I know gun-fu

And if you really don't get it, then just add a bayonet and keep slicing up people, just like before.

Bayonets, making guns backwards compatible.

@ImportViking Have the Japanese have used more bayonets they could have a better grasp in the backward compatibility idea, that would be useful for the playstation :P

@Schattensturm I just got a vision in my head to mount a PlayStation to every gun. That'd make for interesting virtual wars...

@ImportViking XD

@ImportViking You're more right than you know. When muskets were first introduced (Don't say "guns." At the time a "gun" was specific to cannon. Technically it still is today, but common usage has changed to include hand weapons.) musketeers were interspaced with pike men when in formation. Battle tactics of the day were essentially large groups of people with pointy things running at each other. A spear or a pike was a way to keep yourself as far away as possible from the guys running at you, often with swords.

So the tactic was for a couple of pikemen to stand on either side of the long range musketeer (Not rifleman. This is long before rifling became a thing.) for the close in combat.

Then some smartass thought "Hey! If we strap a long knife on a musket it's almost as good as a pike! Then we either eliminate the pikemen or double our musketeers!"

While I'm no fan of being in combat at all, being a soldier back in those days must have been miserable.

@Tarmaque

Actually, combat was rather tame in comparison to what people imagine it to be. Most actual fights were less "choreographed swordplay" and more "drunken bar fight", and historically, the majority of soldiers did their best to avoid killing each other much to the chagrin of the officers/nobles. Turns out, most humans don't like the idea of killing other humans, filthy worthless foreigner or not, especially when said "foreigner" was "guy from two towns over who didn't even look all that different from you". It was actually unlikely a soldier would die on the battlefield. OFF the battlefield, well, that was where being a soldier (or worse, a sailor) was beyond awful. Poor supplies, no medicine, no infrastructure, frozen winters, unfiltered water. It wasn't even until WWI that more soldiers died on the battlefield than off it.

@CorruptUser Oh, agreed! And to be honest a couple centuries later when lined up in ranks of three to load, stand, and fire, so the other side could just shoot you was arguably worse. Napoleon style.

Like I said, no thanks.

@Tarmaque Quite honestly, in my opinion it still is today. If humans were intrinsically more peaceful, we wouldn't need people as cannon fodder to 'protect' lines on a map, religious ideals or property.

Agree with your information. I know that bayonets were actually also implemented in an era where it took a long time to reload a gun. Bayonets were placed so that a musketeer could protect himself in case he didn't have a loaded gun or if someone was too close to shoot at. At least, that's one of the reasons, or so I understood.

@ImportViking "Club your musket" was also a legitimate order when the gunpowder or bullets ran out. After all, that huge wooden stock is basically a very heavy club.

That in a nutshell is why general access to guns makes people more rather than less safe. Think about the amount of natural strength and agility, training, practice and experience needed to injure or kill someone with melee weapons if they ALSO have access to those weapons. Most people inclined to come at you with a lance, sword, machete, knife or bat will be fairly adept at using it (mainly because people like that either become adept relatively quickly or become incapable of coming at anyone with anything.) Even if you HAVE lots of training and experience, someone with equal or even slightly less training and experience but greater physical strength and dexterity will retain the overall advantage.

Now think about the amount of innate physical ability and competent practice it takes to injure or kill someone with a gun if they have access to the same guns: Whoever lines up their shot first wins, just that quickly and easily. It really does not matter if you are a 40 kg unathletic person facing down a 125 kg Olympic weightlifter: Shoot straighter faster and your problem ceases to exist. Even if he is a special forces combat veteran; the odds you have better aim than him are admittedly low in that case--unless you are ALSO a special forces combat veteran, in which case we are back to "whoever shoots straighter faster wins." But if you duel him with swords he will probably overpower and kill you (or worse) unless you are MUCH better with your weapon.

Obviously some groups of people should NOT have guns--nor swords, knives or bats; anyone with a proven history of criminality or mental illness, and children too young to have impulse control or recognize the difference between right and wrong or fantasy and reality. Just as obviously, we should mandate everyone with a gun is competent to use, carry, own, store and maintain one, precisely because it is so much easier for ANYONE with a gun to seriously injure or kill someone. If a four-year-old swings a bat at you, you can probably disarm them easily, and probably will not be hurt very badly if you do not; if a four-year-old points a gun at you, your life could instantly end. A clumsy knife wielder is usually dangerous mostly to themselves alone, if only because of limited reach, but a clumsy gun wielder is a mortal threat to anyone within its considerable range. The worst result of a poorly stored and maintained bat is that it cracks and splinters when it hits something; the worst result of a poorly stored and maintained gun is that it could go off when jostled or explode when fired. There are no ancient tales of people speared to death by their own hunting dogs, but there are modern cases of people nearly or ACTUALLY killed when their dog spooked while traveling in a car with a gun, caught the trigger with a paw while scrambling around, and consequently shot them. I have seen two such stories in the news in as many years, without even looking for them (they stuck in my mind because people being shot to death by their own pets makes for a memorable story.) That is not even POSSIBLE when a gun is properly stored, but stupid people doing stupid things with weapons tend to end tragically.

I find it both interesting that so many peaceful Western European nations have some of the worlds highest per capita gun ownership yet lowest murder rates, and frustrating that so few people (at least on the Atlantics other side) realize that. Most people believe the whole continent of Europe a "Gun Free Zone," with the sole difference that the left thinks that a paradise and the right thinks it a killing field. Both sides are embarrassingly in error due to their even more embarrassing shared ignorance.

A final note: I have a number of sharp knives in my kitchen drawer. I also happen to have an elementary school-aged child. What I do NOT have is any significant concern that she will seriously injure or kill herself, any of her friends, my wife or me by taking out one of those knives and playing with it. She will not even use the "grown up" SCISSORS: She does not have access to them, but would not use them even if she did, because she knows they are DANGEROUS for young children, because she in turn knows young children do not know how to use them properly. She certainly does not consider them toys, and if she found something that "looked like" a toy knife or adult pair of scissors she would not blithely assume she could safely play with it. Because I am trying not to raise a moron, and realize that that starts with not being a moron myself. ;)

@JOL tl;dr. American likes gun, thinking I am responsible, so everyone should have guns.

@Lidonious
He's from Norway, you buffoon

@Lidonious Had you read what I said, you would know that was not it. Swedes like guns too: They rank 22nd in the world (out of 230) in per capita gun ownership, which is top 10%. That is NOT why Sweden ALSO ranks 50th (out of 230) in per capita homicide, just outside the bottom 20%. MOST countries with the highest per capita gun ownership AND lowest per capita homicides are Western European democracies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

Americas problem is not that all people have access to the wrong kinds of guns, but that all guns are available to the wrong kinds of people. The proof is that most of Europe has plenty of guns without becoming a killing field, simply because it goes to great lengths to 1) prevent all people untrustworthy with ANY weapon obtaining any and 2) ensure ALL people who do obtain guns first obtain training to own and use them properly.

@Lidonious TD;CR version: Most European countries have many guns yet few murders--because they find out whether someone has a huge criminal record or just got out of a mental hospital, and require certified competence, BEFORE legally selling them a gun. The stats are clear that that works far better than "guns for all" OR "guns for none."

@JOL Most American firearms homicides are committed with handguns. Most other countries, like Canada, make it fairly easy to get long guns suitable for hunting, but very difficult to get handguns, which are really only well suited to killing your fellow human beings at close range.

@JOL Let's ignore the whole ''Clarity'' in your post and focus on the facts.
Guns are like dynamite, we don't make dynamite illegal, however used by untrained or not locked away from untrained hands is a real issue. Making it laws in several nations for people in police positions and so on, to have a special type of box that the gun must be placed in, both when on duty and not. (When on duty it is locked inside the police car.)

You're talking about the freedom of everyone to be able to defend themselves through generall access to firearms. We're talking about statistically reducing the number of misfires, mentally ill gaining firearms and basically less ''dynamite'' in a society.

Unless you stop making the assumption that western europe does not have the very laws many in the US are fighting for, it is naturally that you will consider them delusional. Norwegians have weapons, yes, weapons for hunting typically not for self defense, and especially not AR15s.

@cmL @cmL AR-15s were legal last I checked, though I did hear Stortinget had introduced a bill banning semi-automatic weapons, that was expected to pass easily. It goes back to the valid point @DutchToSwede made in his reply: Unless faced with a lone attacker and a pretty good shot under pressure, firing a single-shot gun immediately reduces it to a clumsy ineffectual melee weapon--that a bigger stronger attacker can and will still easily take away and use as a bludgeon of their own. The problem, and I concede it is largely an American problem, is not that everyone has access to the wrong KINDS of guns, but that the wrong KINDS of people have access to every gun. That is why is is vitally important to ensure that only people PROVEN legally incompetent by reason of DOCUMENTED criminality, mental illness or youth are categorically disqualified: Everyone else is qualified and entitled as long as they first get equally well documented training in safe ownership and use of their weapon.

@JOL pretty much how it is handled in the Netherlands and Sweden. And probably the rest of Europe, but I am not familiar with those laws. In NL and SE anyone can apply for a license. It requires a reason to own them, most commonly hunting or sport shooting. And an approval by the police that you are not some maniac. And you have to keep them in a safe ofcourse. Self defence is not a valid reason here.

@cmL
I'm sure it does a lot of good locked in a box. "Hold on, let me get my gun before you stab that person." >_<

People in places that have no guns are ignorant to what happens when everyone has them. When everyone has guns, everyone knows more about how to handle guns. Guns are only an issue when they are heavily restricted to the point that only bad people have guns and the good people are too ignorant about them. In the USA, where we have nearly as many guns as people, gun related deaths are actually rather low once you take gang shootings and suicides out of the statistics and remember the USA is more akin to the EU in size than to any one European country.

@Steeeve
On your first point, if someone has gotten close enough, to not give you the time to open a locker and get the gun. Have one even managed to assess if it's a real threat?

Yeah that's bullshit. ''When everyone has guns, everyone knows more about how to handle guns.'' is a (in lack of better comprehension of English) a lousy argument.

As there is a difference between. ''Learning by doing, and learning by requirement for wielding''

As in learning by doing involves making mistakes and adjusting accordingly. And unless you count a 10 minute ''Don't point the gun at people.'' lesson by a salesmen/neighbour/friend/Family member as enough training. People will be make mistakes, and as any mistakes involving something of explosive power, there will be fatalities.

Just to point out just how different the two of us are on the priority of safety, Norway are strongly considering banning selling fireworks to untrained or not publicly authorized as they are hurting themselves. This limits personal freedom, but it will decrease the number of blind or near blind people every year as a result of accidents.

We did ban the ''Rockets'' fireworks and now only have Ground fireworks, and it has had a significant impact on reducing the amount of eye injuries every year. There are still a few, and therefore we consider banning the last bits as well. Replacing it with a public fireworks display instead.

@JOL today, maybe. Well, not the safer part, but the ease of use. In the past 100 years.

Even during the middle ages many cities banned weapon cariage in cities and such. Because people kill eachother. With whatever they can. Even then they knew that more and easier to use do not make society safer.

Upon the invention of firearms melee weapons did not become obsolete. In fact, it took roughly up to the US civil war for melee weapons to fade out. If early firearms were so good that would have happened a lot sooner, in stead of after what? 300 or so years of development? The main issue with firearms for the longest time has been accuracy and rate of fire. The moment you pull the trigger you effectively have a big, unwieldy club. Assuming you even hear a BANG in stead of a very satisfying CLICK. Then you must shift your focus to reloading/troubleshooting said unwieldy club to make it do BANG again. Or run. Or die. Or both. Highly impractical really.

@DutchToSwede You are right that single-shot guns were grossly inferior to most melee weapons until relatively recently. One thing I recall from grade school Texas history class was that in the time it took a white man to fire, reload and again fire a black powder rifle, a Comanche warrior could fire no less than a DOZEN arrows from a long bow whose stave was as tall as him (and thus comparable to the dreaded English longbow in both range and power.) We were also taught that was the main reason the Texas Rangers were among the first units to adopt the Peacemaker revolver, of which it was later said that, "God made men; Colonel Colt made them EQUAL."

All that said, crossbows were popular long before firearms for the same reason the latter became standard in most European infantry units several centuries before the US Civil War: Because they may take longer to deliver repeated attacks than melee weapons do, but are FAR easier to use, and thus far easier to train large numbers of civilian militia levees to use quickly. For trained and experienced military professionals, the lance and later the saber were still preferred because those with high degrees of existing skill were far more dangerous wielding those than firearms--but very few PROFESSIONAL soldiers existed prior to the invention of firearms. Conscription, and especially peacetime conscription, did not become widespread until guns did, and that was hardly because European and other armies lacked the need of massive manpower: It just was not practical to invest the time, manpower, money, provender and other resources to train civilians to even minimal levels of military proficiency with military weapons. That was especially true as long as they were as or more effective by simply changing the business end of their farm implements into weapons if and when needed for military service, but leaving them to practice farming skills with farming tools the rest of the time.

People, even in non-military purely social settings DO "kill each other with whatever they can." Guns do not change that: What guns change is the victims ability to do more than "run or die" from the people trying to kill them with whatever they can, as people do unfortunately often. And you are absolutely right that a semi-automatic gun is infinitely better suited to that purpose than a single-shot gun is, for precisely the reasons you stated. That is a wholly different animal than a fully automatic gun, which has no use except to either kill many people quickly or a few people with casual indiscriminate fire. I still advocate the availability of THOSE to the private citizens, but the mandatory certified training standards should be higher than the standards for other guns, in direct proportionate to their respective lethality. We let people drive cars as long as demonstrate certified ability to do so safely and abide by the laws regulating driving, but a license to drive a car is not sufficient to legally drive a bus or semi truck: Because those vehicles are significantly more powerful than standard cars, so proportionately more dangerous in the hands of unskilled operators, so legal operation of them requires separate and correspondingly higher certification and licensing.

@JOL I guess there are people who would keep a gun with a chambered round in the vehicle... Darwin award right there. >_< Your gun should never have a round in the barrel and guns in storage should be fully unloaded (exception for a gun used for home defense). Kids should be taught the dangers of guns as early as possible, just as you would knives and hot surfaces. I come from a town where 20+ guns wasn't abnormal and no children ever shot themselves because they were never in a situation where they did not know what a gun was. Don't teach them, how will they know when they find one? :-/

@Steeeve The widely spread mantras based on knowing how a firearm physically works without considering the implications of how that knowledge is obtained, presuming this knowledge is always taught, and then desperately clinging to any excuse to avoid considering these things is something I find fascinating. Note I mean in general; I have no idea about you personally and am partially writing this because I'm hoping to hear from someone who doesn't do this on why it's so common.

For instance, the point "Kids should be taught the dangers of guns." This is entirely TRUE, but large numbers of Americans jump to "therefore we should presume everyone otherwise legally able to own guns has been taught this." Which doesn't appear to be a CONSCIOUS idea ("of course I don't believe that" as a response the hearing it out loud), but still one regularly presumed when discussing how to limit firearm access to people who aren't aware of how a gun works (often shown by insisting another idea shouldn't have to account for what happens where this doesn't hold).

And when I say "limit firearm access," I don't mean "limited by the government." Presumably in your town letting kids start handling guns before being taught "the dangers of guns," was extremely abnormal for parents to do.

Which can't really be discounted by declaring "each individual example is just an idiot," as a reason not to consider this (again, something I've seen often; I have no idea about you specifically). There's no law of physics that would make the dog firing any less lethal if the gun had been improperly stored by someone else.
___________________________
Another common argument structure I see is to group laws (in this case I am referring to government) that would restrict who can obtain what firearms into two groups, that appear purely to presume a particular argument. Group 1 is labelled "gun control," and taken to necessarily lead to all firearms being banned. Group 2 is labeled "just common sense," and not "gun control," without leading to the same results.

One case I've noticed with a very fast slip between the two is from "that can't be true because it would be illegal for anyone with an FLL," to "applying that same law to people without an FLL would be overly burdensome and would become a slippery slope" (note to non-Americans: FLL as in Federal Firearms License). Note I don't bring up FLL holders in the example this precedes and when I've been able to ask, the law that applies to FLL holders is consider to "just be common sense." Usually backed up with "it just is," whe asked to do into detail.

Again, this does not appear to be CONSCIOUS idea, which is why I find is so fascinating. Well, that and the assertion it isn't merely firearms but also soviet style revolutions that are a legal right (often while declaring people who don't consider the latter a right somehow fail to understand the soviet union was horrible).

@JOL. You. I like you. Of course, this scenario would require EVERYONE to own a gun, but you, my good sir, are more reasonable than most Americans. I'm not saying that I agree with you. I'm not saying I disagree with you. But you have a good, sensible argument. I hope you have a nice day.

Fun fact, until the 18th century, firearms were more prevalent in Japanese warfare than in European warfare. Most of what you "know" about Japanese history is a combination of nationalist propaganda and historical fetishization. "Bushido" as a word did not enter the common language until 1899, and was virtually non-existent in literature before then. And that's not even getting in to the swords...

@CorruptUser Rare, but certainly not non-existent. The earliest use of the word "bushido" dates back to the Sengoku (Warring States) period, which lasted from 1467-1615, and Sokou Yamaga (1622-1685) wrote extensively about bushido. Unfortunately, he was exiled and so his work didn't become popular until much, much later, around the beginning of the 20th century.

@JudasFm
Thus the qualifier "virtually". The word is old, yes, but obscure in part for the reasons you mentioned. While the samurai did have a sense of honor as did all professional warriors, and Japanese culture did have some variations as all cultures do, bushido was not nearly as extensive or as ritualized as pop culture would have you believe. It wasn't until the very end of the 19th century, due to a popular publication, that any but a few, even among former samurai themselves, would've even heard of the word "bushido". But, Japan wanted to romanticize a part of their past, and the Japanese government was more than eager to establish a single national identity, so, well, history.

And in an ironic twist, for all Japan tries to set itself as being different from, say, Europe and its knights, the mythology of Bushido is actually yet one more way that Japan is similar. For you see, Chivalry has virtually the same history (meta-history?) as Bushido...

@CorruptUser Note that the book Bushido: The Soul of Japan was written by Nitobe Inazō. In English. What is less known is that he made up a lot of it out of wholesale cloth, basing much of it on the ideas of Chivalry he read about when studying English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, and his time studying at Johns Hopkins University and Halle University in Germany.

He was a Christian, not a Buddhist or Shinto, with very western ideas. He married an American woman: Mary Patterson Elkinton who was a Quaker. Over the years they traveled extensively between Japan, The United States, and Germany, and he wrote a number of books in Japanese, English and German. He eventually earned 5 doctorates. (A highly intelligent and well educated man!)

Bushido: The Soul of Japan is not wholly incorrect, but it is heavily romanticized and influenced by western ideas. It was written, in English, during a period of time that Nitobe was living in California. The book was a huge success in America which was at the time fairly obsessed with things Japanese. (The book was published in 1899.) Because it was written by a Japanese man people in The United States took it as more truthful than it really was.

However the book was not translated into Japanese and released in Japan until few years later. Japan at the time was undergoing a period of nationalist growth, and curiously the book became a best seller there as well. The growing nationalist movement saw in its romanticized notions of Bushido a justification of their nationalist views. It changed the way they saw their own history, even though it wasn't very accurate and cribbed a lot of its notions from European mythology. (And I do mean mythology. The chivalric code was always a sort of fantasy rather than a reality in Europe.)

As far as historical texts about Bushido go, Hagakure is a better place to start. However it is a more personal contemplation on rather than a description of what Bushido was in general at the time (more than 100 years earlier.)

A better idea of what the life of a Samurai was can be determined by studying the life of Miyamoto Musashi, and by reading his writings in The Book of Five Rings, fifty or sixty years prior to Hagakure. Far more brutal and less honorable than the romanticized notions in Bushido: The Soul of Japan. The idea of Bushido as we think of it today (and even as the Japanese think of it today) is about as accurate as our ideas of King Arthur's notions of Chivalry. i.e. not very.

@CorruptUser Oops! Sorry, I somehow missed that part of your post. My bad

And later Japanese warlords/generals took this concept of "ease of use" and ran with it like you wouldn't believe. It took years to teach someone how to fight with a sword, a bow, or on horseback, it only took weeks to train someone to use a matchlock. In fact when Japan finally reunified and decided to invade Korea, over a sixth of the Japanese army was armed with matchlocks.

Ironically the thing it was more difficult to produce large quantities of firearms than it was to train people to use them. Because of course at first the firearms had to be imported from literally the other side of the globe. And then when the Japanese did start building their own matchlocks, the gunsmiths sat on the secret like a jealous dragon guarding its horde. So only a relatively small group of people knew how to actually make the things.

@Hfar A large part of that was because the warlords were smart enough to realize that if anyone could produce guns it would be very easy for other people to use guns against them.

@Hfar Japan was a very fast adopter of the firearm, fully integrating it within their military structure within a generation or so (at one time they had more firearms than Europe did IIRC). For all the samurai and katana worship, the Japanese LOVED them some firearms. And then they did it again in the 19th century, going from matchlocks and samurai to fully modern (for the time) armies within a couple decades.

And yet, to be truly proficient takes training and discipline. I think the Brother Japan could relate to that.

@MikeM_inMd And it is a perishable skill, that requires continual practice, and really has variations between firearms. This means that you must learn strategy, the application of your available tools to the job at hand in the correct way. The old philosophy espoused by the samurai of the time would apply quite well. Learning the basic techniques to care for the tool and use it effectively can be done in a week. Learning to make it an extension of your will can take a lifetime.

@tomyironmane The amount of training and discipline required is completely different though, and the degree to which means, genetics and physical exercise are decisive in any confrontation. There are reasons feudal infantry consisted largely of spears and pikes: Yes, they were more useful than swords against mounted foes, but 1) it is much easier and cheaper to replace the end of a scythe and make it a polearm than to forge an entire sword, 2) the former was thus not only more available to the average peasant on short notice but more PRACTICAL for use in peacetime and 3) that was MOST of the time, so the only people with enough leisure time to develop military proficiency with military weapons--to be true professional soldiers rather than occasional civilian levees--were the nobility not obligated to work from before dawn until after dusk just feeding their families.

It remains true that an experienced shooter has a big advantage over an inexperienced one--but not the completely insurmountable one experienced swordsmen or lancers had over inexperienced ones. No one learned nor learns the basic techniques to care for and effectively use a sword or lance in weeks, which is another reason peasant levees fashioned their plowshares into polearms: Those weapons required a very similar skill set rather than a completely different one that could only be adequately developed through YEARS of extensive training and practice they lacked. The hunting parallel applies there too: Hunting has been common in very culture since prehistory, but the only thing ever hunted with a sword is PEOPLE, so if you need to turn a lot of hunters into a lot of soldiers in a hurry, do not give them blades, have them direct their experience with hunting spears and bows toward people.

It ain't hard to USE a gun, but to use one with SKILL takes practice. When I was in high school (15 years ago...my God I'm old) we had to take shooting lessons. You'd be stunned to see how many kids are totally hopeless with a rifle. 90% of these eighteen year olds didn't know how to fucking aim. Some even got knocked on their asses by the kickback. It's a gun, morons. It has a kickback. It's not like playing Doom. I grew up with a game hunter father and learned to use guns fairly well by age 10, so shooting a stationary, huge target was simple. I'd love to see some of the other students try to hit a rabbit or a squirrel! Hell, I bet they'd even have trouble hitting a big buck.

@tc49pz

what kind of messed up high school did you attend that had mandatory shooting lessons?

I attended a rural high school in Texas and I've never heard of such a thing.

@celtic_twilight Texas used to have them all over, though I am a bit surprised there were still places that had them recently enough a 29-year-old was enrolled in one, much less a MANDATORY one (that part is new to me as well.) My dad used to tell me that when he was in high school in TX in the '50s some kids (i.e. the few with vehicles) drove their pickups to school with rifles racked in the rear window--and no one got shot, because people who had guns were taught to respect them, in turn because people who could not or would not respect guns were not allowed to have them. He and my mother also talked about how their parents would routinely leave their loaded hunting rifles securely propped in a corner, yet no one got shot--because all the kids knew guns are not toys and that if they so much as LOOKED at that rifle they would be unable to sit down for a week.

@JOL No, I'm pretty sure people did get shot back in your father's days as well, accidentally and on purpose. Accidents happen even to cops who carry a gun with them openly all day long (unless they are in the UK) and have a submachine gun in the car as well for tougher situations. They are also required to practice regularly. Yet things happen because humans make mistakes. They wouldn't be human otherwise.

@tc49pz Guessing one of the big problems is 1) People assuming it's just a perfectly straight line and forgetting that gravity and atmospheric conditions put more of a force on the bullet the further the distance is, and 2) Forgetting to account for kickback fucking up the aim?

Well, but it was a *foreign thing.* Anything weird and above all FOREIGN just *has* to have hidden secrets that makes it difficult to learn, because if it were obvious and attractive then the local culture would already have it, right? And would have mastered it long, long ago, and then they'd be muffling laughter behind their hands at the Foreign Devils and their Simplistic Foreign Guns. (This holds true for every freakin' culture in the world about every *other* freakin' culture in the world, from Anglo-Saxon to Zulu; it just does.)

BTW, I absolutely love Ancient Japan's and Ancient Portugal's outfits. Very nice.

@Ysabet To be fair, there is a hidden secret with guns... a few, even. It's just that the secrets are in having gunpowder (which I think the Japanese had), coming up with the idea of using the gunpowder to propel a solid projectile down a tube rather than using the explosive as the primary weapon, and then finding a way to make an apparatus to do that which is strong enough to (usually) hold up to the internal explosions being produced, light enough to be carried by a person, simple enough to operate that it's actually practical to use with less than three hands (some of the really early firearms weren't...) and simple enough to make that they can actually realistically be mass-produced. Figure out all that, and actually USING it is easy!

'@Draxynnic' Probably a big part was machining the "tubes" to standards you could rely on. Lotta periods in Japanese history where metallurgy tanked due to lack of resources or infrastructure.

I actually really like that outfit design for Japan - it should be used more often

It's not shooting a muzzle-loading gun that's difficult, since they were inaccurate enough that most of the time the only real way to hit anything was to line up a bunch of troops, have them all point in roughly the same direction, and fire as a group.

The real difficulty was training the soldiers on how to reload in a timely manner. And also how to properly keep the gun in working condition.

@ShoggothOnTheRoof the accuracy of muskets is much better than you think. When well loaded with tight fitting balls, they were roughly as accurate as modern shotguns firing slugs, and more accurate than bows while demanding less training.

The Japanese were very impressed by the accuracy of the matchlock firearms the Portuguese showed them, and started copying them until they became a mainstay of their armed forces. Then, they invaded Korea and won nearly every land battle against Korean and Chinese forces thanks to these matchlock muskets (the Koreans and Chinese would then start copying them, recognizing their superiority to their bows and black powder weapons).

That being said, the typical soldier was not a well trained shooter, they were not given much chances to train shooting the gun (which had no iron sights beyond a bead... sometimes), they were trained to load it more than to fire it, furthermore, military loadings had smaller balls that were less precise to be able to keep working despite fouling, and combat engagements were frequently past 100 yards.

'@simval84' To go further, even today accuracy in the average battle is estimated to be extremely low; like 1 in 147 low. So the "inaccurate" musket contends with "inaccurate" modern rifles.

But this is due to a lot of factors, like "shooter and target are behind cover" and "shooter can only poke his head up for a split-second to lookaimshootDUCK!" But even then guns and people are rather inaccurate. It's why machine guns were such a revolution; if one in a hundred bullets is going to hit, fire a thousand as fast as possible.

I believe a large part of guns in Japan had to do with the fact that they were peasant weapons. A "proper" soldier from the right caste was supposed to follow his training, use his Bushido and all the cultural mystique attached to it. When you had no real battles or wars to fight you didn't use guns much because they were flippin' expensive and not "cool". When you were throwing a full-size army at a problem with your shiny new guns you used a levy of peasant conscripts who lacked training but had numbers. In both cases you believed the vague cultural idea that true warriors had magic powers (think like anime shows where a katana cuts a bus in half) and that guns weren't really a part of that.

Then there's armor-piercing (which arrows could do, but not as reliably as guns). Archery having a higher accuracy cap than guns but a much higher training requirement. And many other things besides. But this is wordy enough.

@boring7 Actually, a lot of what's "known" about Bushido actually comes from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries when Imperial Japan was in the midst of wave of nationalism and heavily romanticized the Sengoku period. While samurai typically dueled with swords, in battle the katana was more of a rank insignia and fighting was done primarily with bows or spears.

@boring7

It's not that they were peasant weapons. The Japanese used almost exclusively matchlock muskets, they never developed flintlocks or percussion weapons. Matchlocks relied on slow burning wicks that had to be lit shortly prior to firing, as a result, these weapons were useful on battlefields but couldn't be carried loaded and ready to fire for a long time, as the wicks would burn out. So no practical pistols, no using them for guards or for individual weapons.

As a result, swords, spears and bows remained the best personal protection weapons available in Japan during the entire period. So Samurai kept training with them all the way to the 20th century, though they didn't hesitate to use matchlocks during battles.

Funny enough, this is exactly what I watched a Youtube video about just a couple of hours ago.

@anothga Seems like it was recommended to a whole lot of people. I watched it just the other day as well.

'@Louhikaarme' Same here