It’s time for us to attend a wedding and a funeral and a scramble through the sewers…
Summary
Carrot brings his new militia to the Day Watch house, recruiting a handful of new trolls and dwarfs and putting Detritus and Cuddy in charge of them. Then he relieves Quirke of duty, knocks him out, and tells the trolls to go release Coalface from prison. They proceed to swear Coalface in to their militia to prevent another riot, and Carrot promises that they’ll have Hammerhock’s case solved by tomorrow. Gaspode and Angua run into a meeting of dogs led by Big Fido, and she can’t transform back into a human because her clothes got stolen. She heads back to the Watch House with Gaspode, and breaks into Carrot’s room for a sheet. Carrot returns and Angua explains that her clothes got stolen while she was doing undercover work. They talk about the fact that d’Eath is dead and someone else has the gonne now, but they’re not sure who. Gaspode suggests that Carrot kiss her, which he half-hears. Angua kicks Gaspode out of the room and she and Carrot sleep together. Afterward, Carrot opens the curtains and moonlight hits Angua, turning her into a werewolf. Carrot takes up his sword before even thinking, and Angua escapes by jumping out the window. Carrot realizes that Gaspode can talk and demands that he help find Angua.
Buy the Book
Seasonal Fears
The figure in current possession of the gonne scales the Tower of Art and thinks of how the gonne is far more powerful than kings or anything d’Eath had planned to do with it. The next morning the Watch (with all its new inducted members) are preparing to pose as honor guard for Vimes’ wedding. Cuddy has made Detritus a special clockwork helmet to help keep his brain cool so he can think. Carrot was out looking all night for Angua, but didn’t find her. He tells Colon to have men stationed on the rooftops all around the city; he’s sent Nobby to go pick up d’Eath’s body in the sewers. Vimes prepares for his wedding, which is happening in the Great Hall of the Unseen University—Ridcully discovers that he forgot to find a best man, and demands that he do so. Cuddy drew the short straw for duty and is proceeding up the stairs of the Tower of Art. The Watch meet Vimes in the street, and he asks Colon to be his best man. Carrot and Colon simultaneously realize the danger as the Patrician’s carriage comes down the street. Vetinari stands, and is shot in the leg; Carrot throws himself across the Patrician in time to stop the second shot with his body. Detritus gets hit, and Vimes is hit by shrapnel.
Angua can tell that Carrot has been hurt and rushes to get to him, but she and Gaspode get into a scuffle with Big Fido and his crew first—this ultimately leads to Big Fido’s demise. Colon gets to the Tower of Art and finds Cuddy’s body; he dives out of the way of a gonne shot before getting hit on the head. Cuddy’s ghost refuses to leave if he’s not going to be properly buried. Everyone gets inside the university, and Detritus brings in Cuddy’s body, then goes to sit in a corner. Carrot thinks he knows who’s behind all this, so he suggests that they lie and tell the public they’ve caught the killer: Edward d’Eath. Vimes gets his gear back on and they get to it. The rest of the Watch stay behind with the Patrician until Detritus finishes thinking and gets up with Cuddy’s axe in hand. Vimes and Carrot meet the shooter down in the sewers—it’s Dr. Cruces. Vimes starts laying out the crime, but Cruces shatters the lamp and the sewers begin filling with water. Carrot charges Cruces with the deaths caused by the gonne, and that gets him talking: It turns out that while d’Eath killed Beano, Hammerhock was killed by an accidental discharge, so Cruces killed d’Eath. He begins attributing deaths to the gonne itself, Hammerhock included, as though it has a will, which d’Eath also believed. Cruces makes to shoot Carrot, but Angua has found them and pounces on him—she’s shot four times and dies. Carrot doesn’t want to leave her, but Vimes insists.
Vimes pursues Cruces until they meet and begin to wrestle over the gonne. Vimes gets his hands on it, and it immediately begins talking to him, telling him it can put everything right that he thinks he wrong. He begins firing, breaking through into the Assassin’s Guild and chasing Cruces down. Noon begins to chime, and Cruces notes that Vimes can’t shoot him because he’s a member of the Watch—he doesn’t realize that once the bells stop chiming, Vimes will no longer be a member. But right when the chimes run out, another watch chimes, and Carrot emerges, telling Vimes he cannot kill Cruces. He begins to get through to Sam, and in the last moment, Carrot sharply orders him to drops the gonne, and he does it instantly. Cruces tries to distract them both, taking up the gonne and showing Carrot all the documents d’Eath found confirming that Carrot is the rightful king of the city. But when he makes to use the gonne, Carrot runs him through with his sword without a second thought. The assassins insists on keeping Cruces’ body, and Detritus arrives at the guild, ready to kill assassins, but Carrot talks him down and takes up Angua’s body to bring back to the Watch House, sending Vimes to get married. He cleans her up, does his chores and writes his report and waits. When the moon rises, Angua enters the room—Carrot had hoped the rumors that only silver kills werewolves was true.
The Watch attends Cuddy’s funeral, and Vimes notes that the gonne was buried with him. The Carrot heads to the Patrician’s office and outlines an entire plan for making the Watch a robust and modern operation. The Patrician grants these requests and recommends that Carrot be the Captain. Carrot agrees, but suggests that Vimes be instated to the old position Commander of the Watch. (It turns out that one of his ancestors held the position the last time it existed.) Carrot also asks for a home for Gaspode. They talk of the evidence that Carrot might be king, and Carrot makes it clear that he has no intention of taking a throne, but that the evidence is well-guarded should he ever find need of it. Vetinari shows him the old Ankh-Morpork throne and reveals it to be not solid gold, but rotting wood covered in gold leaf. Carrot brings the letter with Vimes’ new orders (and pending knighthood) to him, and they begin laying out plans for the new and improved Watch. Gaspode immediately rushes to escape his brand new home.
Commentary
So… we gotta talk about gun control and the relative ease and thoughtlessness with which modern weaponry allows us to kill each other.
Because it’s absolutely essential that Pratchett makes this the crux of the novel, a novel that centers on Sam Vimes, who himself is half a knock-off of Dirty-fucking-Harry. It’s important that this story ends with Sam Vimes rounding a corner with a gun, shouting that he’s “The law, you sons of bitches!” in a clear spoof of practically every single American action film on record—Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Bad Boyz, anything with Shane Black’s name on it—and ends with Vimes shooting no one at all. That when he tells Carrot that the gonne is to blame for all of this, that Cruces was probably a decent fellow and that he might have been just the same given time, Carrot replies, “No, captain. You put it down.”
The heroism here is in resisting any urge to use this sort of weapon at all. The Disc is full of dangerous items that can wound and maim and kill, but Pratchett’s very clear on the difference between these weapons and a firearm—it gives you power that isn’t your own:
More power than any bow or spear—they just stored up your own muscles’ power, when you thought about it. But the gonne gave you power from outside.
Using those other weapons, you need to use yourself. But with a gun, you barely need a person at all because that’s how easy it makes murder. It’s relevant that whether you take the gonne’s “will” as a literal fact of this story or not, Hammerhock’s death is essentially an accident. A sizable portion of gun-related deaths are down to poor handling and mistakes, so it only makes sense that one of these murders wasn’t really a murder at all.
This book came out one year after Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins premiered in London, and I find myself wondering if Pratchett saw it because a sizable portion of the show centers on this issue, particularly the aptly named “The Gun Song”:
All you have to do
is crook your little finger,
Hook your little finger ‘round
…you can change the world
But the depressing thing is that this book was written years before mass shootings became a common day occurrence on my side of the pond, leading it to read more like a warning than satire. If only there were just one gun that we could bury in the ground with one of its victims. And that’s important too, in fact it might be the most essential piece of this story to take note of—the only way you prevent this from running wild and corrupting everything it touches is to do away with the mechanism entirely. Pratchett’s solution isn’t gun control, it’s gun erasure, and people probably go around saying that’s just a function of it being a fantasy world and that’s bullshit. It’s the solution because that is the solution. You get rid of the thing that lets people kill each other with such ease and impunity. Anything else won’t ever be enough.
There’s a thematic echo here, where Pratchett reuses a line that we last heard coming from Granny Weatherwax, this time giving it to Carrot after Vimes asks about his desire for revenge against Cruces for killing Angua: “But personal isn’t the same as important.” And it’s beautiful because both Carrot and Granny are good people—but really Good with a capital ‘G’—yet they’re different in how they go about their goodness. Being good is innate for Carrot; he doesn’t know any other way to be. Being good is hard for Granny Weatherwax, but she manages it, even when she’d rather not. But they both arrive at the same conclusion.
The fact that they see eye to eye on this particular point as Good People is meaningful in the worldview provided by these stories; repetition that’s not for the sake of comedy is never something that Pratchett does lightly. We’re meant to note it and keep it in mind.
Asides and little thoughts:
- “When you were a Watchman, you were a Watchman all the time, which was a bit of a bargain for the city since it only paid you to be a Watchman for ten hours of every day.” The irony here is that there only used to be a handful of jobs that you’d associate with this kind of commanded dedication—military, doctors, news reporters, and so on—but since Pratchett wrote this line, it’s become common for all sorts of jobs, including ones that seem absurd to offer this kind of twenty-four hour a day devotion to…
- Playing into the asides about how police work can affect one’s empathetic faculties (like last week’s bit from Detritus), we’ve got a similar look at military service and how it affects those enlisted and conscripted in Colon’s aside about his drill sergeant and how he treated his soldiers through bootcamp. The riff here is giving us the common bootcamp anecdote—how it changes a person forever (which it does), how you come out the other side as a more competent, impressive person—but handing us the other possible reaction, being that you would absolutely want to beat the shit out of the person who removed your humanity for an extended period to make you a “better” soldier.
- All the references to The Third Man are great, and making me want to watch The Third Man again.
Pratchettisms:
Interchangeable Emmas had taken over the house.
The service itself was going to be performed by the Dean, who had carefully made one up; there was no official civil marriage service in Ankh-Morpork, other than something approximating to “Oh, alright them, if you really must.”
“She’s got to marry someone once she’s turned up. Can’t have unmarried brides flapping around the place, being a danger to society.”
Cuddy brushed himself off.
Plaster dust draped him like devil’s dandruff.
The pounding spirit of the gonne flowing up Vimes’ arms met the armies of sheer stone-headed Vimesness surging the other way.
The Patrician’s smile remained, but his face seemed to pull away from it, leaving it stranded and all alone in the world.
Vimes watched the feeble pun go right through Carrot’s head without triggering his brain.
Next week we start Soul Music! We’ll read up to “The Death of Rats climbed up Binky’s mane and took up station between the horse’s ears, tiny robe flapping in the wind.”
I’m going to quote myself from TV Tropes here, on the WMG page for Men At Arms:
Vetinari has something of a Heel–Face Turn in this novel, motivated by Vimes and Carrot.
Think about it: the Patrician completely failed to read and manipulate the situation correctly. He tried to push Vimes into solving a series of murders that he was already working on, and that attempt actually drove Vimes into retirement. He had no idea that Cruces was the murderer. And at the end, Carrot’s proposal to rebuild the Watch takes him completely by surprise.
What we’re seeing here is Vetinari realizing that his mental model of Ankh-Morpork and of human nature in general is inaccurate. That there are not “always, and only, the bad people.” That it is possible to improve the city while preserving civic order, not merely leave it balanced in its misery.
It is only after this novel that Vetinari’s manipulative skills really begin to match his towering reputation for having them.
I adore Pratchett, I love the Watch books best of all, and I’m not avid hunter or gun collector, but the whole evil gun thing talking to people and making them murder is just terrible. Did Sir Terry ever handle a gun? They aren’t that scary, they don’t whisper to you, and they aren’t that much more dangerous than a crossbow. Maybe it’s a British versus American thing, but for me the gun as the bid bad is underwhelming and silly. One can be all for gun control as they want, but this premise isn’t going to win any converts.
Fortunately Pratchett is still a wonderful writer and I enjoy this book immensely. It’s so good that it can have a really lame gun control premise and still be a great book. It’s too bad that Cuddy had to die as the troll and dwarf bromance is fantastic. Butat least we have Cheery to look forward to.
Frank Herbert wrote a short story about a world in which firearms (and explosives) suddenly became unusable called “Cease Fire”. It does not end with a utopian vision of a world without guns, quite the opposite, it ends with an excerpt from an historical tract called “the Coming of the Sword”.
she and Gaspode get into a scuffle with Big Fido and his crew first—this ultimately leads to Big Fido’s demise. Very indirectly. Big Fido dies because of his own fanaticism: he’s not willing to be saved by his collar. There’s more room for commentary about that little bit than I can unpack — and I’m not sure how much freight Pratchett intended it to bear, with all that’s going on closer to the gonne.
A Pratchettism:
“I’ve got some sick leave coming up”, one of them said. “I should think that’s very probable, if you hang around,” said Carrot. From anyone else that would be another Dirty Harry moment; from him, it’s an honest warning.
“You get rid of the thing that lets people kill each other with such ease and impunity.”
That’s the sad thing in this novel. Really to eradicate the gonne, or any other bad invention, one must un-know how to make one. That genie is very hard to keep in the lamp.
I’m enjoying this Pratchett re-read.
Thank you
Carrot putting his un-magic sword through a stone pillar. We also discover he recognizes the effect he has on people and is disturbed by it.
Bad Dog! Gaspode has the power!
Cuddy informing Death that his tortured spirit can linger if it darn well wants to!
Detritus and Cuddy.
Vetinari getting comeuppance for being to clever by half.
The power of Vimesness.
Gaspode – one of my favorite characters in all the books. Here we see him sacrifice his ability to beg sausages from the Watch to try to bring Carrot and Angua together.
Carrot and Granny – okay, he got to use her catchphrase, but I don’t see them as very similar. I think a much better comparison is Vimes and Granny, both of whom are Good and both of whom are motivated at their core by a love of their homes – Ankh-Morpork and Lancre.
The Gonne – Leonard’s invention should have been melted down immediately but it needed to remain in existence for the story. Still, at the end, burying it with Cuddy seems to be a bad decision. Perhaps Pratchett was leaving it open for a possible reappearance.
The power of the Gonne – the idea that it gives you power that isn’t your own was used in Roundworld as an argument by bowmen (and the elite) against crossbow.
You were a Watchman all the time – I see this as a reference to mindset and I wonder if Pratchett would include himself and other authors in this.
Bootcamp – Sarge may be at the top of the list of people the recruits want to get even with but we shouldn’t forget that the goal of bootcamp is to dehumanize them so that they will follow orders to kill or to be killed (e.g. ride into the valley of death).
Pratchettisms – okay, it’s not a Pratchettism but a Kingfisherism (Clockwork Boys) but it so fits with the waiting parts of this book – “The hours passed. Like a kidney stone.”
About gun control (or gonne control):
Bear in mind that Pratchett was writing this book in Britain in the early 1990s, just a few years after a man named Michael Ryan picked up his two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun and went on a killing spree in and around Hungerford, a quiet market town in the heart of southern England. He killed 16 people and wounded 15 more before armed police managed to surround him in a school, where he shot himself. It was arguably the first mass shooting by a lone gunman on British soil, and to this day it remains one of the worst.
The “Hungerford Massacre” had a deep effect on the British psyche, destroying forever the comfortable belief that “it can’t happen here.” Mass shootings happened in America and suchlike lawless places, not in the shire counties of England. (Oddly we were all too familiar with the idea of mass murder caused by terrorist bombs, but somehow that was different. You might detest the terrorists and consider them evil murderers, but you understood that they had a motivation, even if you disagreed totally with it. For a man to just head out of his home one morning and start picking off passers-by seemingly at random, for no apparent reason… suddenly nowhere felt safe.)
One fact that horrified the public when it emerged was that all Ryan’s weapons were legally owned, with valid gun licences signed by the local police and his doctor. The tragedy led directly to tighter gun control laws in 1988, outlawing the possession of semi-automatic weapons by civilians.
When this book was published, the events in Hungerford would still have been very fresh in the memories of both Pratchett and his UK readers. It would have been impossible for those of us who read it when it first came out (as I did) not to think of Hungerford.
On a lighter note…
Pratchettisms: I’m a little surprised – but delighted – that you picked up on the “interchangeable Emmas” line. It’s one that my wife and I still use as shorthand for a certain type that can still be encountered in the posher, more horsey parts of the English shires. (I nearly wrote that they are still common, but of course the Emmas are always well-bred, they’re never “common”.)
@3&4
As EAP says in the post:
“The Disc is full of dangerous items that can wound and maim and kill, but Pratchett’s very clear on the difference between these weapons and a firearm—it gives you power that isn’t your own”.
As to the sword, Lindsey Davis explained years ago: Killing someone with a sword requires “strength, skill, and a real desire to see the b*****d dead”. Not at all the same thing that enables toddlers to kill their parents, siblings and/or themselves without meaning to.
@2: an interesting argument. My memory (which I don’t claim is reliable) says that Vetinari is right much more often than he’s wrong in some previous books, but he was also taken aback by Carrot at the end of Guards! Guards!; perhaps he’s right that there are so few good people that the odds favor a demanding person being bad (or at least venal) until shown otherwise? What other edge cases are there before Moist von Lipwig, who he does manage very effectively?
It’s also interesting how much we also see Carrot deepen; previously he was mostly amusingly rule-bound, but now there’s some thought and steel underneath. (Killing Dr. Cruces quickly reminds me of one of the instructions for Dark Lords….) I suppose some of that is the exposure to Ankh-Morpork, but we’re told in some book that most dwarfs in Ankh-Morpork are much more obnoxious than at home, rather than being more knowledgeable.
@10: burying it with Cuddy seems to be a bad decision. Maybe, maybe not; given the reputation/desirability of dwarfish axes, it’s possible dwarfs have developed skills/tech to discourage grave robbers — Cuddy’s grave could be one of the safer places. (How many people would get a chance to see the workings if the gonne were destroyed?)
@6: Pratchett has made un-knowing possible, in a sense; the inventor is locked up and the one person who seriously analyzed the gonne is dead. (I do wonder about the motive power, which on Roundworld was a general frightener long before it was used for direct damage.) OTOH, how many people will remember that the gonne is possible, and will one of those have the skills to try to reproduce it? There are waves of multiple appearances of an idea in Roundworld history, but it’s not clear Discworld is yet as good at spreading ideas.
@8 Gaspode (and the fact that he was dumped very early where most of the pack were runaways) suggests comments on fake radicals/outlanders, such as the white ?rastas? in Ten Things I Hate About You. He’s a fun survivor.
@3 There’s some things that gun owners should always take into account: one, that according to the best estimates we have available, gun owners are a minority in America, comprising of about 40 percent of the population. Did Sir Pterry ever handle a gun himself in England? Probably not. Two, non-gun owners do tend to assign a mythical quality to firearms.
Having said it, you’re right that he might have missed the right metaphor. The danger in guns is that people take them too lightly. Hauling off and punching someone takes more effort than pulling a ten pound trigger and has less dire consequences.
A note I keep forgetting to put in, and don’t recall seeing: this is one of a small number of Pratchett’s novels that was dramatized by Stephen Briggs; I have the script, and would make it happen locally somehow — if I just had the energy I had when I was tech-directing the Rivets plays. (The script even comes with notes on sets and a complete list of props.)
And on re-skimming the script, I recognized Vimes’s final reaction: not just that he’s finding something to keep himself busy, but that he knows the city well enough to fix Carrot’s layout of additional Watch stations. (Carrot has been showing potential girlfriends the wonders; Vimes knows the mechanics.) As someone who’s been doing convention layouts for decades, I love that.
Carrot is the Decoy Protagonist of Guards! Guards! where Vimes unexpectedly took the spotlight, and Vimes will remain the central focus of the Watch across the subseries. But with Vimes forced out of commission for much of it, this book alone is Carrot’s time to shine, and to develop as a character and a person. Detritus also develops greatly in it, and will keep getting better.
@2: That’s a great point, which I hadn’t thought about. The primary direct impact of this book’s events is the Watch’s great expansion in size and diversity — which will continue — but it may also have helped set Vetinari’s course for improving the world. I see the TV Tropes page further speculates that Vetinari’s early-series pessimism may have largely come from his youthful experience of seeing and helping a bad ruler get replaced by what swiftly turned out to be another bad ruler. Seeing Carrot reject the possibility of rulership, and apply what power he has to the aim of improving life for the people he looks after and the city they serve, may have inspired a shift in mindset.
I’m ambivalent about this book’s framing argument that a weapon should only be as powerful as the muscles of the person wielding it, which seems to imply that only physically-strong people should be able to use weapons and everyone else is helplessly out of luck. But I don’t know if that was the intended implication. Also, Detritus’s siege crossbow arguably has more capacity for mass death and destruction than this particular gun, though it might not have as long a range.
At the end of the previous section and in later books, it’s said that Angua has six nipples when in wolf form. I’ve read that dogs usually have ten nipples, but I don’t know about wolves. (Wondering about this makes me feel like Shadwell.)
‘The Librarian liked being best man. You were allowed to kiss bridesmaids and they weren’t allowed to run away.’ For this one moment in the series, the Librarian is decidedly unlikable.
Where did the gonne’s wielders get so much ammunition? They may have retrieved some of the bullets after use, but not all.
Big Fido evidently couldn’t wriggle out of his collar like some cats and dogs I’ve known, and refused to have some other dog chew it off. Or else he kept wearing it as a sign of his past captivity or something. In any case, it got him a Disney Villain Death.
I wonder if Death showed up for the gonne’s soul, such as it was. And whether it accompanied Cuddy into his afterlife.
Pratchettisms:
‘Sergeant Colon gripped his helmet like a Size Number Ten limpet trying to crawl up into a Size Number One shell.’ (I don’t actually know if that’s capitalized; I only listen to the books.)
“So we’ve got a clockwork soldier, have we? We’re a real model army, we are.”
Looking ahead:
Carrot refuses to let a vampire join his militia. By the book’s end, vampires are explicitly allowed to join the Watch, but it will be a long time before Vimes gets pushed into reluctantly hiring one.
Contrary to Carrot’s statement, silver is not the only thing that can kill Discworld werewolves. Fire works too, as do fireworks.
We’ll find out that most bodies buried in the Cemetery of Small Gods eventually get exhumed, cleaned to skeletons, and stored in crypts to make burial space for more bodies. So there’s a risk of someone retrieving the gonne’s partial remains that were buried with Cuddy. But hopefully it’s too incomplete, broken, and (by that time) rusted to be resurrected.
“A department for, well, we haven’t got a name for it yet, but looking at clues and things like dead bodies, for example how long they’ve been dead. And to start with, we’ll need an alchemist, and possibly a ghoul, provided they promise not to take anything home and eat it.” — from Carrot’s description of the Watch expansion plan
@14 – As for Vetinari being taken aback by Carrot at the end, keep in mind that his first experience with Carrot was when Carrot arrested the head of the Thieves Guild for thievery.
@17 – As far as bullets, any round ball of metal will do and casting lead is easy. Today we think of bullets as a whole cartridge with the bullet, powder, and primer in a casing but that is a much later development.
As far as vampires, we shall learn later that the reluctance to accept them stems from their ability to control people in somewhat the same way as the elves from Lords and Ladies.
@18: As for Vetinari being taken aback by Carrot at the end, keep in mind that his first experience with Carrot was when Carrot arrested the head of the Thieves Guild for thievery. That’s the opposite end of the spectrum. When Carrot came to Ankh-Morpork, he didn’t know how it worked; now he knows something about making it work better that Vetinari doesn’t. He’s not as good at planning as Vimes, but he’s not just the tourist-gone-resident that he seems with Angua.
Also, wrt ammunition: casting lead to fit is not easy; I’ve read that soldiers in the USian revolutionary war carried their own bullet molds because calibers hadn’t been standardized — a little too large won’t fit at all, a hair too large will jam (and maybe make the gun explode), and more than a hair too small will have less range and accuracy. (I read the gonne as relatively short-barreled, if not an outright handgun, so the fact that it can come close to a target at 200 yards is impressive.) There’s also the matter of propellant; did the display case at the Assassins’ Guild include everything? I suppose the gonne could have guided its bearers to the necessary pieces….
@19 – I was not trying to cast aspersions on Carrot, only to say that Vetinari didn’t view him as anything special. He appointed him head of the Night Watch on Vimes’ recommendation and the alternative was Colon. Carrot is “not as dumb as he looks” but we, and Vetinari, only begin to see it in this book.
OTOH, I would never characterize him as a “tourist-gone-resident” but as someone on a mission who encountered reality and fell in love with the city. Angua’s views may differ.
As far as the gonne, I’ll chalk up the accuracy (and the reloading time) to Discworld physics.
“this book’s framing argument that a weapon should only be as powerful as the muscles of the person wielding it”
Interesting way to look at it. From here, the framing argument is that guns give an additional power to the users that is so easy to access that it corrupts them, as well as wreaking a lot of unintended harm.
@21: I don’t know how else to look at that argument. Seems to me like if all weapons should only “store up your own muscles’ power,” then people like me who lack powerful muscles should also lack weapons and thus be defenseless. I don’t think Pratchett would really say that and mean it, and I don’t think the rest of the series reflects such a notion, but I’m less sure how else to take it here. I’m not in favor of the gonne, or guns in general, as they do seem more hazardous to the world at large than they’re worth. But luckily I’ve never yet needed to try to defend myself from physical danger.
@22: I think the point is more that using a weapon should require effort and commitment, not be something that can be done casually and without thought. You have to really mean it, not have a momentary whim.
“God created Man, but Samuel Colt made them equal,”?
“The riff here is giving us the common bootcamp anecdote—how it changes a person forever (which it does), how you come out the other side as a more competent, impressive person—but handing us the other possible reaction, being that you would absolutely want to beat the shit out of the person who removed your humanity for an extended period to make you a “better” soldier”.
Why dont we see more of that in fiction? I have a feeling a lot of people would do that if they were in that position. I think it happened in Full Metal Jacket but that’s it.