As a way to short-circuit the non-discussions about "gunz", I imagine a new hobby: making just-as-bad-as-guns not-guns.

Imagine you live right now and have access to all the technology and goods that you already have access to right now...

I'm talking springs, blades, chemicals, computers...

Imagine that your assignment is to prepare yourself for wilderness survival. You are going somewhere with lots of big game and not much else. You are going to have kill big dangerous things and eat them.

You are going to have to create and curate all the things you take with you. You'll be forced to move a mile or two every few days, just to ensure your "kit" is that portable. So don't just imagine a small missile launcher.

You are allowed to spend as much time as you like with CAD software and testing and engineering help and whatever else you have access to right now. As a practical constraint, you are going to have to pay for all this. You're going to Big Game Island for a month, and then you are coming back! -- hopefully alive.

You'll be coming back to your old life after one month. And you're coming back to your usual life savings, minus whatever you paid to arm yourself.

And you have to create all your kit and weaponry from scratch. Want a flechette slinger? -- You'll have to build one.

And you cannot bring or make what a reasonable contemporary human would call a "gun". So no rifled tubes with lead projectiles propelled by a chemical reaction.

In fact... "no chemical reactions". How bout that?

Why? Because you are being forced to do this by the Gedankengruppe.

What you will end up with will be enough to take down a skittish adult bison that probably won't stay still for you (sure bison. why not?)

And it will be perfectly legal and it won't be a thing about which there is a "great political debate". It'll just be a clever, carefully optimized thing-killer. Congratulations.

Now, manufacture those things and arm anyone who fears for their safety.

Yes, guns are a great solution for this problem. If guns were "allowed" in the experiment, everyone would just choose to take a gun. That's what's typically used to take down bison. But if that were disallowed, what many folks would come up with would be just as dangerous and effective, possibly even cheaper and

and

and

currently unregulated, free to conceal and carry. Free to give as Christmas gifts.

Maybe another way to frame the experiment:

Suppose that

1. Suppose that home invasions with violence and maybe death are once-per-decade likely for any given person in your neighborhood. Imagine home invasions are as frequent as casual vandalism or yard gnome theft.
2. Suppose that you also commute to work on the scariest subway system you can imagine with a connection that has you walking through the scariest neighborhood you can imagine at 2am. There are sharpened screwdrivers! Maybe you work with 100 people and 3 of them were messed up/killed during similar commutes in the last year.

Just suppose it's "real" and "going down". You are allowed to arm yourself, we'll pay 80% of the cost of inventing your dream weapon, but it can't be a "gun" as described above. It can fit in your front pocket while you're commuting to work. It can fit in the top drawer of your nightstand. You can even have a separate weapon for each use-case.

I figure: if we pay 80% of the cost, we can the imagine something that can be mass-produced at a reasonable (gun-competitive) price and you still have a real incentive not to go all space-warp and nuclear fission.

Whatcha got?

Here's some things I think would be cool:

• Use of electronics: you add some electronics that allow you to reliably pierce the heart of any human in-frame (yes, object recognition and all that). You might be able to actually control the projectile in-flight. It needn't be fancy. The camera would still be on the human and the little computer would still be working. You could send inputs to the projectile and have it twitch its little fins at the cost of hundreds of milligrams. Mmaybe.
• Commercially compressed springs. They come in little cartridges just like gunpowder. What do gun regulators think about things that do not use chemical energy? ("oh we can patch up these old laws just like new!")
• What about lasers? Especially now with the 80% rule.
• Maybe the projectile is not particularly fast but it is particularly brutal. If you wanted to make a thing that, upon contact, burrows around inside the body until it runs out of battery...what then?
• What about a projectile that "explodes" but not with chemical energy?
• It comes with glasses! Put on the glasses and pick up your weapon. When you pull the trigger, the glasses turn on their LCD shutters while lasers and shit (permanently) blind the target. They don't have these paired shutter glasses and they can't wear welding helmets in the dark! Chemical lasers! ☝🏼

And these things can be sold to hunters who would gladly give feedback and fund research. Do we have "gun season" and "bow season" and also "guided flechette" season? If you have a weapon that's not covered by the many regulations, do you get more or less hunting? Is it maybe more "fun" to kill things this way? Maybe it's not a thing.

I feel like gun regulations are so stupid (in both the "kinda not necessary" and the "poorly considered" sense) I wonder if you can't just make them pointless overnight by flooding the world with lots of more-terrible weapons.

The point being, of course, people will figure out how to do the crazy, random people murdering regardless.