See title. No gun control debates or political wisecracks allowed; just a technical discussion of which specific weapon in each category is likely to have been used in the highest number of deaths.
Sword
Other bladed weapon
Rifle
Machine Gun
Handgun
Aircraft
Armored vehicle
You have to put parameters on your question. For all time? War and peace?
The Hutus, on a killed-per-day rate, outdid the industrial killing of the Nazis using mainly pangas.
Surely, it’s one of these:
Knife
Revolver
Rope
Lead Pipe
Wrench
Candlestick
You seem to have left out my WAG for the correct answer: artillery. I’ve seen figures attributing 3/4 of casualties in WWI and 1/2 in WWII to artillery. I suspect the figures in Korea and Vietnam would also be in the 3/4 range.
The human race goes back such a long time that I think the answer is “other bladed weapon”, i.e… knives, axes and spears.
My high school latin teacher used to claim it was the gladius?, that short little sword/knife those cranky little Roman bastards ran around with. Yeah, they never had something on the level of WW1 or 2, but a couple thousand years of enforcing the peace one way or another probably added up.
Don’t click on that claim thing. Its some sort of weird ass ad. Unless you need a personal injury lawyer.
I wouldn’t be so sure. The number of people killed during WWII alone (let’s call it 60 million) is more than the total world population during most of human history. (Prior to agriculture, about 1 million people at any time, and it didn’t hit 50 million until 1,000 BC, per this site.)
60 million is about 3% of the world’s population in the 1940s. The page you cite says, “The total number of humans that have ever lived has been estimated at 110 billion.” If just 0.1% of those were killed by a particular kind of weapon, that would add up to about twice the deaths of WW2. And there would have been such deaths throughout history, caused by such things as inter-tribal warfare and personal disputes.
But they were killed a bunch of different ways. Bombs, fires, starvation, and guns, knives and swords of many various sorts and so on and so on.
Of course you could get rediculous in specificity at the other end. Bob was killed by the Colt 45 model XYZ while Steve was killed by next years very slightly different model so they go into different groups.
To clarify on the original topic:
Sorry for the misinterpretation, but I meant specific weapons from the listed categories, counting any time they’ve been used to kill (war or peacetime), throughout all of human history. Hoplite spears, B-29 bombers, the AK-47, “Brown Bess” muskets, Welsh longbows, Soviet T-34s, etc.
None of these. Mortars and artillery accounted for more than 21% of war casualties while small arms fire killed less than 5%.
Is 0.1% reasonable? Looking at a WHO estimate 0.83 million people were killed either by murder or warfare in 2000. That’s out of 57 million deaths total (Wikipedia has 57 million for 2002 and 58 million for 2005). So, only about 0.14% of people were killed by any weapon.
Reaching 0.1% with any weapon would mean that one weapon was responsible for 66% of killings. Even in the stone age, you have distinct classes of weapons: clubs, knives, spears and arrows at a minimum.
(This assumes we can carry the 2000 rates backward. I doubt we have better numbers. It’s debatable just how violent things used to be in prehistory; I’ve heard arguments that violence didn’t get serious until after agriculture and animal domestication made it worthwhile to attack other people. We do know that fewer people are dying from disease, childbirth, etc. than they used to.)
If artillery really killed 21% of people in warfare, I just don’t see how spears and arrows can keep up. I guess it comes down to how specific you get about individual models.
The death by violence rate is much higher in hunter gatherer societies I’ve seen estimates of 15 percent of total deaths. That changes things a lot. My vote is club as being the number one, it’s going to be hard to beat the cumulative total of 1.5 million years of humans beating other humans to death with bones, branches or large rocks.
If the search is narrowed down to a specific make or model in a category of weapons, I would indeed nominate the AK 47 in the category “rifle”. It has been around since WW II and been used in many bloody conflicts ever since.
In the category machine gun maybe the German MG 42.
Diseases brought by the old world combatants most like killed more people on both sides than any single weapon.
For what it’s worth, I just watched a show on The Military Channel and they not only said it was the machine gun, but specifically the Maxim Machine Gun (the first true, fully automatic machine gun) which was responsible for more deaths than any other single weapon (primarily during WWI)…
0.14% is an annual rate - the previously given 0.1% was a per-lifetime thing, so you’d have to multiply 0.14% times an historical average lifespan, giving us 5.6% if we assume 40 years. That said, we’re less violent overall than we were historically, so I’d guess the figure should be higher (this is Steven Pinker’s argument in The better angels of our nature). On the the hand, I’m not sure that my figure for average lifespan is accurate given the huge amount of infant death.
The 0.14% is the percentage of annual deaths that are violent - not a percentage of living people who die that way, so it doesn’t need to be adjusted for life span.
By just one guy? Heinrich Severloh, a corporal in the Wermacht, fired 12,000 rounds from his mg-42 at Omaha beach on D-day from 5AM to 3PM. He killed an estimated 1,500 American soldiers.