The End of Killing : How Our Newest Technologies Can Solve Humanity’s Oldest Problem reviewed, July 2019

By @SimonCocking review of The End of Killing :  How Our Newest Technologies Can Solve Humanity’s Oldest Problem. Available from Amazon here.

Technology will make killing a thing of the past.

The gun is antiquated technology, and it is responsible for tens of thousands of senseless killings every year. Humanity has accepted that killing is an unavoidable fact of life?but Rick Smith argues that it doesn’t need to be this way and that we have the means to make the bullet obsolete in our lifetime.

Smith is the founder of TASER (now Axon), and in this book, he demonstrates that we are on the cusp of a world in which killing is neither required nor acceptable. That change won’t come by way of stricter gun control laws. No, what holds us back from making an overdue and necessary shift in how we think about weapons is our skepticism about new technologies and their potential.

Smith has devoted his career to understanding why and how we kill each other. In The End of Killing, he reviews the history of weaponry and warfare as well as the latest technologies in crowd control, surveillance, and artificial intelligence. He delves into the big, thorny questions about how technology is creating more tools for police, homeland security, and military, and offering more options for our personal safety and our justice system. With clarity and conviction, he challenges the conventional wisdom on these subjects, showing how technologies that appear strange and scary at first can be the key to making the gun a relic of the past.

In our current impasse of dead-end debates about gun violence and police brutality, Smith offers us a clear roadmap into a safer future. Thought-provoking, insightful, and controversial, The End of Killing will make you reconsider the violent world you inhabit?and imagine the safer world on the horizon.

The End of Killing, reviewed

As we all know one of the biggest problems with capital punishment is that if you have a miscarriage of justice, if new evidence comes to light, or for any other reason it turns out that the wrong person has been convicted, there is no second chance if the state has already executed the person. Rick Smith as the founder of TASAR (now Axon) is well placed to discuss, explore and ask some very interesting questions about the use of lethal, and non lethal force.

There are many occasions where killing has happened ‘for the greater good’, because someone else perceived they were in danger. The intent has rarely been to kill the person presenting in front of you, but rather to stop them from acting in a way that you perceive to be injurious to your own interests. This may not be an area that is currently at the forefront of public discussion, but it really should be. Thankfully in Europe, and really the rest of the world outside of the USA, we have far lower levels of gun related deaths, but the principles still apply.

This book is very thought provoking, and across a series of chapters covered a range of topics. Smith is careful to walk a cautious line between various lobby groups out there, though to be honest large areas of law enforcement, and potential also military engagements could easily embrace more non lethal tools into their portfolio of weapons used.

We really enjoyed reading this book, and felt it raised a lot of interesting ideas. As so many areas of our lives reap the benefits from new, innovative technology, why not weapons too. Afterall in the US, SBC – suicide by cop, is a sad and messy event where no one wins – people suffering from depression get a second chance to work through their issues, while policeman are not traumatised by people impelling them to kill them. A great read,  one to recommend.

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