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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The_Universe" data-source="post: 2306855" data-attributes="member: 8944">An elite can form around anything as long as they have sufficient will and power to regulate access to whatever makes them "elite."  In the case of mounted knights (listed above) the elite was largely self-regulating.  Economic pressures prevented any truly large number of people from being able to access and maintain the "technology."  While gunpowder tech does not naturally lend itself to the same kind of hierarchical distribution, there's no reason that a sufficiently determined group of people with a willingness to use the powers that they have access to couldn't make themselves an elite.  I did a similar thing in a D&D game I ran for a long time, and the only way that I could maintain verisimilitude and still not have guns all over the place was to make the penalties for possessing a firearm without the blessing of the "elite" (in this case, the King's military/closest advisors) ridiculously steep.  In short, discharging and/or possessing a firearm unless you were a member of a specific group was a capital offense. It didn't matter if you'd hit/hurt anything - simply having one was enough to warrant your death. That edict, coupled with a reasonably vigilant and centrally controlled police-type organization was able to restrict the spread of guns and related technology significantly, to the degree that they remained uncommon/exotic for almost 1000 years after their introduction.  For real world examples of such central control preventing the spread of firearms, read up on Chinese and Japanese history.  In both cases, a powerful central authority were able to almost completely stamp out the use of such easy and inelegent weapons as firearms. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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