I’ll add crutches. Dickens’ Tiny Tim would easily recognize a crutch from today. When I had to be on them for a torn calf muscle, I kept wondering why the design hasn’t improved in thousands of years. I wanted hover crutches.
How does this square with the popularity of tacticool shit, including any-and-all the electronified gun bling one’s picatinny rail can hold?
Sure, for some segment of gun owners, there is a certain appeal to the historical context or mechanical elegance of various firearms. A much larger segment own them for utilitarian reasons such as hunting or home defense. But I think there is a non-insignificant percentage of gun owners who own multiple guns because it makes them feel like a Big Man.
I used to compare guns to cameras. Both are common handheld mechanical devices that perform a simple function. Both have seen thousands of variations designed to improve efficiency or to handle special circumstances. Both have been refined by over a century of industrial/scientific competition.
The gun propels a small piece of metal through the air at very high speeds in a straight line.
The camera exposes a light sensitive surface to a controlled amount of focused light for a controlled amount of time.
(Yeah, definitions are never perfect.)
If you mean they own them because (rightly or wrongly) it makes the owners feel empowered, than I absolutely agree. That is definitely one reason why I own them myself. I do not consider this to be incompatible with other things I’ve said and other types of motivation. I also think it’s not all that different from the egoistic reasons other people buy fancy cars, gadgets, or clothes. We’ve all got something to prove, either to others or ourselves.
Lizard, can you consider opening a thread on how many pressure cookers you own, and the evolution of the design of pressure cookers as an IED?
???
You are saying that adding on a targeting laser, or a low light vision scope would fundamentally alter the way that a gun works to the point where someone from 1911 wouldn’t understand it? That’s what you are trying to say by saying that having electronics for driver and passenger interaction would confuse people.
At the very best, all you are saying is that unlike guns, cars have had a hundred years of improvements for safety, reliability, and efficiency, and that gun technology is stuck with what we had over a hundred years ago.
This is a straw man. Adding things to a gun does NOT change how the gun itself functions, because it doesn’t depend on those things to work. The thing the person from 1911 wouldn’t understand would be the laser or the low-light scope, not the gun. Every major type of firearms action–recoil, blowback, gas operation, etc.-was worked out mechanically before World War II, most of them before 1920. Everything since then has been variations on a theme.
Mostly, no. My main point was meant to be that the operating principles of projectile firearms will probably never change, because the laws of physics don’t change. Guns today are FAR safer and more reliable than they used to be. It’s possible to reassemble a Colt 1911A1 such that it will fire without pulling the trigger. (I learned this the hard way.) No modern gun would be sold with a flaw like this. Modern ammunition also more powerful for its size, and uses deadlier bullets than ever. And just to add to the pile of long historical connections: Almost every major pistol caliber–the 9mm, .45 Auto, .22 Long Rifle, .380 Auto, .38 Special–was created before World War I also. “Recent” in that realm is the .40 S&W, which is STILL 30 years old.
I don’t disagree that it has exactly as much straw as claiming that the touch screen radio of a car would make a car hard to understand.