What if we replace guns and bullets with bows and arrows? (2022)
Of course this would get upvoted on HN. A blog post by an impractical contrarian outsider who's seriously suggesting that the entire world replace advanced weaponry with stuff that got phased out hundreds of years ago, because it would be "low-tech and sustainable". He even suggests that it's unrealistic not because it's the opposite of the entire point of weapons (to kill more things faster and easier), but because it would require "global cooperation" and "uninventing things".
The Onion couldn't come up with this. It's so embarrassing. And yet, as I type this, dozens of people are taking this premise seriously and debating it on its merits. Humans really are doomed.
I'm trying not to be mean, but this article is so naive and insular that it's almost like it was published on a solar powered website or something. Like bikes and cars, we have both bows and arrows and guns already. We use them according to our requirements and their performance characteristics. That pretty much means bows get used for fun and to get a few extra weeks of hunting season, and guns are used for everything else. We use bikes more because there are more cases when they are useful. It's not a philosophical question for anyone trying to choose the right tool for actual, real world job.
> Why did firearms and bullets replace bows and arrows? To many, this sounds like a stupid question with an obvious answer: the firearm succeeded the bow because it’s a superior weapon.
This is objectively true now and has been for a while, though the article goes into detail about how it was far from being true in the early days of the firearm.
> firearms took the skills and muscular effort out of killing someone from a distance.
> 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.
As with many things, economics dictate the choices we make as societies.
> It would decrease the number of people in a given population who could become effective soldiers
We're doing a fine enough job of that already, with sedentary lifestyles leading to fat and unhealthy people.
The author misses on a few points and the article comes across as nostalgic more than realistic.
First: violence was a lot worse before, so what makes the author think going back in time with weapons is actually good?
Second: that guns allow the weak to be as threatening as the strong is considered a feature by many people; an equalizing force. As the saying goes: "God made men, Sam Colt made them equal." The idea that you can find vulnerable people and exploit them without fear is a big driver of violence -- but if everyone must fear violence coming back at them, that's a pacifying force.
Third, the author goes on about the sustainability of guns. But arrows are a lot bigger and more expensive, so I question the idea that they'd be made sustainably. "Artisanal" means wood, I suppose, and that could be much more problematic than a few factories cranking out bullets. People would reuse arrows more, but there are also a lot more people today so that would really involve some kind of industrial process and I doubt it comes out as a net advantage.
Even when it comes to public safety, I'm not quite sure it's a win. We are pretty safe most places, and in the US, violence is mostly local to known areas.
Seems like a good article about the long histories of two types of weapons, and the many deeper differences between them - accuracy, training, supply chains, etc.
Beyond the the obvious (both nasty nations and scared nations will keep their guns and bullets), the article seems blind to the fact that artillery, landmines, and other non-gun weapons cause ~90% of casualties on modern battlefields. Granted that those things fall under the same "it would be so much better if only..." idealism - but omitting them throws some credibility shadow on their historical account.
At the introduction I thought the article was trolling. In the middle I thought it was instead just an interesting way to present info about bows and arrows. By the end I realized the author is serious and the premise is silly.
If getting everyone to move to bows is feasible, why make that the goal? We should instead solve all conflicts with dance offs and rap battles. Ooh, or a walk off! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkMer1HnluU
>Medieval English longbow archers only used such high draw weights because their arrows had to penetrate thick steel plate armor
Experimental archeology shows that this was not the case. Arrows could not penetrate thick plate, and could only defeat plate armor by shooting a large number of arrows and hoping to hit a weak point. The Youtube channel "Tod's Workshop" has done many tests with reproduction bows/arrows/armor, designed to replicate typical equipment and technique (featuring archer Joe Gibbs shooting an impressive 160lb draw weight) from the Battle of Agincourt era. Medieval plate armor was highly effective.
Good introduction video is "MEDIEVAL ARMOUR TESTED! - Arrows vs Amour 2":
So, in the firearms community there's this old argument about bolt action rifles vs modern rifles in which some naive people believe that in combat bolt action rifles could compete with modern gear. Usually phrased as "one shot is all you need" so a bolt action is "just as good". This is that argument, taken to it's absolute most naive, braindead, delusional conclusion. If a force of the best archers went up against a disorderly militia of West Virginian hillbillies with their average armament, the result would be an utter massacre. The ability to penetrate cover, fire repeatedly, fire accurately, suppress the enemy, and do so while pressed against the ground or against cover would win the day every time.
> Hand-held firearms are usually assessed or compared in terms of performance characteristics such as lethality, range, and rate of fire.
Can someone link one of those assessments?
Most assessments I've seen usually focus on accuracy, penetration, and reliability.
Accuracy is usually measured in MoA in US.
Penetration is usually measured using ballistic gel. (12 to 16 inches against an unarmored human)
Reliability is measured with "Mean Rounds Between Failure".
Effective and Maximum Range, and fire rate of weapon is definitely measured, but it's not something that I would think is highlighted compared the other metrics above.
I'm not sure how one would measure "lethality". Debate over "stopping power" goes back a long way, but it's not something that I've seen is easily measured or compared against.
This is a pretty interesting article but the conclusion is literally insane:
> For all these reasons, rather than keeping weapons out of the sustainability discussion – they should be our focus. If we cannot imagine low-tech warfare, we cannot imagine a low-tech, sustainable, and fair society. Switching to low-tech weapons sounds unrealistic because it would require global cooperation, but the same holds for lowering the emissions from fossil fuels. Switching to low-tech weapons sounds unrealistic because it involves “uninventing” things, but this also applies to many other problematic everyday products.
> Indeed, military technology is one of the few domains in which we have collectively decided not to use certain technologies. Humanity has banned many types of weapons in warfare, such as chemical and biological weapons, blinding laser weapons, and poisoned bullets. Meanwhile, no country has succeeded in outlawing SUVs, although their danger to other road users and the environment is well-known. As weird as it sounds, military technology leads by example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_China%E2%80%...
While soldiers carry firearms, due to decades of tradition designed to reduce the possibility of an escalation, agreements disallowed usage of firearms, but the Chinese side was reported to possess iron rods, clubs and batons wrapped in barbed wire and clubs embedded with nails.[191][192] Hand-to-hand combat broke out, and the Indian soldiers called for reinforcements from a post about 3.2 kilometres (2 mi) away. Eventually, up to 600 men were engaged in combat using stones, batons, iron rods, and other makeshift weapons. The fighting, which took place in near-total darkness, lasted for up to six hours.
The fighting resulted in the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers ... While three Indian soldiers died on the spot, others died later due to injuries and hypothermia.[199] Most of the soldiers who were killed fell to their deaths after losing their footing or being pushed off a ridge.[193] The clash took place near the fast-flowing Galwan River, and some soldiers from both sides fell into a rivulet and were killed or injured. ... According to Indian media sources, the mêlée resulted in 43 Chinese casualties.
Replace? Currently there's a choice of either. If someone wishes to use bow and arrow, they can.
This is a thinly veiled 'lets ban guns' but this is naive at best and when you understand why the second amendment is literally 300 IQ. Banning guns is not even close to the realm of possible.
I do have an expectation the 'free world' will inevitably adopt something similar to the second amendment. Though I expect restrictions like the lack of fully automatics will be written more explicitly.
Not to mention the reality that gun manufacturing is now worldwide, achievable at home and this can never ever be regulated for the rest of history.
Is this article serious? Can you imagine if the UN tried to prohibit Ukraine from using firearms to defend themselves?
Clearing a room with a bow and arrow? This is some really ignorant, ivory tower drivel.
> Unless the target is very close, the archer needs to compensate for gravity and shoot the arrow in an arc – hence the word archery.
I always assumed the name came from the weapon invariably having the shape of an arc.
It's a nice composite bow, I'll give you that. But the engraving gives you no tactical advantage whatsoever. Unless you were planning to auction it off as a collector's item. And you're forgetting one more basic thing… You don't have what it takes to kill a home invader.
Man, that's a softball question. "The world has a lot more pipe bombs and hand grenades".
More seriously, several of the assertions in this piece are seriously borked.
OK, a few paras in: "a bow with a draw weight of 45 lbs can kill almost any creature on this planet". Umm, no? Maybe a "HELL naw man". It doesn't even sound true if you think about it, say, medium-hard. He's also comparing bow maximum ranges with aimed rifle precision ranges, another "the hell is this guy thinking" sort of assertion. Historical stuff: "became the dominant hand-held missile weapons from the 1500s onwards" Nope, he is at least a century too early here, possible a century and a half - hell, the Spanish colunellas was only invented in 1510, to say nothing of it being successfully implemented.
I'm done. After all that we don't even touch on the actual reason for firearms in the early modern period, which is . . they're cheap as hell. It's an iron tube with special dirt. And it can be fired by a conscript peasant with a couple days' training. Every other missile weapon is orders of magnitude more costly, and only occasionally maybe marginally better in some edge cases.
I totally dig on the idea of sustainable ranged weapons, but dude . . you gotta get some better background if you want to get taken serious.
Sorry this sounds kinda hostile. I am sure the author is a great person and really smart. I'd probably really enjoy hanging out with him.
Tangentially related: in Joe Haldeman's SF novel "The Forever War", at some point "stasis field generators" are added to the arsenal. They limit the maximum speed (of matter and photons) inside a small volume of space to less than 20 m/s (not counting the insides of specially shielded space suits). If you want to root out enemy troops holed up inside the field, you need to get in with bows, arrows, javelins and swords.
When I was in middle school and daydreamed about sci fi futures and robot wars, I wondered about a giant steel bow as a robotic sniper's weapon.
A 4' tungsten needle at high subsonic speed would be a scary thing. Maximum range of 5+ km, almost silent, and able to punch through meters of concrete. It's not quite an anti-tank weapon, but if it hit a car or a person it would just leave a hole and a thump. It'd go right through an engine block and bury itself into the ground so deeply that the hole would fill itself back.
I've also seen what a modern broadhead can do to a moose. Warning: this video is horrible.
https://youtu.be/3VhEYvHdVa0?si=vsK_aWdSxJ3ylYpU&t=70
That arrow goes right through the ribcage and shreds a lung. The animal coughs up a pint of blood immediately. In less than a minute it passes out from blood loss.
All to say... maybe we wouldn't kill people on the scale of a nuclear bomb. But if humans really tried to go to war with arrows, it would be awful. Guns are better at killing than they ever have been, but bows have also gotten better.
Sounds like a slippery slope. First we replace guns and bullets with bows and arrows, then somebody will want to replace bows and arrows with slings and rocks.
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/72713/why-were-s...
> In the hands of skillful and strong archers, bows can thus produce a similar rate of fire as semi-automatic weapons, and they can outperform guns and pistols.
This is ridiculously false on its face. Pick a novice and give them 1 hour of training and they'll be able to shoot faster and sustain that rate of fire with a modern semi-automatic pistol than any expert archer in the world.
Arrows' trajectory it's highly parabolic and they are affected a lot by the wind. OTOH, a modern crossbow could be highly effective on relatively short distances.
Clearly I can't carry a bow as easily as a gun when weaving through traffic on my fixed gear.
The article is ridiculous on many levels and many assertions, but a big one is downplaying the lethality of a modern bow. Even a low draw weight bow will send a modern broadhead arrow completely through a person, leaving a 2 inch long slice along the way. It’s common for deer bow hunters to instantly drop the animal or have it only make it a very small distance as they spray a literal fountain of blood from all the severed arteries. The comparison to bullets doesnt make sense as they wound in very different ways. Arrows are like knives, requiring little force to kill, it just needs to cut some vitals.
Originally the guns replaced bows, because, despite its surface simplicity, the bow, as a weapon, is actually relatively difficult to make and is very time consuming to become proficient in, compared to a gun.
Fun article if a little silly. As the author notes, the primary reason muskets started to overtake bows is because you can train shooting in five minutes where archery takes months.
The transition is a classic example of a disruptive innovation—-initial tech is worse along every dimension (range, damage, reliability, firing rate) except one, training time.
Some of the comparisons are wildly biased. The effective range of an M4 is 550m, much better than the M9’s 50m. A standard rifleman’s combat load is 180 rounds which is surely lighter than 180 arrows.
What if we replaced aging with cupcakes?
If you want to pop to the shops, hopping on a bicycle can be the better option.
If you want to hunt small game, a bow can be the best choice.
But if you're attacked by zombies, you grab a gun and get in the car.
The opposite has been painfully experienced. Firearms supplemented the excellent bow and arrow among native Americans. But the repeating handgun was the most significant weapon advancement in the struggles between Americans and the native American indians. Here's a good Time magazine article about the bow and arrow and the arrival of the Colt "six-shooter":
https://time.com/5842494/colt-gun-debate-history/
The bow and arrow is a great weapon and hunting tool which I learned to use as a child. But my policy is to avoid lethal confrontation until it is face-to-face. Then I can use handier weapons, e.g., a handful of dirt or a knife. That is almost always possible.
So why don't we replace all our bows, arrows, rifles and pistols with knives? Bwahahahaaah!8-))
"What if we replace guns and bullets with bows and arrows?"
The people who break the rules will keep using guns and obliterate those who strictly follow the rules.
This is also how tyranny can form relatively easily, when "times are good," for example, in NaZi Germany it would have been those blindly following laws-rules, so long as "it's written into law" then that is the bar of following orders, and why with the Nuremberg Trials it was determined that "I was just following orders" isn't a valid for participating in, being [blindly or willing] complicit in crimes against humanity - and that "they should have known better" is why even why some "journalists"-propagandists were hung as their punishment.
> The reason could not have been a better technical performance, because preindustrial firearms were in almost every respect inferior to bows.... The only technical advantage of early firearms was their lethality.
shame; there's a lot more you can do with a bow and arrow than a bullet and gun, like throwing a guide line over a tree
I wonder how the images in the article are converted to get this "retro" and "pixelated" effect
The article is strange unless its point only limited for recreational hunting.
Anyways, I was wondering why we still don’t have modern lethal dart guns that can replace traditional firearms? I remember seeing them as a potential futuristic military weapon in Pop Mech. I’m guessing that reliability is the issue?
The article outlines the advantages and disadvantages of both the bow and firearm and it seemed to me that the firearm had more advantages as a combat weapon than the bow in the modern world.
Now if theres a collapse the bow would be a requirement to know how to use and build.
I’d rather have an article about a ridiculous alternative world where explosives don’t exist.
You’d still have modern metalwork and everything, just no explosives. Lots of potential for interesting weapons. Then eventually rail guns.
I love how this proposal assumes that everyone simultaneously forgets about armor. Joe Rohan recently lost a bet with Elon Musk about whether he could put an arrow through the cybertruck.
is there a rhetorical question about nuclear disarmament?
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then the US would declare it part of the "rules-based order" that nobody may use guns and bullets, and then the US will use guns, bullets, missiles, and chemical weapons while expressing grave concerns about any non-allied state using as much as a musket.