Has the invention of the gun made mankind more or less free?

Has the invention of the gun made mankind more or less free?

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  1. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Less, firearms lead to far more centralized power and state armies.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      Less. Way less.

      Pretty much this.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      Less. Way less.

      Pretty much this.

      Far more centralized than... monarchy? Man there are some idiots on this board.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        fricking idiot

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          Go on. Elaborate.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        I don't know where to start with this.
        Are you saying pre-gunpowder monarchies had more centralized power than modern states?

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          Yeah, genius. People actually have rights now because governments rule by popular mandate rather than divine right. At least in the west anyway. Fair trials, free speech, right to bear arms, open elections anyone can vote in, social mobility, all of that happened in the age of firearms.

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            Are you really, actually saying that a modern state, like the UK for example, have LESS centralized power now than it did 700 years ago?
            Like for real?

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              He genuinely believes "the people have the power" among other platitudes that are repeated on the television, like a child.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                He genuinely believes "the people have no power" among other platitudes that are repeated on facebook, like a teenager.

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              You don't understand what centralized means. Governments today have more power in terms of their stability and capability to enforce law, but that power belongs to the citizenry, not to a monarch. The PEOPLE are the state, and they loan power to a elected officials to represent their interests. In a monarchy, the KING is the state, and the law flows from their commands only. THAT is what centralized means. This shit is basic high school civics idk how you can even have this argument in 2023.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >The PEOPLE are the state
                Yeah? Why did "the people" massacre themselves in the French Revolution or USSR then?

                Your "basic high school civics" is propaganda-tier knowledge. Drink deeper, m8, or taste not the Pierian spring.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                The army, navy, air force, police and any other organization that carries weapons literally exists to protect the state and its interests.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >The PEOPLE are the state, and they loan power to a elected officials to represent their interests.
                On paper and in the more romantic past. Now we have tendency of deep state take full power and more and more isolate themselves from the will of the people. Peak freedom has passed fore sure and world everywhere moves to tyranny. i cant remember any country that became more free in the recent decade.
                Look like its the true nature of the state and standing army (Founding Fathers warned you but you didn't listen). Something about freedom and blood of teh patriots.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Governments today have more power in terms of their stability and capability to enforce law, but that power belongs to the citizenry, not to a monarch. The PEOPLE are the state, and they loan power to a elected officials to represent their interests
                They don't give a FRICK about you

                https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                >2014
                Great, please compare to 1200. Also, pick a country that wasn't founded with the right to bear arms so you can actually make a comparison.
                What you should really do is compare modern states with and without firearms to control for the fact the nature of states has changed a lot over the years. Then cross compare cultural regions. That article only mentions guns once as an example of what counts as a lobbyist group.
                There's a way to do this and you are nowhere close.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                https://i.imgur.com/QDLYI7r.jpg

                Has the invention of the gun made mankind more or less free?

                >https://davekopel.org/2A/Foreign/Relationship-Guns-Freedom-59-Nations.pdf
                Here is what looks like the most relevant and credible story after a 2 minute search. I skimmed to the end and it at least uses a methodology.

                Conclusion: "as general (but not invariable rule), countries with more guns have more economic freedom, less corruption, and more economic success."

                The only strong conclusion is more guns do not mean less freedom (Freedom House metrics). Probably the US is a strong outlier in both guns and economy. I would need to read it more closely to see if they actually suggest causality but it looks like they do not.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        >feudal monarchs had more power than modern international finance
        I fricking hate midwits

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          If you cant see how a king being allowed to take all your property and execute you whenever he sees fit is worse than what we have now then you're hopeless.

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            Pre gun pre absolute monarchy kings defiantly had more limits of power. Not much against commoners but against feudal aristocracy sure. There was huge layer of convoluted feudal traditions and laws kings were required to honor. And in kings vs feudal dynamics kings had much less power level and feudal could much easier jump ship and join another side.
            Primus inter pares.
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudal_fragmentation

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              Yeah but that had no bearing on the material conditions for like 98 percent of the population. Obviously lords had wiggle room to squeeze concessions from the monarch to varying degrees in different kingdoms but peasants didn't see much of that. Maybe their grain production quota changed a little one year to the next.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        >Far more centralized than... monarchy?
        Guy has a point.
        There are different kinds of monarchy.
        Guns among other things (centralized financing via money) enabled
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_monarchy

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          The counter point to this would be Qin China. The legalist school in general really.
          Also the palace economies of the near-east were pretty dire in general really, there's a darker reason that civilisation emerged in places where people had a hard time escaping.

          At the very least with guns the peasantry become the primary instrument of war that must be respected. As opposed to some spoilt noble with a horse.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      You have the causation backwards.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      that… is the opposite of what it does. A farmer wielding a sword in the 1300s does not make him a threat to the king, but a citizen with a hunting rifle can take down presidents and prime ministers
      >inb4 insurgency cope or whatever

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      MORE

      Before firearms you had nomadic people periodically coming in to frick your shit up. Every civilization, regardless of where they were, always had to be on edge because buttholes on horseback could be coming in at any time. Imagine if Tanks just grew naturally and were fed by fricking grass? Yeah rural people would be fricking our shit up too. Guns gave the advantage back to civilization and it's been cities ever since.

      lol dope thinks he'd be "free" in some quasi anarchist state rather than a poor subsistance farmer on edge because of bandits. Where life is nasty, brutish, and short.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      You really need to crack open a history book, zoomer

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      Less. Way less.

      Pretty much this.

      Far more free. Prior to then, you had a reliance on traditional blades, pikes, so on and so forth. The training required to effectively use these instruments without dying or getting injured (which back then is just dying, but slowly) was largely relegated to members of standing armies or noblemen classes. You could think of the crossbow as the proto-gun in this regard, as it eternally BTFO'd your traditional noblemen cavalry classes and other such armor wearers. The problem of course is that more effective firearms require fine tuning, which tends to come with more refined industrial processes. This lends more toward state structures, but in principle anyone can use a gun, and in theory anyone with the right tools and knowhow could make at least a rudimentary firearm.

      As a wise man once said, there's enough firearms to equip one in twelve people on the planet. The question is, how do you arm the other eleven?

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        >You could think of the crossbow as the proto-gun in this regard, as it eternally BTFO'd your traditional noblemen cavalry classes and other such armor wearers.
        Crossbow was primarily siege weapon. Open field battles in Europe were ruled mostly by heavy cavalry till guns surely won meta in 1525 under Pavia

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          Yeah this is true. I suppose the phalanx/schiltron would be the more commonly used anti-cavalry method, but still you get my point.

  2. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    More. You can make a gun out of just about anything in minutes.

  3. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Define free.

    That aside, guns are "neutral" and makes the ability to kill closer to the headcount unlike swords, so if you're limited to guns only like in the 1800s you'll have a lot of revolts hard to supress.
    Comms, transport (no cars) and complex things like organizations, aircrafts, artillery made control easier.

  4. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    If you have a gun, everything is free.

  5. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    yeah yeah just post more hot women in military uniforms

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      The 30 years war, the first war in which musketeers made up the majority of infantry, had the worst death rates per capita, with some areas in the HRE being depopulated over 50%.

      ~260 million people killed by governments in the 20th century.

      Guns are le bad, but ultimately we can't RETVRN to anglo tradition of longbowship, because the gun is out of the bag, so we all need guns.

      kay

  6. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Much more. Peasant uprisings used to stand little chance. Now the power dynamic isn't nearly as wide.

  7. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    More. Oppressing people who are heavily armed without their permission is extremely difficult

  8. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    yes

  9. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    more or less

  10. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    The rise of the gun has more or less been in line with the rise of state power, but I think advances communication and transportation and banking schemes have done more for centralized power than the gun itself. If you gave guns to everyone in, say, the early middle ages, I think commoners would be far more successful in holding off bandits and tyrants. Now, it doesn't really matter too much what guns the people have, because they are domesticated and don't fight back regardless. The television has been vastly more damaging to the mankind than the gun.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Now, it doesn't really matter too much what guns the people have
      Actually it matters.
      Because for best guns government holds monopoly fiercely.

  11. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    way less free

  12. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    it made everyone equal

  13. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Thing is, if the people have access to something like firearms the state also does. And a state being a state means it'll have far more of them due to the sole control of resources.
    Add to this the sole right of a state to issue laws about ownership, manufacture and import of weapons, the creation of militias and such.
    This in mind, claiming you have more freedom is outright imbecilic.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Thing is, if the people have access to something like swords the state also does. And a state being a state means it'll have far more of them due to the sole control of resources.
      >Add to this the sole right of a state to issue laws about ownership, manufacture and import of weapons, the creation of militias and such.
      >This in mind, claiming you have more freedom is outright imbecilic.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        Don't be moronic on purpose, please.
        Guns are not swords or spears.

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          You're right, they're a lot easier for untrained peasants to use.

          • 10 months ago
            Anonymous

            Yeah, and conscripts.

            • 10 months ago
              Anonymous

              They're pretty much the same thing anon. A man won't enact his freedom any moreso when presented with a blade than if he were to be presented with a firearm. He does however gain the ability to uphold that freedom much more easily with the latter.

              • 10 months ago
                Anonymous

                Gorilla warfare

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          That's the point!
          Guns are usable by any moronic Shaniqua so the government can round up a gang of morons and use them to beat up anyone who fights back; unlike the sword and spear days when anyone who wanted a top-down organisation had to struggle with competing bands of warriors and independent rural centers of power.

          Guns paved the way for 20th century totalitarian government. Before modernity, when muskets were the norm, soldiers were considered the brainwashed dregs of society.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      If a state of 30 people rules a country of 100 people, and the state has 3,000 guns but the people have 100, the balance of violent power is against the state.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        There's also organization and coordination, getting those guns where they need to go when they're needed. Something any group of citizens, no matter how organized, will always be worse at.

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          Not always buy typically. Look at Mexico for a state unable to control organized crime. God forbid you live in Haiti. There are a lot of factors that come into play and you really need to know real world contexts to draw conclusions.

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          >getting those guns where they need to go when they're needed.
          In the case of a place like the United States, the guns are already there. Your neighbor is as good as an armory. Coordination and skill should be worse but that's not always the case. Also,

          Gorilla warfare

          For everything it is, the state is not mobile except for say a secret police force. That may or may not be enough. Usually it's enough until a point of grievances is passed and the whole state implodes a la Romania.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      >a state being a state means it'll have far more of them due to the sole control of resources.
      >laws, what they are and who obeys them
      You make a lot of assumptions.

  14. 10 months ago
    Anonymous

    Centralization != state capacity/power.
    Almost any modern state has more power than any state from say 1000. That doesn't mean it's more or less representative or more centralized.

    • 10 months ago
      Anonymous

      When the commonry is not divided along a million ideological/ethnic/etc lines and is fully aware they do not have institutional power (this is just primordial truth regardless of what -ism claims to be in charge), they simply agree when the king is being malicious and pick up their pitchforks. The king is more likely to listen to the sword of damocles than "public opinion" which democratic despots repeatedly spit on with zero consequences. More immigrants? More taxes? More censorship? More wars? More laws? More anti-white propaganda? We don't care if you don't want it, cattle, you'll just talk about it instead of shooting back, so we're going to do it anyway! Parliamentary governments, on the very rare occasion they actually do listen to the masses, take forever to get anything done because of their countless useless bureaucrats, but when moneyed interests want something done, a "problem" is created for the state to "solve", and is quickly acted upon with no consent or concern for the public. The modern wageslave kneels more to Rothschild than any high/late middle age or rennaisance peasant did to their government.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        >democratic despots
        To ching, nay, to chong.
        I'm not sure what your point is besides you don't get your way so you think no one does. You'd be shocked to know most people actually are centrist in their beliefs and they accept compromise on divisive issues because it's preferable to civil war. It's hard to argue choosing to participate in a system like that is actually tyrannical.
        >actually they're all steeple
        The steeple aren't the ones who need to compromise so they're basically irrelevant in a modern democracy.

        • 10 months ago
          Anonymous

          >steeple
          *sheeple, of course. Good talking to you kiddies.

      • 10 months ago
        Anonymous

        >The modern wageslave kneels more to Rothschild than any high/late middle age or rennaisance peasant did to their government.
        If you want the same standard of living as a middle ages peasant you have more freedom than ever to do it. As a bonus, you won't be a literal serf on someone else's land in case you decide to reenter society, make money, and buy property.
        >durrr you're only renting propert.
        Buy a plane ticket and go to Liberia. Real land ownership is open to you like it never was to a French peasant.

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