OSD 335: Guns suck
Suppose you need to drive to the grocery store. How do you start your car?
Today, if you have an electric car, you don’t start it. You just get in and go.
For a modern internal combustion car, you just push a button to start it.
A generation before that, you’d turn a key.
Go back another generation and on a cold day, you’d need to adjust the choke before the car would start.
Go all the way back to a Ford Model T and you’d need to adjust the choke, prime the carburetor with fuel, adjust the ignition timing, place the car in neutral, and hand-crank the engine with a lever directly connected to the crankshaft. And remember to use your left hand to crank the engine, because if you use your right hand and the car backfires, it’ll break your arm. Here’s Ford Motor Company’s helpful instruction on that topic:
You can read more on that in “OSD 235: Guns are for nerds”, but the summary is that guns are still in their Model T phase. A few weeks ago, in “OSD 323: Home defense is an unsolved problem”, we wrote that guns are the worst option for home defense, except for everything else:
Home defense advice focuses on putting you into a position where you have many leisurely minutes to make that decision, or to prevent yourself from needing to make it at all by deterring intruders. Concentric rings of security, making your home a hard target, door hardware that makes it take a few minutes to kick your door in, etc. And all of that is great. The vast majority of home defense situations don’t involve a successful break-in, let alone gunfire.
What if all of that fails? The final option is a gun. But think about what that means: if somebody does successfully break into your house, with current technology the best option is, “You get five seconds to make the most consequential decision of your entire life.”
That piece focuses on the moral and logistical problems with shooting somebody on short notice, but let’s set those aside. What about the main technical problem with firing a gun in self-defense: guns are hard to shoot.
The common answer is that if you find a gun hard to shoot, it’s because you haven’t trained enough. You need to go to the range, learn proper grip and trigger control, learn to use a red dot, learn good presentation, manage recoil better, etc. And that’s all true. Once you do all that, it’s pretty easy to shoot well. But that’s the point. “This is easy if only <unrealistic condition that most people will never satisfy” means the thing is not easy. Most people are never going to put in that much training time, so guns are going to stay mysterious for most people.
Most gun training only exists because we have to cope with the fact that it’s hard to learn to shoot well. That’s not a people problem or a discipline problem, it’s a technology problem. This isn’t to say trainers aren’t essential. Trainers are doing life-saving work, because guns will always be an essential tool when all else fails, and it’s important for people to know how to use them. But the ceiling on the population size of that well-trained cadre is always going to be pretty low. That’s just the nature of expertise. In every subject, there will always be more laypeople than experts. There will always be more people who can start a Tesla than a Model T.
Guns are necessary, but while we iterate on the Model T and make it better, we should also be pushing the industry forward and trying to invent Teslas. That’s the only way that self-defense will truly go mainstream.
Suppressors are a good early example. They’re basically magic. Less noise, less recoil, less flash, zero downsides ballistically. Other than some increased dirtiness (which is being innovated away in newer designs), they’re a strict improvement over unsuppressed guns.
We want to see more along the same lines. Strict improvements. Fire-by-wire, better sighting systems, civilian defensive drones. Battery tech has been going crazy the past few years. Mid-tier drones have an energy density around 150 watt-hours per kilogram. The DJI Mavic 4 Pro, at the top end of consumer drones, has an energy density (including the battery management system, housing, wiring, etc.) around 287 watt-hours per kilogram.
Consider an electromagnetic gun with a 1.5 kilogram battery pack that has an energy density of 225 watt-hours per kilogram. That’s 1,215,000 joules in the battery pack, which is the equivalent to the muzzle energy of ~700 rounds of 5.56x45mm. There are going to be some internal losses, so assume only 25% of the battery energy is converted to kinetic energy of the projectiles. (For comparison, 70-90% of the battery energy in an electric vehicle is converted to kinetic energy.)
Electromagnetic gun shooting 175 rounds equivalent to 5.56x45mm
Weight of battery pack: 1.5 kg (enough for a theoretical 700 rounds, but we’re assuming 75% of the energy is lost in the operation of the gun)
Weight of projectiles: 55 grains x 175 rounds = 0.62 kg
Total weight of energy + projectiles = 2.12 kg or 4.66 lbs
AR-15 shooting 175 rounds of 5.56x45mm
Weight of battery pack: 0
Weight of cartridges: 176 grains x 175 rounds = 2 kg
Total weight of energy + projectiles = 2 kg or 4.4 lbs
Electromagnetic guns are also ~silent, have zero dust/smoke, and aren’t subject to federal gun laws. Before you get too excited: the napkin math above doesn’t account for the weight of the gun itself, and the technology is still far too heavy and fragile to replace firearms in the next few years. There are also physical limits on muzzle velocity with existing materials. The cofounder of Arcflash Labs estimates a maximum velocity of 150 meters per second, which is much less than even the slowest firearm rounds (e.g. subsonic .22LR leaves the muzzle at just over 300 meters per second). But with enough people iterating on the concept, those limits will start to inch upwards and we’ll also find use cases for the tech that make it not matter so much that it doesn’t exactly replicate everything that a firearm does.
That’s just one possibility for the future. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. The point is that we need more things like it, and faster. Guns are 19th century technology. They’re still serving a purpose, and they always will. But there are millions of people out there waiting for an easier on-ramp into civilian defense.
This week’s links
Two people charged with illegally exporting gun parts from the US to Japan for airsoft cloners
It’s actually amazing that guns are so cool, and the market forces around that so powerful, that people are incentivized to personally fly to the US and risk life and limb bringing suitcases full of KAC rails back to Japan.
Speaking of guns being old technlogy…
… that doesn’t mean they’re not awesome. Case in point:
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Guns suck.
Mines. Mines are what we need.
Thing is an electromagnetic home defense projector (we won't call it a gun) can be tethered to an 80lb basestation fed by batteries, a capacitor, and full household current. It doesn't need to be portable it just needs to be handy.