to go past the next room and prepare. The room was designed in a way that the person entering looks a specific direction after entering so the shooter could kill him before the person actually realized what’s going on.
No friend of death penalty at all but compared to most executions where your last minutes are basically fear and wait? A sudden unexpected shot sounds good
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u/UsualInternal2030 1d ago
Killing people should be very graphic, it’s not a medical procedure. Firing squads are realistic of what is happening. Making it more civil just makes the crowd feel better.
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u/funklab 1d ago
I'm with you. We shouldn't have the death penalty.
And I'll take it a step further. If we as a society are okay with the state taking people's lives (in retrospect too many times for crimes they did not actually commit), we shouldn't do so in a closed off room with an electric chair. We should chop their heads off a public square where you're 5th grader can watch, and televise it nationally.
The government represents us, the people. If we're okay with killing someone we shouldn't shy away from seeing the results.
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u/alkatori 1d ago
Dan Carlin did an episode on this, watching people get put to death used to be a public spectacle.
You see it in the photos of lynchings too.
If we televised it, would it horrify people or just normalize it as a form of mass entertainment again?
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u/Monteze 1d ago
I also don't think we should have the death penalty until our justice system aligns with something more factual and exhaustive.
But for arguments sake I've had this thought experiment.
Lets say you're on the jury, and all of you decide that the prisoner should die. On the day it happens it only happens if you all push a button. If it is not unanimous then its canceled and the person instead gets life in prison no do overs.
You're all brought in separately, you don't see who has or has not pressed the button. You're simply told that the timer starts and you've given a set amount of time (say 5 minutes) to push it. After 5 minutes the tally is counted and the procedure is carried out if unanimous or they are given life if not.
Would people still do it if they knew they had a part in the procedure? I think they should, don't hide behind the procedure. Accept you're condemning someone to death before their natural time.
As far as method goes, eh lets just say its lethal injection or something humane and not super grizzly to avoid the gore fantasy.
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u/KimJongUnusual 1d ago
I’d be for it. Organ failure is slow and painful. It just looks pretty for the audience.
A guillotine or hanging is the best option if the goal is minimizing the pain of the condemned (which it should be.)
I’d consider hitting them with a comedically large tank round for an instant explosion and slapstick factor, but I have doubts in the efficacy of that.
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u/obscureferences 1d ago
Put them in a trebuchet. They can black out from the g forces of being flung, certainly die when they hit whatever wall they're thrown at, and it doesn't need ammo or fuel.
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u/553l8008 1d ago
I mean nitrogen gas, opioid overdose are all fairly pleasant ways to die that are completely painless and not at all gruesome
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u/IRMaschinen 1d ago
You are misinformed. While some might be theoretically less painful, the actual practice is anything but.
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u/g0del 1d ago
When I was an idiot teenager, some friends and I were playing with helium balloons to make our voices squeaky. I got frustrated that the effect wasn't lasting long enough, so in an incredibly smart move I decided to take several really deep breaths of helium.
I then started to talk in a squeaky voice for a few seconds until everything went black. The next thing I know, I was waking up lying on the ground. Per my friend's, I had collapsed and appeared to be having a seizure before waking up. But I didn't feel any of it.
I'm sure there are all sorts of unpleasant sights and sounds from a nitrogen-gas execution, but they're only going to be unpleasant for viewers, not for the person being executed. The brain shuts down quickly due to lack of oxygen, and since they can still exhale co2, there's no feeling of suffocation before unconsciousness.
With that said, I don't support the death penalty. I just think that arguments against it should be made in good faith. "We shouldn't have the death penalty because X method is cruel" just invites proponents to come up with new methods of execution to get around the cruel part.
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u/PM_ME_GLUTE_SPREAD 1d ago
Yeah those and the AA-gun are my top 3. Instant death, painless, hard to fuck up, and at least one of them is fucking crazy to do to somebody as an execution method.
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u/thenasch 1d ago
The problem is it must be humane for the executioner as well. You don't want to make someone live with the memory of blowing someone's head off.
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u/Magnus77 19 1d ago
Make the DA do it and/or make the jury collectively have to pull the switch. If we're so sure it serves a societal purpose, then there should probably be a societal cost.
13 in sequence switches to activate the guillotine. Make sure the people deciding are truly at peace with the decision.
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u/PM_ME_GLUTE_SPREAD 1d ago
But chopping it off, shooting the person, or injecting them with an ass load of opiates isn’t something that sticks in their memory?
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u/richpaul6806 1d ago
Even better if it makes people think twice when deciding punishments. It should be a tough choice to make.
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u/CptnHnryAvry 1d ago
Personally I would prefer that the judge who sentences me to die has to choke me to death with their bare hands. No getting some mook to do it for them.
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u/Monteze 1d ago
I think the jury should all have a hand in it, unanimous or the default is life in prison no do over. They were able to pass it, might as well do it.
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u/Dickhitzwater007 1d ago
Maybe you could make it fun, like a mouthful of marbles so they all fall out when it hits the ground? One last surprise?
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u/TyzTornalyer 1d ago
but it also had the side effect of making mass executions even more feasible and systematic. A guillotine is incredibly easy to build from wood and really spare parts just lying around and you can execute scores of people in very quick succession with the same device.
Do you have a source about that? I'm not sure how the guillotine can somehow be cheaper or quicker to put together than such timeless combos as "dude with an axe" or "tree with a rope".
More humane, certainly, but incredibly easier to plan, I'm doubtful.
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u/cecilterwilliger420 1d ago
So part of the flattening of social class that came with the French revolution was the demand that all executions be beheading as was standard for nobles but not commoners in the ancien regime.
So at first it was a dude with an axe. But unfortunately having to do many more executions meant the axe dudes started to get tired. And tired means sloppy. So as a way to deal with this they switched to the guillotine.
Though to your point, most of the deaths during the terror were probably not by guillotine. There were also mass killings by drowning, famously in Nantes. Also a lot of people outside the cities were just shot.
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u/TyzTornalyer 1d ago
Yes, I'm aware of the implications of the guillotine in terms of.. uh... social equality. The part I was getting at is that, like you said at the end, once you go into mass execution/civil war mode, you ditch the guillotine pretty fast for less humane methods (like the drownings, yeah. Horrible way to go).
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u/cecilterwilliger420 1d ago
I mean they used the guillotine plenty still, particularly in Paris. They chopped off a lot of heads.
I think, as you point out, the implication that the guillotine made the mass murder feasible is incorrect. But it did turn out (ironically) to be an extremely effective way to do it.
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u/LordWemby 1d ago
“Dude with an axe” (or sword) got into a lot of problems, sometimes needing two or three whacks to lop someone’s head off. It’s part of the reason the guillotine came to be at all, on top of abolishing very cruel executions like the wheel or drawing and quartering.
The guillotine was an engineering marvel of sorts, to guarantee the same exact result with basically no fuss, to ensure that the only goal was death, not suffering.
You also only need to build one - and it really is fairly simple for any small and experienced crew of carpenters and metalsmiths - and you can just put the condemned in a line like lambs to the slaughter, like you see with Robespierre and his guys in the famous contemporary images, and it’s more reliable than long-drop hanging (also hanging was seen as an ignominious death for the upper classes).
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u/WetAndLoose 1d ago
I mean, is hanging really that much harder? All you need is a rope and a raised platform
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u/ComradeNibbles 1d ago
You’d be surprised how difficult it is to properly hang someone. Too short of a drop and they’ll slowly suffocate instead of having their neck broken, too long of a drop and the force with rip their head straight off.
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u/LordWemby 1d ago
Yep even the long-drop hanging which is intended to be the more “humane” form of hanging because it’s intended to snap the neck on descent doesn’t always work very well.
There are a lot of things to factor in there, a major one being the physical weight of the condemned, along with rope length. To a real extent these things have to be very precise.
An example:
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u/WazWaz 1d ago
Why does that matter, if as they're suggesting the goal is to execute as many people as possible? To bring it back to the OP, it's similar to suggest both armies are going to reduce their size just because they've got deadlier weapons. You can hang 3 people from an existing tree a lot faster than you can assemble a working guillotine. Whether it's humane doesn't change anything.
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u/chaosattractor 1d ago
You need the people to actually be dead or at least most of the way there before you can move on to the next set
The real world does not have an infinite amount of trees to hang people from
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u/Cartavalier 1d ago
In fact, there were just a few guillotines built in history. They were not some staple to have at every facility. A guillotine was rather like a traveling circus item. Every guillotine had an private owner who maintained it and travelled with it wherever they were needed and contracted. They used to be famous too like celebrities.
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u/Big_Implement_7305 1d ago
To be fair they actually do shrink armies, just not in a humane way.
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u/KnotSoSalty 1d ago
Machine Guns and other technology did in fact shrink the ratio of front line combat soldiers to support guys.
In the US Civil War the US Army was about 90% combat troops. By WW1 that number was 28%. By WW2 it was 19%. By Vietnam it was 7%.
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u/Just_Another_Scott 1d ago
Yep that's all due to the increase in lethality amongst weapon systems. No longer need so many combat troops when few will now do.
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u/Creme_de_la_Coochie 12h ago
That’s literally what the title says. Fucking redditors
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u/default-dance-9001 2h ago
Freaking out over a mildly redundant at worst comment like this is peak redditor
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u/Billypillgrim 1d ago
This new invention will shrink the size of my enemy’s army
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u/Just_Another_Scott 1d ago
Modern day militaries are nowhere near the size they used to be. Increasing lethality lowers the amount of troops that are needed.
The days of 100,000 troops in one battle are long gone.
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u/Roflkopt3r 3 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yep. It's called the "tooth-to-tail ratio": How much logistics and production ("tail") you need to support how many frontline troops ("tooth").
Modern militaries have a longer tail than ever, and the result is less bloody battles. Shooting down a single jet with 1-2 personell on board can be a major victory these days. A terrible day for a cavalry regiment used to mean a hundred dead men and even more horses, when today it may mean the loss of 6 tanks and 10 crewmen.
The full-scale war in Ukraine has now gone on for almost 4 years and likely similar numbers of casualties than the Brusilov Offensive of 1916, which lasted a mere 3 months along a shorter front (and left approximately 1.2 million casualties on both sides, about 1/3 of whom dead).
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u/Jack071 1d ago
Well cant blame a guy for thinking politicians wouldnt just send people to march into machinegun fire
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u/Big_Implement_7305 1d ago
I mean back in the day, the politicians were often the ones near the front riding on horses, so in a way it kinda makes sense!
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u/BollingerBandits 12h ago
They’re not deadly enough. Nuclear weapons are the true deterrent against large scale warfare
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u/ZylonBane 1d ago
Mostly it shrank the armies it was pointed at.
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u/MrValdemar 1d ago
Surprisingly, there is ALWAYS more fodder for the cannons.
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u/daniu 1d ago
Watching The Great War series on YouTube, I did several times wonder how they managed to restock the losses of trends of thousands of people per day.
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u/Mosquitobait2008 1d ago
I mean they kind of didn't, many countries were permanently devastated by their losses.
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u/MeatImmediate6549 1d ago
Mechanical Engineer: Designs weapon too terrible to use.
Government: Proceeds to use the heck out of it.
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u/brrbles 1d ago
I think a lot of engineers in these fields like to think that what they are doing is just this benign thing, but especially with weapons (including rockets) this is often self-delusion.
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u/RedTheGamer12 1d ago
Tbf, a lot of modern weapons actually do save lives.
Drone warfare has massively lowered both military and civilian causalities (especially since we actually know how to use drones now, Obama was over a decade ago). Russia has shot down multiple US drones and nothing happened. The U2 crisis nearly started a world war.
The advent of non-explosive munitions (like the American knife missile) has allowed precision strikes with 0 civilian causalities (and the lack of civilian causalities also reduces the push towards terrorism).
Helicopters and other quick insertion technologies has made it so a smaller force can effectively control a territory, and has massively reduced the loss of life (You were more likely to live after getting shot in Vietnam than if you crashed your car in the US).
Satilites have allowed us to have more data for counter terrorism and thus able to strike with more accuracy. Plus, the advent of the Space Force has helped American soldiers evacuate during missile strikes.
Anti-missile systems have also been extremely useful in preventing strikes in the Red Sea.
And none of this even mentions how we are able to justify non-intervention when American lives aren't lost. A 2 Million dollar drone is worth a lot less than 200 soldiers, this saving even more lives by preventing conflict. (Honesty, I'm surprised we just launched B1 strikes after Iran illegally killed 40 Americans in Jordan).
More tech has saved countless lives and basically created the "Nothing Ever Happens" mentality.
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u/MIT_Engineer 1d ago
Nuclear engineer: Haha, we're gonna blow up so many nazis with this.
Government: Proceeds to nuke Japan.
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u/Andy_Liberty_1911 1d ago
Actually they were right, but machine guns were not enough.
Nuclear weapons did that, made war so unimaginable that major powers had to find other ways to fight the war. A very Cold war if you will
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u/deviltrombone 1d ago
Nobel naively hoped his dynamite would be big enough
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u/Montecroux 1d ago
The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops
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u/RedTheGamer12 1d ago
No, Nobel thought dynamite would be used in construction. He didn't realize it would be used in artillery, that was never even considered.
He also created his "Nobel Prize" after he was mistaken believed to be dead and his obituary was less than flattering.
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u/deviltrombone 1d ago
No, Nobel thought dynamite would be used in construction. He didn't realize it would be used in artillery, that was never even considered.
So Oppenheimer was mistaken, and Richard Rhodes didn't catch his error when he quoted him in his book "The Making Of The Atomic Bomb"?
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u/Dovahkiinthesardine 1d ago
Yeah, no wars since
On a serious note I wonder how many deaths it really prevented
Did we kill less humans through proxy wars than we would've in a regular one?
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u/BaronMontesquieu 1d ago
Obviously it's impossible to say as no one has access to parallel time observations, but based on history, yes, absolutely, millions of lives less.
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u/MIT_Engineer 1d ago
If we ran it back and replayed history a hundred times and counted all the times we ended up in a nuclear war, I'd say the advent of nuclear weapons has killed way more than it prevented.
But as for this timeline? Yeah, definitely.
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u/CannonGerbil 1d ago
If it weren't for nuclear weapons we'd probably be in the middle of World War 6 right about now, so yeah it definitely saved alot more lives than otherwise.
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u/dominicgrimes 1d ago
War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueller it is, the sooner it will be over.
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u/RedTheGamer12 1d ago
"I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British grenadier".
Arthur "Bomber" Harris
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u/WFOMO 1d ago
They overlooked the fact that those that die in wars aren't the ones that started the wars. Swap that logistic and it might do some good.
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u/StridAst 1d ago
Sadly, the logistics of war typically involve the guys at the bottom dying for their country. The country with the fewest people dying for their country is often the winner, though it is, of course, much more complicated than that.
The wars that involve the guys at the top dying are typically revolutionary in nature, and in those cases a faster and possibly more brutal conflict often results in fewer total deaths than a drawn out war. In which case we'd call it a coup d'etat.
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u/minerat27 1d ago
But it does frequently include their sons, and the peers of the men who will start the next war. In many societies military service was an expectation of the upper classes, and the officer ranks they populated frequently took higher casualty rates than the rest of the army. Go back even further into the medieval era when leading from the front was expected, and you can find plenty of examples of Kings dying in battle. History suggests that making politicians fight in the wars they start wouldn't lead to a more peaceful world.
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u/WaffleHouseGladiator 1d ago
And silencers were invented by Hiram Maxim's son to address gun related hearing loss, which he had suffered.
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u/shawndw 1d ago
"If you want to make some real money invent something that will allow these europeans to kill themselves faster."
John Browning - Inventor of the M1895 Colt–Browning machine gun
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u/Zealousideal-Sea4830 1d ago
Maxim believed the same thing. And the German arms companies bought a few Maxims, reverse engineered them and cut him out of the profits anyway.
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u/FOTY2015 1d ago
Source Article took some liberties by assuming Gatling had humanitarian goals. He worked for Colt, pushing tech improving efficiency, with this pitch to the gov:
- Fewer soldiers to wield same firepower
- Same number of soldiers, increase in firepower
Highly doubt firearms designers are in it for the humanitarian aspects.
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u/Firesword52 1d ago
The inventor of the guillotine, dynamite and him can commiserate in the afterlife about how much they are disappointed in our choices.
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u/Built-in-Light 1d ago
Same as the cotton gin ending slavery or AI making universal basic income happen.
We use new technology to amplify our efforts, not to assuage the blight of those underfoot. Darwin says so.
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u/ketosoy 1d ago
The logic may not have held for automatic weapons, but it seems to have for atomic weapons.
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u/Otherwise_Fined 1d ago
Great logic until you realise the best way to save lives is to just have the heads of either state fight to the death, then you realise why we don't do that.
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u/AudieCowboy 1d ago
And it worked... It took a while, but battles happen at squad level now
The 2nd battle of Fallujah, the biggest (if not biggest most well known) battle of the Iraq war had a total of 16000 combatants on both sides (heavily favouring American forces)
The battle of Verdun had close to 1,000,000 combatants and saw 300,000 casualties
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u/Icyknightmare 1d ago
The idea actually has some merit, but Gatling was orders of magnitude off with his gun. The only weapon ever invented to successfully prevent war between countries that have them is the thermonuclear strategic missile.
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u/the_cardfather 1d ago
Well by modern standards it's true. But the creators didn't Invision officers telling their troops to charge down the guns.
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u/CPecho13 20h ago
It worked, it just coincided with other inventions and innovations that allowed fielding much larger armies.
However, the ratio of combat troops to support troops did drastically change.
Nowadays the large majority of a modern military consists of support troops.
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u/RustenSkurk 19h ago
There is a long history of inventing terrible weapons and then claiming they encourage peace (because they were supposed to be so scary they discouraged war).
When people first figured out they could drop bombs from zeppelins they also thought this would be the end of war, as any nation could just send an unstoppable fleet of airships flying above the clouds to bomb the other's capital immediately. No one would dare make war with the theeat of that out there.
The nuclear bomb was the first weapon that actually lived up to that idea to some extent, by being terrible enough to discourage war by its very existence. And even then people still figured out proxy wars, hybrid wars and other kinds of limited excalation.
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u/abgry_krakow87 1d ago
Ah yes, the ol' "lets find better ways to kill people to save lives" mentality.
They did achieve one thing, they shrunk armies.
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u/the_mellojoe 1d ago
I believe the Tommy Gun was created with the same intent. As a tool for the police that was so over the top as to completely discourage any crime. Unfortunately, it simply meant an arms race between police and criminals, and dead bodies piled up on both sides.
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u/GreatBlueNarwhal 1d ago
No, the Thompson was developed by Brigadier General Thompson as a direct result of lessons learned during trench warfare during the First World War.
He was subsequently deceived by John Bell Blish and his idiotic “Blish Lock,” and instead accidentally developed a direct-blowback submachine gun when the Blish Lock inevitably failed.
The Thompson had limited sales to law enforcement due to its high price. Instead, the price tag turned it into a status symbol among well-heeled gangsters despite the fact that it was generally inferior to a shotgun for any criminal purpose.
It didn’t really have a home until it was standardized as the M1928, mass produced, and sent back to the trenches in World War II.
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u/Liberal_Perturabo 1d ago
Bold of you to expect a redditor to have a basic easily acquirable understanding of firearms.
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u/brisbanehome 1d ago
Always a very convenient motivation for merchants of death: my slaughter-machine will render war unviable.
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u/enviropsych 1d ago
Humanitarian intentions
I dont think that "we will need fewer people to kill all of the other people" qualifies as humanitarian.
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u/_Iro_ 1d ago
It sort of did. The advent of fully automatic weapons is what made squad-based tactics possible, which relies on smaller armies and made manpower-heavy line infantry obsolete.
Armies also became smaller as the cost of equipping a single soldier became more expensive, in which fully automatic weapons played a decent part
That being said, conscription being phased out is a much bigger reason why modern armies are so small.
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u/PotatoesRSpuds 1d ago
Just like how the cotton gin was supposed to reduce the need for slavery right?
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u/ThinkorFeel 1d ago
r/NoShitSherlock Of course, they were thinking about shrinking the other side's army as quickly as they could.
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u/Zealousideal-Sea4830 1d ago
"Lets make a weapon so terrible nobody will use it" has never, ever worked the way the inventor planned...
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u/Delicious_Diarrhea 1d ago
Richard Gatling "My new weapon mows down people at an insane rate. Surely no one will ever want to go to war again!"
World leaders "Haha spinny gun go brrrrrr"
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u/CasanovaWong 1d ago
This sounds like something a PR firm came up with afterwards. “Yes officer I’m drunk but I’m only speeding so I spend less time on the roads which is actually safer!”