The deadliest weapon in American history, Kulak notes, is the handgun, because more Americans have been killed in ordinary criminal homicides than all the wars America has fought:
Applying the logic which we have already seen, that outside of the most war-ravaged countries ordinary homicide, gang wars, feuds, and clasdestine actions are VASTLY more likely to kill people than high intensity warfare, you quickly notice a trend.
The three deadliest weapons in the world today in terms of body-count (your likelihood to be killed by them) varies between
- Handguns in the New World where guns are plentiful but open carry of rifles is not the norm
- Auto and semiautomatic (and previously bolt-action) rifles in the third world of Africa and failed parts of the Middle-East where it is perfectly acceptable for gangs to walk about with AK-47s in their arms
- Knives and bladed weapons in Gun restrictionist jurisdictions (Europe), Asia, Prisons, etc.
If you die a violent death, dear reader, whether in the killing fields of darkest Africa, darkest Detroit, the trenches of forever war or the smuggling tunnels of Mexico, to an enemy you’ve never spoken a word to or to a spouse you said just one word too many to, it will almost certainly be to one of these 3. Even in the age of FPV Drones, IEDs, cluster munitions, and thermobaric rocket artillery, a super-majority of the time the person who decides you need to die will be within 2-200 meters of you, see you with their bare eye or possibly a simple optic, and decide in sight of your face to end your life with the tool they have at hand: knife, handgun, or rifle.
And it’s very hard to tell which of the three actually leads the pack globally.
In the US where guns are widely available knife homicides are only about 10–15% of what firearm homicides are, In the UK this is reversed, and firearm related murders are 10% of knife murders.
In all three cases, the great majority of murderers are black Africans. Perhaps we should focus on controlling them.
Selection effect. When conduct of war was labor intensive, the priority enemy weapon asset to take out was humans. As weapon platforms and systems become more and more capital intensive with technological progress the things you want your machines to destroy are other machines. Large scale organized War is still obviously pretty deadly, but has been getting less deadly, and probably that trend will continue. It’s plausibly that shifts the dominant form of homicide from big war to relatively small scale or even very personal murders. I’m not confident enough to say “for the first time in human history”, but it’s not implausible.
The deadliest weapon in the world today is a biological weapon: The Sub-Saharan African.
A contender would be another biological weapon: Immigration, with its communicable diseases and genocidal impact on the host population.
Mitchell’s Plain, part of Cape Town South Africa, is a serious contender for the title of Murder Capital of the World. Very few Blacks live there. A lot of drug dealers do.
I don’t believe that a lot of sub-Saharan Africans live in Detroit either. Detroit does however have a high population of gang members, probably resulting from misguided policies enacted by well-meaning do-gooders. Perhaps the shootings are motivated by wars between drug-dealing gangs.
Roo_ster: “The deadliest weapon in the world today is a biological weapon: The Sub-Saharan African.”
LMAO.