Xiado said:
A gun is a coward's weapon, a weapon that can kill efficiently in the hands of someone with no discipline. Of course guns beat swords, just as chemical and biological weapons beat guns. Those weapons are looked down on for the same reasons I hate guns: Cowardly, efficient, and brutal not in the wounds they inflict but in their utter indifference in whom they kill. Fire an Agent Orange bomb at the enemy and you don't even need to think about collateral damage. If you're wielding a sword, looking the enemy in the face, you need to think about every person you kill, put a tangible effort into every person you cut down. A gun requires the twitch of a finger to kill someone who isn't even close enough to beg for mercy.
If you call a sword brutish and messy, it's odds on that you haven't seen the damage inflicted by guns in warfare. Bones shattered, flesh pulped, limbs torn off by machinegun fire, entrails blown feet into the air by artillery explosions. It's also likely that you call a sword ineffective because you've never handled a decent one. Armor was developed -because- swords are effective; no weapon would be used in battle if it was worthless.
Swordfighting techniques were developed to fuse the killing potential of man and weapon, not as rules to restrict thuggery. This angers me because you've obviously never trained with a hand weapon, never bothered to use any skills that come with them, and yet you criticize those who do discipline themselves and develop skills to be thugs, and why? You don't provide a reason other than brutal kills, and killing is never elegant. Neither are most fights with swords, but in training one strives for elegance, because in battle, your technique will drop a certain amount. If you are perfect in form, in battle, you will be effective, if your form is lacking, in battle you will be useless.
And a sword isn't a coward's weapon? Not every sword-wielding soldier only fought other guys with swords. In fact, it was RIDICULOUSLY common, especially amongst the nobility, to go around and bully others simply because they had one and others didn't. And besides the fact, one doesn't wield a weapon to make a fight fair. One picks a weapon because he is hoping it will imbalance the fight in his favor. They bring a knife? You bring a sword. They bring a sword? You bring a gun. No one ever stayed alive by fighting fair, so people who spent their lives getting good with swords decided that they were clearly a more "honorable" weapon because they got to stare into their victim's eyes as they butchered them with a glorified cleaver. How, exactly, does proximity to the victim make a weapon more "elegant"? If anything, it makes it more savage, as it puts a priority on the sensation of killing rather than simply getting the job done. Why would I want to take my time fighting someone? Its a life or death struggle. If it must happen, I want it over quickly, efficiently, and with him on the ground. Preferably a very long distance away from me. If thats being a coward, so be it. I'd rather be called a coward than be dead.
I work in an ER. I see gunshot wounds every day. Yes, they are messy. Very nasty, much more than you see on TV. But compared to the kind of cuts that swords make? Its relatively clean. A 9mm bullet might make an exit wound of a couple inches at the very most, and that would be considered an EXTREMELY nasty wound. A sword chops off limbs, causes colossal amounts of tissue, muscle, and nerve damage. And the wounds are NASTY, to boot. Very big, very destructive. Plus, you mention artillery shells blowing people up and machine guns tearing people apart, but you fail to mention people getting their skulls pulped by warhammers, eye gouged out one at a time by knives, entrails forcibly torn out by spears. Every weapon causing physical trauma, thats the entire point. But you are comparing a sword to an artillery shell; thats like comparing a handgun to dropping an anvil one someone. Simply a biased comparison.
Why, exactly, do people say guns require no training? To be effective with one, it requires quite a bit. You have to know how to reload it, how to arm it, how to clean it, aim properly (something many people NEVER get), trigger discipline, ammo types, and all the tertiary bits like how to effectively use cover and flanking. If you don't know how to do all these things, you will die to an experienced gunman. Its no different than swordfighting. The only difference being, in a gunfight, its usually over a lot faster. Before people invented technique, swords were made to more easily kill people who didn't have them, just as guns were made to more easily kill people with swords. Just because they are older doesn't make them somehow "better". You want to know a weapon that perfectly fuses a man and complete killing power? A freaking sniper rifle. If having a sword makes you better than someone else at an arm's reach, certainly then being able to kill from a mile away is akin to being god?