People Don't Usually Use Guns With A Primary Goal Of Killing People

Just a short observation: People don't usually use guns with a primary instrumental goal of killing people permanently.

I'm not talking about firing squads, suicides, or hunting, where killing someone or something is indeed the purpose, or accidental discharges of firearms. 

I'm talking about intentional uses of firearms justified or criminal, against people other than the person using the gun, both in civilian settings and in war. And, I'm not talking about menacing, threats, or deterrence. I'm talking about actually and intentionally shooting other people with firearms, i.e. gun homicide, whether or not it is legally justified.

Of course, firing squads are hardly the only practical means of executing people sentenced to death. Firearm suicides would ideally be prevented in every case because, even if there are circumstances where suicide should be legally allowed, firearms are not a desirable tool to achieve that end. And, by definition, no one wants people to be kill with an accidental discharge of a firearm.

The vast majority of the time, shooting someone with a firearm is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Sure, there are times when someone uses a gun to kill someone because they want that person to be dead permanently, in essentially a non-judicial version of a firing squad execution. And, almost always, extra-legal execution that is not simply for the purpose of incapacitating someone to achieve some other end is a crime, even when this is done by members of the military. If it is equally possible and reliable to incapacitate someone rather than to kill them, such as when enemy soldiers surrender in war, it is criminal or a war crime, to kill them instead.

Far more often than having a goal of extra-judicial execution, someone uses a gun to incapacitate someone. The fire a gun at someone to prevent them from harming them or someone else, to prevent them from interrupting the commission of a crime, to prevent someone from arresting you, to prevent a kidnapping you or some other serious crime, to prevent them from getting in the way of their advance, to protect a boundary or location, to prevent someone from escaping from prison, or to prevent someone from escaping being arrested or stopped.

When law enforcement and the military use firearms to kill people, arresting or taking prisoner the person who they shot while disrupting their actions in progress, would almost always be preferable. The same is true of civilians using firearms in self-defense. This is also true of a large share of criminals who shoot someone in furtherance of a crime like robbery, burglary, kidnapping, or rape, or criminals who shoot members of law enforcement or civilians using firearms in defense of themselves or others or property.

People mostly shoot other people with firearms because firearms make it possible to incapacitate someone immediately when it is not practicable to incapacitate them in any other way.

If we had Star Trek-style ray guns that could be set to "stun" rather than "kill" and were just as effective at incapacitating someone immediately as a firearm was, that would satisfy the goals of firearm users who actually shoot other people with firearms the vast majority of the time.

Non-lethal weapons aren't there yet. There are many situations where the imperative of incapacitating someone outweighs the value of their own life, and non-lethal weapons aren't an adequate substitute to achieving that end. But ultimately, this is a technology problem. If we could develop that kind of technology, it would be vastly more desirable than our existing firearms in the vast majority of circumstances where they are used for their intended purpose.

One can also imagine AI and technologies like "smart bullets" improving the accuracy of firearms in a manner that makes shooting a person in a way that incapacitates them without killing them just as easy as shooting to kill.

Indeed, even against animals, the only accepted use of large caliber ammunition against an animal is to incapacitate a large bear or a large herbivore that presents an immediate threat, and not to kill it for food. Bear and larger than moose herbivore killing for food is almost completely banned, outside some rare, regulated Safari hunting, mostly in rural Africa.

Really, the only time that firearms are legitimately used for the express and intended purposes of killing what is being shot permanently, for which there aren't already superior alternatives, is hunting game. And, that rarely calls for ammunition in excess of 22 to 30 caliber bullets or shotgun pellets (which are not armor piercing or hollow point bullets), which are not automatic weapons that fire multiple shots per pull of the trigger, and do not require large magazines of ammunition. And, in these applications, long guns (i.e. rifles or shotguns) rather than handguns, are almost always preferable, because they are much more accurate at longer ranges.

In essentially every circumstance other than conventional hunting rifles and shotguns to hunt animals for food or trophies, a Star Trek-style stun gun would better meet the legitimate legal objectives of the user than a firearm. Indeed, if a Star Trek-style stun gun could incapacitate animals that are being hunted as effectively as hunting rifles and shotguns do, and the hunter then killed the animal only after it was incapacitated, that would be no worse for legitimate hunters than the status quo. If a Star Trek-style stun gun that was this effective did exist for humans, this is plausible because in most cases, because deer are about the same weight as an average human or smaller, and other animals are the same or smaller in weight, leaving only adult male grizzly bears, elk, and moose as typical animals that are larger than humans. A moose is only five or six times the weight of a heavier human man, an elk is smaller than a moose, and a grizzly bear is only three to four times the weight of a heavier human man, so the Star Trek-style stun gun wouldn't have to be that much more powerful to handle every animal in the wild in the Americas short of a bison, and pretty much everything except elephants, rhinos, hippos, and the very largest wildcats (almost all of which are endangered species) outside of the Americas.

Legally, the case for allowing private ownership of firearms, according to the U.S. Supreme Court in Heller v. District of Columbia, which is the governing theory of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, is that an individual right to bear arms exists to permit people to use them in furtherance of a "natural right" to self-defense of their persons, of others, and of their homes (not the political insurgency theory that the language of the Second Amendment hints at), and the existence of equally effective non-firearm technology that could achieve that end would undermine this justification.

Again, we don't have that technology yet. But this suggests that we invest far, far too little resources into developing non-lethal weapons (really less lethal weapons, since no weapon is non-lethal in all circumstances, even if designed to be), since actually killing someone is so rarely the actual primary goal for which a firearm is used. Replacing firearms (as would be possible in almost every legitimate case) with non-lethal/less lethal weapons that are equally effective at incapacitating someone, would save tens of thousands of lives each year in the United States alone, and would save hundreds of thousands or millions of lives each year in warfare.

The Victorians

Imagine living in a world where 40% of your heads of government and 30% of cabinet members went to the same middle school and high school. The author quoted below hypothesizes that the socialization of the national elite in boarding schools, that were apparently well-enough run, was critical to the success of the 19th century U.K. which was very social class bound. 

Query if the mechanism might have instead been freeing up elite parents to focus on their adult roles rather than on raising their children.

The elites of Victorian Britain operated differently. Their schools and universities were not terribly academic and had very little STEM. As adults, they got up late, drank a lot, and spent a remarkable share of their waking hours partying. They loved feasting, sports, holidays, dancing, and dressing up. Contrary to their stodgy reputation, they were probably a lot of fun. . . . 

Most socially elite Victorian boys began formal education at the age of seven or eight, spending about five years in a ‘preparatory school’ before passing on to a ‘public school’ (which, to the enduring confusion of international observers, is a kind of elite private school). There was a hierarchy of public schools, with the nine ‘Clarendon schools’ at the top, and just one, Eton College, clearly at the apex. About 30 percent of nineteenth-century cabinet ministers and 40 percent of prime ministers were Old Etonians.

Most students at both preparatory and public schools were boarders, meaning that elite Victorians were generally sent away from home by the age of eight and spent their childhoods more with peers than with family. In this respect they were distinctive even in their own time: elite families in continental Europe and the United States were far more likely to keep their children at home and educate them at small local private schools. It is plausible that this contributed to the lack of subnational loyalties in the British elite, in contrast to the distinct elites of, for example, the Southern United States, Catalonia in Spain, or Hungary in the Austrian Empire.

From Samuel Hughes, in Works in Progress. 

The Decisive Benefit Of Weak Psychic Powers

In fiction, often psychic powers are portrayed as extreme, ultra-powerful abilities. But even very modest powers could provide a profound advantage.

Take psychokinesis, the power to physically manipulate things with your mind. Suppose that your psychokinetic power is very weak. You have a range of just ten centimeters. You have a strength and coordination comparable to that of a single hand of first grader.

What can you do with that?

You can open locked doors that don't require a key to unlock from the inside. You can shock someone in your close proximity by socking them in the nose or ears or poking them in their eyes. You can trigger the car alarm on someone else's keys when you are near them, or pick pocket their keys or wallet. You can retrieve jewelry that has fallen into a drain or a sink. You can turn cut the power to a car by pressing a start button or turning a key in the ignition from the passenger's seat. You can zip up or button the back of your dress that you can't reach with your hands. You could pull the trigger on a concealed firearm without moving your hands towards it. You could create a distraction by opening a faucet.

Take telepathy, who can communicate silently with their mind. Suppose that you are a very weak telepath. You have to be touching someone for it to work. You can't communicate outright words or images, only vague urges or strong feelings.

What can you do with that?

You could easily determine if someone is living or brain dead, or if they are human or a robot. You could tell if they were seething with rage inside despite having a calm and civil demeanor. You could manage your relationships better. You could help someone understand you when you can't speak even if you can't be very specific.

Consider pyrokinesis, the power to create or manipulate fire with your mind. You are weak. You have a range of perhaps ten centimeters, and can only make a little spark.

What can you do with that?

Sure, you can light a cigarette or a candle or gas stove, when your matches are wet and you don't have a lighter. But you could also trigger pretty much any fuel tank to explode. You could start a wildfire in the vicinity of flammable materials like dry grass. You could squelch the trigger to a stick of dynamite. You could use it to signal a coded message as you flicked it on and off. You could burn the inside of someone's mouth, or singe or ignite their greasy hair, or create the equivalent of a cigarette burn in some unexpected place to distract them so they'd unhand you.

Consider the ability to see into the future, but very weak. Only within the range of your senses and only for a few seconds in advance.

What can you do with that?

This is essentially the main edge that the Jedi have in Star Wars, allowing them to be just a little bit ahead of people that are fighting them. It could allow you do avoid all manner of accidents. It could prevent you from being betrayed by someone at the last minute, or just prevent you from doing something embarrassing. It might allow you to defuse a bomb by foreseeing what happens if you cut the red wire. It could be very useful on game shows. You could win every time at rock-paper-scissors, or could allow you to know whether to call heads or tails in a coin flip.

You can imagine similar ways that other psychic powers, even if extremely weak, could be game changing.