Welcome to Gaia! :: Swords are a weapon for cowards

THIS IS THE ED. I EXPECT YOU TO READ ALL OF THIS, OR DON'T COMMENT
I will know if you cheated.

If you point out the irony of the sword on my avatar, you will get the insta-B&hammer. Shut the f**k up about it already. Yes, Gaia has a gun. It looks like s**t on my avatar. I'm not stabbing you with my pixels, you're looking at them. It's for display only. It is a piece of art, not a weapon. Honor does not apply to art. That is all.
Note: I have since changed my avatar. I did have a rapier at the time.

Swords are a weapon for honorless dogs. We've all seen the debates about why swords are superior to guns. At the end of it, there's only two arguments left standing.

The first one is that blades are silent. You often see an argument such as
So I ask you, is a silent kill honorable? Killing a man, two men, a group of men before they even know there was an enemy at hand? That's hardly fair, and fairness is a large portion of honor. Two men, facing each other on the field of honor, that is an honorable fight. One man slipping a stiletto between another's ribs is an deceitful assassination. ETA: Christ, do you people not get this? It's NOT MY ARGUMENT. I'm responding to a common argument by the swords-are-better group. For everyone that says "But you could do the same with a gun!", I never said you couldn't.

The second argument left standing is that a kill with a sword allows you to feel the life of another man when you take it. Again, this is an argument I've seen made a hundred times. Swords are better because you can feel the life leave your opponent. I ask you this, what kind of fucked-up sadist enjoys the feeling of another man's life slipping away between his fingers? That's not honorable, that's monstrous. That's the kind of thing a man like Mengele or Torquemada would enjoy. Footnote for the dense: this statement does not apply to all swordsmen, just the ones that claim this. It's been done before. Those idiots absolutely flock to these threads.

A sword is also far more inhumane than a gun. Look up knife fight wounds on Google Images. I won't post them, they're extremely graphic. I'd much rather have a hole in my arm than be missing it completely. A shot to the gut is gruesome, but it's nowhere near as stomach-wrenchingly disgusting as a man whose intestines are falling out of a gaping slash in his torso. While guns can be gruesome, the most hideous and gruesome gunshots are often shots that would have killed the victim instantly. Gruesome sword wounds force the victim to live until enough blood has drained from their bodies for them to pass out and die. The most gruesome gunshots are often headshots, and a wound that destroys the brain ends life instantly.

Above all, a sword requires no skill whatsoever to use. You pick it up and wave it around, and you can kill a man with no problem. A gun, however, requires an amazing amount of skill to use properly. One must take into account the movement of the target, the weight of the bullet, the muzzle velocity, the wind, the sight picture, their stance, the number of rounds left in the magazine, whether or not their safety is on... any one of a million things which may or may not affect the shooter at any given time. And these are only the things which affect an unstressed shooter. A combatant in a gunfight must take into account enemy tactics, their own biological responses to the situation*, where cover is and how best to utilize it, their surroundings and how they can be advantageous... a gunfight is incredibly complex and difficult. I myself was a competitive shooter for three years. I practiced every weekend of the year, and at least two additional days most weeks. I managed, in that time, to achieve the second lowest competitive ranking the NRA had to offer. That was my peak, and I was good. Shooting a gun is far more difficult than one would imagine. Three years of dedicated training got me to where I was; the middle of the pack. And there are people like Middleton Tompkins out there who could take a fly out of the air at a thousand yards, and people like Rob Leatham and Jerry Miculek who can put a dozen bullets exactly where they want them in an incredibly short amount of time. My candle is but a cigarette compared to the lighthouse of these men.

People say that a sword is a beautiful weapon of honor, and a gun is nothing more than an ugly killing machine. Those of you who hold that opinion, I would like to direct you to this thread, and I hope you cry yourself to sleep tonight after realizing how incredibly wrong you were.

Some argue that with a sword, one has to be brave enough to engage in close combat. To them, I say that close combat with a sword is nowhere near as dangerous and harrowing as a fight in which death can come from any direction at any time, from any distance. In a swordfight, you can simply step back and be safe for a moment. Not so in a gunfight. In a gunfight, you find cover or you die. It's that simple.

I'll add more to this as it comes up. I'm sure this will be a rather interesting thread.

•First addendum: Silencers do NOT silence a weapon. They simply make it quieter. It is still rather loud.

*Biological responses, described by GunsmithKitten:


•Everyone so far has said "lol wut about sniprs?" My response is this: Snipings are incredibly rare. The only people who get sniped on a regular basis dress like Fidel Castro and live in Central America where they oppress the local sugar farmers. They're less common than poisoning assassinations were before the invention of firearms (which is possibly the least honorable method of assassination possible). So please, very very very few people are killed by snipings. In modern society, knifings are a thousand times more common than snipings. Let's not bring that up unless you think you have a truly solid point, okay?

•Anyone who comes in here and says "honor is outdated, it'll just get you killed" is missing my point entirely. The point isn't which one would be better suited to a modern fight. That's an idiot test.

•If this is your argument:
http://img396.imageshack.us/img396/9250/motivator1957573oo9.jpg
then STFU and GTFO. Props to Sierra for the picture.

•One must also take into account modern warfare. If anything happens and you get in a fight, you bring a gun. This is because a gun has advantages over a sword. 9 times out of 10 a marksman will beat a swordsman. But in modern warfare, nobody uses a sword (kinda obvious, no?), so bringing a sword to a fight is suicide. You bring a gun. A gun at least puts you on the same level as another man with a gun. Is survival instinct dishonorable? Two people facing each other with guns, that's a gunfight. And I've already explained why a gunfight is honorable.

•While I thought it would go unsaid, apparently not. Please do NOT quote the OP, unless you're breaking it down into chunks and responding to it bit by bit. If you feel you're interrupting the current flow of conversation with your input, please feel free to begin your message with "In response to the OP," or similar.

•Take note, I'm including all blades in this argument. If I can have the pistol, the shotgun, the rifle, the musket, etc. all used against me, I think I should be able to claim knives, daggers, swords, and other hand-held blades to my advantage as well. Spears, arrows, and other thrown weapons are exempt.

•I'd also like to point out another thing I found to be obvious, but I guess it's less than intuitive. When you're in a swordfight, you're right up against the other guy, you're in the "danger zone." People automatically assume that with a gun, you can kill someone from outside the "danger zone." Not so. When both parties have a gun, the danger zone is incredibly large. If he can see you, he has a decent chance of hitting you. Even if he CAN'T see you, he still has a fraction of a chance of hitting you. So no, distance holds no safety in a gunfight. For the record, snipers aren't safe because they're far away, they're safe because they're hidden. Ever seen Saving Private Ryan? Sniper got sniped.

•Dave Sevigny shooting IPSC, a testament to how much has to be brought into play when firing a gun. More IPSC. I don't know who those guys are, but DAMN are they good.

•You can't compare sparring with swords to target shooting. That's an unfair comparison. Compare target shooting to sparring with a dummy, or compare sparring with a human to combat/paintball/airsoft. Anything else just doesn't work.

•The big and/or technicolor bits are what a lot of twats keep missing. Please, pay special attention to those bits. I'll hurt and/or ignore you if you ignore them.

• If you want to say this or something similar, I've heard it every fucking page. Don't bother.
Another argument that I'd appreciate you guys not bringing to the table AGAIN is "Killing isn't honorable at all." Heard it a million times, don't want to hear it a million more.
Apparently, most of you take offense to this. I don't think you understand I'm telling you not to use this argument because EVERYONE uses it. I've heard it a million times, and I really don't want to have to refute it every three pages.

•For all of you people who say "guns are for cowards, because you can sit back from a safe distance and fill someone full of lead," tell me...



How safe is THAT GUY, huh? That was a bullet missing his face by inches. Look me in the proverbial eye and tell me that you wouldn't have s**t yourself if that was you.

• I've seen a million replies of "when was the last time you heard of someone getting murdered with a sword?", so I'll put the answer here. I'm not sure how long the link will last, so I'll quote the text.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,382782,00.html

I never said they're ugly, did I? And besides, until Gaia gives me a revolver, nothing else fits the Steampunk.

EDIT: By the way, your signature is INCREDIBLY fitting for the first response, given my last sentence.

*headdesk*
*headdesk headdesk headdesk headdesk headdesk*

Would you READ the post? I SPECIFICALLY wrote up a bit JUST FOR THAT ARGUMENT.

The question now is "define honor".

And yeah, I recognize they both take skill, but I was counter-biasing my argument. You always see the opposite bias, so I threw some backspin on it.

There is no honor in killing someone. Hell, most sane soldiers in the army aren't very proud of that fact that they've killed people.

They do, and I own one. However, my avatar is based on brown, and the gun is black. No go. It's also a modern submachine gun, which is hardly fitting for the 1900-era steampunk.

Read the paragraph with 3 links in it. That's the one.

Silencers make guns a silent weapon...

Hardly. You ever silenced a gun? Still pretty damn loud. Goes from 120db to about 70. Ever slammed a car door? That's the noise level it makes.

My first thought when I read your post was, "those who live by the sword often get shot by those who don't."

With that said, I think that guns are more of a practical weapon versus swords, with the modern advances regarding guns. However, there is something to be said for those who fence, and would use swords (even if they aren't that sharp or whatnot) to settle a dispute, even if the dispute is not something that would be considered (excuse me please, for using this phrase) "to the death."

As for the gun wounds versus the knife wounds, both of them strike me as being able to be considered gruesome. Just think: eviseration (sp?) versus a headshot. Same thing, one has guts while the other has brains on the wall.

Anyway, my point: guns are practical. Fencing is a sport.