How do you think having a weapon capable of killing, wounding...

You're assuming crimes are committed rationally considering the potential punishment, which is not true at all.

>considering the potential punishment
No, it's more of concerning the immediate consequences rather than the potential punishment. Most inmates polled have responded that they would not commit a crime if they knew that there was a high chance of immediate violent retaliation (i.e. I'm going to go rob the nu-male rather than the cowboy with an openly-carried iron).

Far more diplomacy to resolve disputes.

I was about to post that I don't think replicators would make a phaser except for personnel rated by the ship to own them but then I remembered an episode of DS9 where a dude replicated a teleporter sniper rifle just by feeding some plans into it

Starfleet is a pseudo-military organisation. I'd expect weapons handling to be part of training at the academy.

Starfleet is a joke.

You know how Vulcans suppress emotions? This is their outlet. Shaping alien societies into a joke just to see how far it can go. This is why the galaxy is full of dumb theme park planets.

And they apparently started with themselves

This, Med-Bays are probably full of future Chads recovering from stun related injuries. All so they can post the holo on Spacebook

Where exactly do you think you can live that has zero chance of violent situations?

Ignorance is bliss I know, but at least TRY to acknowledge reality.

It doesn't have zero chance. Just a low enough chance that carrying a weapon wouldn't be worth the annoyance.

Forgot to add: I live in a country where the police usually don't carry guns. Where the police don't want to be carrying guns unless there is a specific threat that justifies them.

>This is not a /pol/ post.
That's the only true statement you've made.

...

Aside from the stunning part, that sounds a lot like America, so I'm gonna go with 'poorly' for how it would effect a setting.
Yes I know that most of America's problems are unrelated to guns

I thought UFP didn't allow weapons for civilians? It's supposed to be this big utopian hippie society that Gene Roddenberry dreamed up. They don't even kill animals for food.

>effect

>If every member of a society is armed, and 95% of them are generally good, and 5% of them are generally bad,
How many of them are stupid and irresponsible though?

Eh, settlers have them all the time. That's where the Maquis get theirs - they're all frontiersmen.

I think it's more that most people feel no need to carry them on civilised worlds.

People would work out their differences peacefully, since getting violent would mean one risked almost certain death.

Guns leave forensic traces and are mortal weapons, to be used seriously.

With a stun setting that's actually worth a damn (vs eg single-shot, 10m range tasers), stun weapons can become the norm. That devalues violence a lot - now police can shoot first (and on widebeam) and ask questions later. Crowd of rioters? Family dispute? Bank robbers with hostages? Set phasers to technobabble and zap em all.

The grimmer aspects are there too. Now serial killers can safely stun their victims, drag them back to the rape dungeon in an anti-gravity van, and then safely vaporize all the evidence afterwards.

Upper middle class gated communities where the nonwhites/Asians are rare and making six figures minimum.

Pretty much this. I lived in one of these for like 10 years, never had a single violent incident occur in the neighborhood. Bunch of shit went on around it, but never in it.

>deadly weapons accessible to everyone

Knives have been available to everyone for a long time, user. Beating people unconscious has also been around for a few thousand years.

You severely overestimate the willingness or capability of most people to beat or stab someone. It's a lot easier to point and shoot than to get up close and personal with someone and stab them in the gut, there are a lot more inhibitions in play.

Wiki says the Maquis armed themselves through the black market.

memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Maquis#Resistance_builds
Second paragraph of "Resistance Builds"

The suicide rate would go up.

And? Care to refute the point?

Stupid and irresponsible means they can't think beyond the immediate, it does not mean they'll ignore how almost everyone around them is carrying a self-defense weapon.

>Aside from the stunning part, that sounds a lot like America

Most of the places where crime (especially gun crime) is especially endemic are places where guns are prohibited.

Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, same with New York City and Los Angeles.

the implied question was how accident-prone this would turn out to be
>drunken teenagers fooling around with a death phaser for shits and giggles

What is the incident of accidents related to firearms in Switzerland?

If everyone is being given a gun, than it stands to reason that everyone is being given gun education.

You mean like a heavy blunt instrument?

>I never studied criminology: the post

>replication rates don't matter! the field

An 80% effective, cheap, nonlethal ranged stun weapon would heavily change the dynamic of society, especially if it's pocket sized. If you could, say, create a phaser that only goes up to "Heavy stun" (IE, knock a dude on the floor for 8 hours, possible but low lethality, may or may not work on alien possession, parasites, or meth-heads), that would revolutionize self defense. People would have a lot less hesitation to pull a nonlethal weapon, and yes, wide beam would massively simplify crowd control.

You'd also see a jump in people getting their asses stunned for doing stupid shit. Getting sweary and threatening to throw a punch? "I feared for my safety, and since he had 30 pounds of muscle on me, I stunned him." "I thought he was creepy and going to try and rape me, I stunned him." Self-defense law would get one hell of a workout, never mind, say, making your neighbor's noisy-ass dog take a nap.

>I don't think replicators would make a phaser except for personnel rated by the ship to own them
Hahaha, he thinks Starfleet has things like 'Security precautions' and 'access control'. That's Orwellian oppression, mister. Anyone is entitled to replicate all the pipe bombs they want, because no one in utopia would ever be dissatisfied or crazy. And of course guests are allowed replicator access, why wouldn't we let random visitors replicate anything? The only limit is that for some reason it's impossible to replicate a charged battery, so replicated phasers are 'useless' until you can charge the fucking things.

>"Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price."

>If every member of a society is armed, and 95% of them are generally good, and 5% of them are generally bad, the malevolent individuals will by and large weigh the risk of being killed by a potential victim against whatever they've got in their wallet, and decide they value their own life more than twenty bucks.

So everyone is equally capable of using a firearm, all malevolent individuals are street muggers, 5% of people are muggers and muggers would never kill someone without asking for their money first. That makes sense.

I think this is pasta since I can't tell whether you're actually addressing OP's question.

It was a very generalized kind of statement, I didn't have the time to look up and break down exactly what all the various percentages of criminals are, but most crimes do tend to be petty, assaults, muggings, break-ins, et-cetra. Generally muggers (at least in my state) absolutely don't murder people, because they're not interested in being hunted as murderers, they are in fact weighing risk/reward, and while it's easy to steal a few twenties off some drunk idiots in the middle of the night, it's not in their best interest to kill those people and have the cops out hunting for them where capture might very well result in a death sentence or life in prison.

Counter to that though, if all of these guns have an extremely reliable stun setting that can be used from a distance, you think criminals would be more prone to shoot first with that, as would random citizens. After all, why threaten someone with the disintegrate setting when you can just tase them before they even see you? Heading down a dark alley and getting mugged would involve being stunned by someone you never even saw, and waking up without your wallet or phaser.

Similarly, that means less risk for an average criminal, as I'd imagine using more than stun in many cases for self-defense would be frowned on by the public. You could make a case that you were only matching the force of the person blasting lasers at you, but honestly there's very little reason to do so when you can stun them and remove the threat equally well.

So if anything, you get more firefights, but less drastic results from them. On par with assault charges, but nothing you wouldn't get from pointing a weapon at someone anyway.

Sounds plausible, although the fact that the weapon can be set to kill a person would in my opinion still dissuade a portion of petty criminals from attempting crime altogether.

Why would you *bother* to shoot to kill if you had a reliable, ranged stun phaser? Unless you're in an actual military situation and aren't interested in taking prisoners, or have some pre existing reason you want to murder this guy, anyway. What does it matter to you if Random Mugger or Attempted Rapist or Aggressive Drunk is dead or sleeping it off in a holding cell? The threat is neutralized either way, and the latter means less hassle and potential trauma for you. Unless you're some kind of loonie who just likes killing people for some reason, anyway.

This If anything, non-military Phasers would be programmed to automatically set themselves to stun after X minutes as a safety precaution, so that somebody doesn't disintegrate their foot. Somebody having their phaser on kill would mean they're very interested in someone being dead at that very moment, which means they're either a soldier or a murderer themselves.

There's no reason for a kill setting for self-defense unless you're in like gang territory where they'll be out for revenge once they wake up and the police can't show up to nab them.

Duels would become commonplace, and everyone would use 'stun' on everyone else. Constantly.

There's a reason the Federation is so wussified and post-scarcity, and that is the 'stun' setting. You basically need to brainwash people if they all have stun rays.

Fist fights would be shoot outs with stun, domestic disputes would probably end with woundings, and probably a lot more murders and suicides simply due to everyone having access to the weapon. Not to mention kids shooting their moms with various settings because kids are dumb and everyone having the weapon just means more kids will get their hands on them.

Can it shoot the cap off of a bottle or will it just destroy the bottle?

>You basically need to brainwash people if they all have stun rays.
>teaching people to act like adults and think about appropriate force instead of just stunning people who piss you off
>brainwashing
I know a lot of people are retards, but how hard would it be for people on Veeky Forums to not stun just because they could?

I dunno, I think "stun" might increase the rates of mugging. Example:

>dude walking down the street late at night
>walks past an alleyway
>looks down it, doesn't see anyone
>keeps going
>suddenly he's knocked unconscious by a stunner from behind and his wallet is jacked

It's guaranteed non-lethal (unlike, say, a baseball bat to the head which might kill), it's ranged, and it gives the target no time to draw their weapon. Also, at least in Star Trek I think it's more reliable than our modern tazers. They don't see you at all before they get knocked out.

Criminal's behavior would change. If there are no easy targets anymore, they would shoot first to prevent the victims from defending themselves.

If everyone's armed, there will be less thefts and more murders.

>If everyone's armed, there will be less thefts and more murders.
Except that stunning someone pre-emptively lets you go through their pockets and doesn't carry the potential damage of a murder rap. Dude wakes up without his pants and you're looong gone.

Sure. I missed the "stun" part, I only considered everyone having a deadly weapon.

Yeah, I guess the only reason the Federation can work with everyone having stun weapons is because they also got rid of money (however they did that). Otherwise I assume stun muggings would be an everyday thing.

>(however they did that)
So far as I can tell, they got rid of money by technologically advancing to the point where outside of literal frontier work, resource scarcity stopped being a thing. Matter/Energy conversion is a hell of a drug.

>Ferengi immigrants
>Stun Muggings up 10,000%

How does the federation deal with it? Ban Ferengi?

They're not the same because a homogeneous society could be either 0% niggers or 100% niggers.

Ammunition is highly regulated by the Swiss government, but your point still stands. Proper gun education that ensures that everyone pays attention, like conscription in Finland and Israel, would greatly minimize the risk of these accidents happening. I'm not saying that your scenario is definitely not gonna happen with universal gun education, it's just not happening to the point it isn't a significant problem.

what everyone seems to be ignoring is the people shown as having phasers are Starfleet personnel (military) and the occasional frontierperson or shifty alien smuggler

You mean swords?

They're pretty neutral, like any other weapon, really.

I don't think we're talking about the Star Trek universe specifically, more just what the proliferation of something like a phaser would do to the world.

I would say that power-limited versions would be far preferable for civilians in most cases. You really, really don't need anything more than the stun setting, since somebody being on the ground for hours is them functionally being dead in any self-defense scenario.

>swords
>capable of stunning

>crimes related to guns are common when guns are illegal

Who'd have thought that making something illegal would make it appear in statistics recording crimes?

>Forced weapon ownership ?
That's how I'd run my ideal society. Mandatory military service and gun training too.

Switzerland and Finnland exist. They don't like strangers in one case and they don't like being approached in the other though.

Ferengi are not going to be interested in mugging Fed citizens in 99% of cases because there's nothing to steal worth stealing.
The normal Fed citizen will be carrying
>A PADD or similar, which is trivial to produce almost anywhere civilised with industrial activity
>A personal keepsake or two, like a locket or watch. No resale value, personal value to owner and friends only.
>A novel or some other 20thC hobby item
How the fuck are you going to bribe the Exchequer with that shit?

Information is it's own valuable comodity. I imagine the average researcher has quite a bit of stored information on their person at any point in time.

Kind or makes me wonder what information security is like in Star Trek.

I think it'd be great to have ferengi routinely stealing entire starships due to dropped thumb drives.

Ah, now. We have a different kettle of fish here. Targeted robbery would be a big deal. We see a lot of things like that in places like DS9, where assassins and spies do covert shit. We can assume that anyone working on anything important would have Starfleet security working around them. Further, we see that Earth itself has effectively no crime of that type. I have to assume that is because the detection technology is so good nobody (except possibly equiv-tech fleet elements) can get stolen goods offworld. In short, unless the guy robbing you has a navy, he probably isn't getting off Earth with it.
Further afield, yes, you need to watch your back. That all being said, random joggers or the like are hugely unlikely to have such things with them.

Well if the weapon is capable of consistently stunning I would think that killing would be even more reprehensible than it normally is.

In Star Trek, weapons like that are only in the hands of Away Teams, Security, or Military forces. They may be made available to All Hands in emergency situations, but are collected back, after.

Handing them out like candy would be disastrous.

I mean, giving Wesley access to the Off-Button Hyposprays was bad enough. Imagine if the creepy fucker had a phaser too.

Potential motives for crime tend to plummet when you can just replicate anything your heart desires for free.

Can you replicate me Five Titty Christina Ricci and her six identical sisters? Wait, you can? Holodeck, you say. How has this not collapsed all of society yet?

>If everyone's armed, there will be less thefts and more murders.
Sure, but the overall rate of both would still go down.

Agreed. Also consider the fact that other people may join in and help someone who is going to be murdered in public. People will not freeze and obey just one guy with a gun. You will have a mob of people angry at the one criminal.

So if anything bad things will likely happen behind closed doors. Or within gangs.

>what is a pommel strike

>People will not freeze and obey just one guy with a gun.

The guy with a gun won't start shouting at people to give him their wallet, though, he'll start shooting. Intimidating people works if they can't defend themselves, if they can, the attacker has to use surprise and disable them first. And phasers do have wide stun setting, that mob of angry people is lying unconscious on the ground before they have a chance to react.

The guy with a gun isn't going to start shouting at the other guys with guns at all, or shooting them, unless he's quite literally a psychopath, and those are so much more rare than common thugs it's statistically hilarious.

Just make all stun shots go BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. And alert anyone nearby who fired it, and who was hit. If these features are removed replicators would pick up on it, and stun anyone useing them and alert authorites.

He gets stunned.

According to the RPGs you can get civilian phasers but they don't go above Heavy Stun. They don't have the higher settings that a starfleet one has.

Which is pretty reasonable. Heavy Stun is going to put down most everything a civilian encounters, even starfleet don't set to kill a lot of the time.

If I remember. Setting the phazer to kill will leave no body. It is basically overkill.

>Tediore was founded on the principle that no family should be without the protection that an affordable, lightweight firearm provides. Whether you're planning on taking little Billy out to the fields for his first pheasant hunt or you need to chase some trouble off your front porch, Tediore will be there for you. Over the years, Tediore has built a reputation among the working class men and women of this land for providing fast-reloading weapons that anyone, on any budget, can afford. So the next time you're headed down to the Save-N-Save, why not put a little piece (sic) of mind in the cart and grab yourself a Tediore? Tediore's pistols, shotguns, sub-machine guns and rifles can be found at major retailers nationwide.

No, Kill just kills. The phaser does, however, go all the way up to "disintegrate target and the bulkhead behind him", which is for some reason never actually seen. Disruptors apparently start at heavy stun and go up to Disintegrate.

Depends on the kill setting. Like stun, there is several settings within 'Kill' depending on if you want to put a guy in the dirt of blast a hole in a reinforced wall. But yeah, a lot of the time the heavier kill settings will reduce the body to nothing.

You know, Tediore is the most high tech shitty gun company I've seen in any media. "Our guns are such plastic pieces of crap, you don't even need to bother reloading them! We sell you the digistruct plan, and whenever you run out of bullets, press the self-destruct button and throw the gun like a grenade and digistruct a new one!" It's using absurdly advanced tech to make laughably shitty guns.

>It's using absurdly advanced tech to make laughably shitty guns.

Truly, a vision of the future.

>How do you think having a weapon capable of killing, wounding, or stunning in the hands of pretty much everyone would effect a setting?

Why would it need a wound setting if it has a stun setting?
What situation would you need to WOUND someone was a better option than simply stunning them?

How's that latest terrorist bombing working out for you, England?

Can you have sex with things in a holodeck?

>It's using absurdly advanced tech to make laughably shitty guns.
Fuck you; I want future Hi-Points that can be used like grenades.

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