"Safe" Violence results in Target Creep [View all]

[cthulu2016]

1) Weapon X kills indiscriminately or unnecessarily
2) Technology leads to a narrow-targeted or less lethal weapon, Y
3) People use weapon Y like crazy because it is "safe"
4) The gain in safety is eroded by the greater use of weapon Y

Classic example: Tasers. Police start out with no way to project force at a distance except their sidearm. This means a lot of people getting shot. Tasers are developed as a non-lethal way to do the pacification job of a sidearm. The world is now a safer place...

...except that since the taser is "non-lethal" cops do not merely use it in situations where they would have shot somebody. They use it in situations where they would NOT have shot somebody... in situations where it would be crazy to shoot someone. (Belligerent elderly woman in wheelchair armed with knitting needle, someone "mouthing off", etc.)

Result: More cop violence than before, with cops tasing anyone who they find the least bit irritating or inconvenient.


Football. Men played without helmets. The death toll in college football was immense, mostly from skull fracture. (It was a national scandal. Men died every week.) Helmets are added, making the game 'safer.' Then helmets get so good at preventing skull fractures that players start using the helmet as a weapon, driving their head into people. They didn't do this before because it would have killed them. There are no skull fractures in football today, but with the better helmets you can now get hit in the head 500 times without dying, so cumulative concussion syndrome becomes commonplace.

The 'safer' violence expands the incidence of violence.


"Smart" bombs are vastly safer than non-guided bombs. We no longer need to blow up whole cities to get one munitions factory or level entire neighborhoods to target one man. There is much less collateral damage than there would be with old-fashioned bombs... assuming that the smart bombs were only used where un-guided bombs would have been used in the past.

But the smart weaponry is so targeted that we start using it in situations where nobody would have used bombs in the past. We think nothing of targeting one house in a row of houses, one car in a flow of traffic. The standards of certainty in targeting go down. Since the strike will 'only' kill ten people, instead of a thousand, we become willing to bomb on mere suspicion.

We are more and more willing to bomb residential neighborhoods, bomb next to schools, until bombs become our answer to every situation, including situations where nobody would previously have even thought of bombs.


This OP is not for or against tasers or hellfire missiles or football helmets. Just talking about the fact that 'safer' weaponry tends to lead to wider use of weaponry.

Meanwhile, the least discriminating weaponry (nukes and infectious bio-weapons) tend to not be used at all.