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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 5094984" data-attributes="member: 53980">As has been mentioned, swords are significantly bigger than your average knife.  Muskets are notably less accurate than modern firearms, and possess a remarkably reduced rate of fire.  Using modern data to compare medieval/renaissance weaponry is likely misleading.Again, you'd have to break that data down significantly before it would be of any practical value.  You want to look at machete/sword attacks for stab wounds, because a knife produces a much smaller wound than a sword (which would naturally increase the survival rate).  You want to look at single shot, higher caliber shootings for firearms (because the ability to shoot someone multiple times in rapid succession will obviously lower the survival rate).  Finally, you'd want to utilize those instances that did not have rapid response (because modern medicine can be borderline miraculous at times, and victims who had to be resuscitated will only confuse the data).  If you haven't accounted for as many factors as possible, then your statistics are unscientific to say the least.  I don't think anyone here is contesting that a modern firearm is deadlier than a knife.  The debate is over primitive firearms versus swords (and other medieval weaponry), which is hardly what the data you presented above is based on.  It's entirely possible that much of this data is comparing a cooking utensil to an actual weapon; of course the weapon is superior in that scenario!  A musket is not the equivalent of a semi-automatic rifle.  A steak knife is not the equivalent of a sword.</blockquote>

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