The Machine Gun Paradox

[nbytilr]

"this thing can replace your whole army so you can just have one guy instead of 1000!" "Thats amazing! Ill take 1000!"

[SlurpeeBoy]

He wanted to reduce the size of armies. Technically, he got what he wanted.

[morgansheepman]

John Gatling was born about 160 years too early to read ' a machine built to end war is always a machine built to continue war'.

[concreteln]

His idea of sending 2 guys is genius - send the ones that declare the wars, we'd have far fewer of them.

[elietheprof]

It’s an often forgotten example of Jevons’ Paradox (when efficiency leads to increased usage)

[SolomonMoore-cusq]

Bro thought countries would start running 1v1s

[vegamineral]

Mr. Gatling clearly never met a politician in his life

[Xqvvzts]

Oppenheimer looked at this and thought: "See, a *gun* was a bad way to go".

[r.fo.]

Imagine how uncomplicated war would be if each side just sent their single most badass guy to duel each other 😂😂😂

[agammuhajir]

Reduce casualties on YOUR side... Until the other side has it too

[dannykeuerleber]

Whats really funny is he might have been slightly right, while machine guns made combat deadlier for massed rank and file formations it cause tactics to change into more dispersed units, this and many other advances mean that the combat casualty ratio in modern combat is a tiny fraction of what they where pre machine gun.

[selfishstockton]

And Alfred Nobel thought that creating dynamite TNT would be useful for clearing tree stumps and mining, not to be used as bombs

[andrewduncan]

Oppenheimer thought the atom bomb would be an end to all wars too.

[aioctober]

“Seems like a Great Idea,
With the best of intentions!

What could possibly go wrong?”

[RubenSilva-tkyb]

His mistake was thinking that people in power cared about casualities.

[teriyaki]

Crazy he was smart enough to invent the machine gun and dumb enough to think it would decrease violence

[flucky_]

Gatling: "no one will throw thousands of men at my new gun"
Imperial powers: "that's cute"

[dudsrescue]

One of my professors did research on things like this. He studied how weapon advancements, especially ones “minimize collateral damage” are often used to justify conflict and violence.

[bigmyke]

We quite literally discovered gunpowder because a Chinese alchemist wanted to find an immortality drug. Man’s hubris has a way of backfiring

[Belsarion]

The amount of people who just blindly believe every word a guy who invented a killing machine said in defense of the killing machine he invented is wild. No wonder things like this keep happening.