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.
