Why isn't a gun considered an elegant weapon?

[shinigamisparda]

So this is a thought that I've been mulling around in the old noggin'. Why isn't a gun considered an elegant weapon? I've heard it said that it's because guns take the challenge out of duel or fight, that it's over too quickly and that guns make said duels unsportsmanlike but I never bought that line of thinking.
The way I see guns are sophisticated pieces of equipment, powerful, intimidating and above all else they demand respect. A gun is something you do not handle lightly no matter how much experienced you may have with one unless you have a death wish, and forgive me for being blunt but they look pretty damn cool.
Hell you can even add decals or engravements to give them that last touch of finesse. So why are they still considered inelegant weapons? Alright you've heard my opinion so what's yours?

Now, let me say right off the bat that I am one of the people who sees swords as more elegant than guns. That being said, you've got me thinking. Even though I don't consider the gun a very elegant weapon there are two types of gun wielders I respect: gunslingers and snipers. Just in the way the sword is seen as elegant where one could draw it, make a decisive slash and sheathe it in one stroke I've also found a certain romance in being able to draw a pistol and shoot five before they could do the same and also in being able to hit a target over a mile away while taking into account the distance, humidity, wind speed and direction and even the turning of the earth to make sure that one tiny piece of lead lands true. Many argue that it takes no skill to use a gun but takes years of training to use a sword. Yet, after giving it some thought, I remembered just how hard it can be to fire a pistol accurately. So why is the sword the gentleman's weapon while the gun isn't?

My answer: The media. We've been conditioned to like long, sprawling action scenes and, although it can be done, the gun makes that considerably harder without having a small army to kill through. When a long gunfight between just two people is done, often it looks like very messy with bullets missing and people jumping and ducking behind cover. In a swordfight, by contrast, the two men are able to face one another by blocking and parrying each slash and stab. Yet in the real world a sword fight is often as short as a gunfight, sometimes decided in one stroke or one counter. If you look at that messy gunfight in a different, each duck behind cover and barely dodged bullet as a parry, it feels more elegant.

Also, this topic has actually been addressed before by Extra Credits in the "Myth of the Gun" episode. I think Japanese sentiments, things like inner strength and being one with the blade, have begun to leak into western nations where the idea of a weapon is to empower a weapon, where the weapon has the strength and no the person. Now, as the episode explains, one of the ideals of the western world is that a weapon and determination is all that person needs. However, another western sentiment is being able to something yourself, and in a way the japenese ideal of inner strength fits this ideal of self empowerment. What if it's not a weapon and determination I need, but just determination? What if I'm strong enough to take on the world without a weapon, just by my own power? This melds very well with the western masculine ideal of self-sufficiency.

Anyway, your free to agree or disagree with my romanticized ranting. Just thought I'd throw my opinion out there.

 

[LarenzoAOG]

A gun can look elegant, as I believe these examples show, also, have you ever seen someone who is truly skilled at shooting fire a gun? I would define it as elegant.

By definition just about anything can be elegant.


el·e·gant
   [el-i-guhnt]

?adjective
1. tastefully fine or luxurious in dress, style, design, etc.: elegant furnishings.

2. gracefully refined and dignified, as in tastes, habits, or literary style: an elegant young gentleman; an elegant prosodist.

3. graceful in form or movement: an elegant wave of the hand.

 

[Feline Jaye]

Guns work via explosions. Explosion tend to be a rather messy thing, especially when compared to the slicing of a sword.

Guns also tend to look more bulky. From an aesthetic P.O.V. sword are more elegant (while remaining functional).

Also it may be mainly left over from when guns were a lot cruder. A few decades ago guns did nothing but blow holes in people. Usually, big holes. Does that sound elegant?

 

[BurnTheIdea]

A gun isn't considered an elegant weapon in the same way that an axe, hatchet, broadsword, longsword, claymore, pike (medieval weapon, not a staff), clubs, the ball-with-the-chain-with-spikes, and sledgehammer aren't considered elegant weapons: They all use brute force. Elegant, in reference to a Katana, is almost synonymous with finesse. A weapon which requires nothing but brute force to use (*cough* gun *cough*) is not considered elegant. It seems that elegant refers to a more feminine fighting style: Martial arts is elegant while boxing is not. It refers to a showy fighting style, compared to a brute force fighting style.

 

[Mr.Numbers]

Clint Eastwood disagrees with this topic.

See a western sometime

 

[Florian Wicher]

Because a gun is designed to be functional and is easy to use.

 

[Jonluw]

Guns are noisy. Guns are heavy. Guns can jam.

bullshit, ill give you noisey, but sword are EXTREMELY HEAVY,

I don't know if you've ever held a sword or what kind of swords you are familiar with, but my longsword weighs less than 3-4 pounds (A Desert eagle weighs 4 lbs), and it's balanced (a good deal of the weight comes from the pommel), so it feels like less when you're swinging it.

they make a shit ton of noise just to carry them,

Can be avoided if you know what you're doing

and they can BREAK in half or dent,bend, rust,ect!
you know how to fix the average gun jam? *KLAK CHIK!* boom, one motion to pull part of the gun back and the jam is gone, even stove pipe jams can be fix with a fingernail.
hell guns arent even that noisey until you fire them, thats why we invented the silencer.

Silencers don't really do all that much to lower the volume of a gunshot. http://www.cracked.com/article_18576_5-ridiculous-gun-myths-everyone-believes-thanks-to-movies.html
I say the reason guns aren't considered elegant (design notwhitstanding) is that any skill that goes into operating them isn't explicitly visible during use.
The user merely stands still, and then the gun goes bang; whereas in a swordfight you practically have a dance going on.

yes but guns tend to have very good balance, and i own a katanna and its WAY heavier than my glock 22. to to mention the amount of fire power from a gun's size and wieght will REALLY be more of a plus than a 4-8 pound sword (or if you use a william wallace type swaord, almost 20 pounds if not heavier) you have to train years with to get up close to the guy hey may kill you faster.

William Wallace wielded a claymore, right?
They weighed up to 5 pounds (And AK-47 weighs 10 pounds).
Read this: http://www.truefork.org/DragonPreservationSociety/Swordheavy.php

And of course swords are balanced. That's what the pommel is there for.

Edit: I took the liberty of taking my sword down and weighing it. It weighs 1.3 kg. (2 lb and 13 oz.)
The weight of a smallsword (which is the most recent kind of sword. The kind used in ceremonies these days.) Is half that of a beretta 92, by the way.
Although I don't see why the weight of the weapon has anything to do with the elegance of its usage.

and fuck danceing, im fighting for my life, screw the foreplay, click, bang, drop, go home.

I'm not arguing that swords are more powerful than guns. No matter what you say, most people will agree that a sophisticated dance where the dancers' lives are on the line is more elegant than pointing at someone, creating a bang, and then seeing them die.

and maby they wont make noise if you know what you doing, but when it comes to swords who the hell knows what they're doing? like 1 out of a thousand people?

Very many, actually.
Manufacturing swords is costly. If you're a lord in medieval times, you can't afford arming your army with swords. The sword has always been the weapon of the nobility. The unwashed masses that made up the brunt of ancient armies were armed with spears, halberds and other simple weapons that are more suited for mass-combat as opposed to one on one battle.

and skill not viable in use? ever fired a handgun at a target from 30 paces? shits hard, you have to practice, hitting moving targets is hard also, and im not talking ducks at a carnival here.

Visible. I said 'visible', not viable. Maybe my point will be more clear if you try reading my post again.

you cant point and click a gun as easy as they say or show. you just fire you miss unless you take aim, you run, you wont hit shit, so yeah you find cover and take aim. like you would with a cross bow or bow and arrow. hell take snipers for example, its not like video game, sniping is HARD as hell to master. and takes SERIOUS intelligence.

Yes, and I've said nothign to dispute this claim.
I don't really see what you're arguing against here. (Although I did hit 9 out of 10 clay pidgeons the first time I held a shot-gun.)

All I'm saying is that the skill required to operate a sword is more visible in the usage of the weapon, making the usage more elegant. I'm not saying using a gun doesn't require skill. I've tried aiming with a scoped weapon. It's hard. However: to an onlooker, there is nothing elegant about a man firing a gun. Something being difficult doesn't make it elegant. The action itself needs to be graceful, something which firing a gun just isn't, as opposed to fencing.

lets not even get into safety mechanisms, cleaning, loading, arming, aiming, ect.
guns are not only elegant, but fairy complicated and end fights quick. which is what baffles me about swords, how is a sword more elegant when its a sharpen club that requires you to be in your opponents striking range? you dont fight to dance or show sword skill, you fight to end shit quickly, like the samurai (who had whole companies of riflemen) who used bows, and fast killing weapons.

im just saying, you pick sword, i pick gun, i go home that day.

And for some reason, you're still thinking I am arguing that a sword is a better weapon.
There is a reason swords aren't in mainstream use today. They are, however, more elegant and graceful. (Design notwhitstanding)

And what is elegant about swords, some would say, is exactly the fact that you have to approach your enemy as an equal and be within his strike zone. It requires skill, movement and bravery to win a sword-fight. And most importantly: All this is very visible in the act of fighting.

And the mechanical intricacies of a gun do not make its usage more graceful or elegant.

 

[Zyxx]

Here's an idea that doesn't seem to have been mentioned yet: it's a visual aesthetic, sexual thing. Most older weapons (many types of sword, battleaxes, bows, etc) have very noticeable curves (femininity) of one kind or another. Straight swords, daggers, spears are very phallic, much more so than even the most suggestively-shaped gun, particularly if you think about how the respective objects are held. Humans like sexily-shaped things: a gun can have sexy designs ON it, but the overall physical shape generally isn't enough to trigger the same aesthetic response.

 

[debossman21]

guns aren't elegant. even if i look at one the first word in my mind isn't "what an elegant piece of weaponry". plus its psychological. think of the effort that went into making the weapon, and the skill it takes to use it well. with guns its just aim, fire, reload, repeat.

 

[Lonan]

It isn't a battle with guns, it isn't about skill, its just reflexes. It's like the quick time events in God of War that tell you to press a button extremely quickly to complete a feat of strength.

 

[otakon17]

Probably because it is so young compared to the sword. And likewise, learning to use a gun accurately and correctly take comparatively less time than mastering the katana per say. I'd say a military grunt learns how to properly use and clean a firearm in less than six months, but that's only a guess on my part. To use a sword properly, takes more time and years to "master". And even than, that is not true for a master of the sword is never truly as such as long as other ways to use it exist. How many variations of technique and learning are there when learning to use a sword versus a handgun. Probably a lot, another guess on my part though. Though yes it takes skill and a steady hand to properly use a gun, I am not denying that.

So a sharp rock is just as elegant for being so old? It's hard to kill with a rock, "hard to master" probably even years...

That's a little different than what I was talking about. The sword and gun are both tools explicitly created by man for the purpose of killing. They both are created with form, function and purpose in mind. A rock is rock is a rock, created by nature that can be used as a tool and weapon, but never specifically with that function in mind. That is what separates it from just being in the class of "old" as you stated. When I said old, I meant the tradition and importance that society puts on these individual tools that they can be considered as "elegant".

 

[Nerdstar]

your all laboring under a romantic depiction that the sword is some glorious lofty weapon when in reality it was often brutal dirty a and harsh, were talking 2 guys rolling around in the mud trying to tab each other with shards of their blades, that good sir is not elegant! the gun IShowever and elegant weapon a prime example is a sniper dual 2 opponents matching wits and skill in the give terrain waiting for the other to slip up and setting up the perfect shot, watch the final scenes of enemy at the gate and you try and tell me that the gun doesn't require skill or that it isn't an "elegant" weapon.


you dont have a 50/50 shot of killing someone the second you pick up a gun odds are youll hurt yourself before the other person and if the other person is skilled enough in firearms trianing they kill you 9 times out of ten, useing a gun takes traing as much or more than a tradinal wepon to master it, and when you do, its a beutile sight.

and here all the proof you need that the gun is an elgent wepoan

"'Love' is making a shot to the knees of a target 120 kilometers away using an Aratech sniper rifle with a tri-light scope... Love is knowing your target, putting them in your targeting reticule, and together, achieving a singular purpose against statistically long odds" - HK-47

 

[IamGamer41]

You know what I hate? A pussy with a gun in his hand.

 

[Lesd3vil]

Simple.

It takes considerably less effort to fire a gun at someone than it does to swing a sword, so the more skilled but less effective martial arts whiners need to have some way to look down on it.

Second, just go look up early firearms... They had to put the ball into the barrel, fill it with powder, light a fuse and THEN aim it in the direction of the thing they wanted to kill... They were unwieldy and often misfired or simply refused to work.

It's basically because it evens the field between a normal human and someone who's trained for years on end to become a killing machine... Because it's not 'esoteric', because John Normal can pick one up and kill people, it's 'inelegant'.

Personally, I'd rather have an effective weapon than an elegant one >>

 

[Pseudoboss]

A few things, mostly because there is generally no "swoosh" in a gunfight, even in movies, and even then, the viewer knows it is nonessential to the operation of the gun, while the "swoosh" can be conceived by the viewer to be essential to the operation of the sword. The most experienced marksman is not going to go as much cool shit (turns, parries, twists, the usual.) that an experienced swordsman would. Also, guns are currently in use, swords aren't. Therefore, swords are generally heavily romanticized, there was probably a lot less "swoosh" than is now currently seen in movies involving swords. Then, guns are hella loud, and noise makes a really big difference on someone's impression of the tool in question. Next, guns do not need anything to be used properly, the opponent stands much less of a chance if the other person has a gun. A sword can be dodged, even by someone unarmed, though that is very improbable. A bullet cannot. There is also the fact that swords require much more effort to use than a gun. With a gun, you just have to pull the trigger and BOOM! a sword, you have to at least accelerate the sword into your target's gut, that takes much more effort. Lastly, there is the problem that a gun allows its use from very far away, a sword requires the combatants to be close, at least able to see the other person's eyes. The way swords are portrayed now a fight is more like dancing with your opponent, there is a beauty to dance, and this is one of the more engaging ones there is.

 

[Hitokiri_Gensai]

Anyone who says skill isnt needed to shoot hasnt done long range shooting, ie, over 1000 yards. But that said, i see the arguement for the inelegance of a gun.

I think its to do with the raw nature of it. The sound and the flash of the gunpowder.

With a sword, you have a masterwork that someone spent countless hours on forming, the edge is a work of art. The endless skill of the creator.

that all said, i love guns, and swords. All weapons catch my interest.

 

[Zeema]

the way i think about it

A Gun can kill someone with very little effort and skill

but a Sword can take years to master

 

[Dr Jones]

IMO i think its more or less like the asian views on em.. Like a weapon should be an extension of yourself (was also mentioned in EC), could be a sword, a suit or something.. A gun just takes away all personality..

 

[kickyourass]

It's not how a weapon looks that makes it elegant, it's the skill it takes to use it.

Any melee weapon, even in it's basic level of experience requires some knowledge and practice to be effective. A gun, cannon, crossbow, essentially any preloaded weapon basically boils down to "load, point, shoot". No real skill or training beyond that is required to be effective.

Yes, there are those who can take using such weapons to a science or an art form (Gunkata and the Grenadier anime on the more fictional sense, snipers in a more realistic basis) but those are extremely rare. But even basic sword fighting takes time to learn, let alone to master, and there are as many sword fighting forms as there are regions in the world. Guns are "load, point, shoot".

Basically this, while you CAN hone your skills with a gun to the point of it practically being an art form (snipers for example fit that description beautifully), you pretty much NEED to do that in order to be considered a skilled sword user.
Plus, swords, bows and the like are generally alot more attractive then guns which might be a part of it.