In the 19th century sword and gun duel were not that rare, think about Mathematician’s Gallois death for example, it seems to be a thing of the past as the last duel occurred in the late 60’s.
Politics also used to be pretty violent, with fascist leagues in the 30’s and even after the war tons of pretty violent fight between political activist in the 60’s and various armed group including full terrorist groups (RAF, ETA and more).
Without saying that today world is peaceful and today politics is “nice diplomacy” things seems pretty laid back simply compared to our parent era and let alone the 19th century.
I would have expected that people would take advantage of modern medicine to be more violent. A duel, or a street fight between political opponent would be way more survivable than it was 100 years ago, so how comes these stuff seems mostly from the past ?
The two aren’t correlated in that way because nobody is thinking to themselves “I want to inflict an amount of damage commensurate with what can be treated by modern medicine”
Politics gets more dangerous as tensions rise in a country. It has nothing to do with what injuries people think can be recovered from. Also we as a society have mostly decided that violence isn’t a good way of solving individual disputes. A duel doesn’t tell you who is right, only who is left.
And let’s not forget, duelling always carries a risk of death. Nobody is thinking in terms of “oh don’t worry, as long as they get me to a hospital quick enough I’ll be fine”, because a bullet to the heart or head is still a killing blow.
I think it stems more from the correlation between modern medicine and modern weaponry.
A duel would be difficult with swords, and yes you could be cut badly but more bruised and possibly broken bone.
A duel with guns, yeah you dead.
way more survivable than it was 100 years ago
Threat assessment, in a nutshell. Back then you could be relatively sure you were evaluating the threat level of any encounter fairly accurately. You could tell if your target was far more privileged than you, deadly weapons were reasonably obvious. These days you have no way of knowing whether your target has immediate access to deadly weaponry, an unseen group of potential reinforcements via socials, or if law enforcement will be able to investigate and prosecute your actions whether there are witnesses or not.
Even if people were thinking “i want to just harm someone in a way that they can still make a full recovery”, modern medicine also tells us much more about ptsd and other mental health issues that can happen from violence. So even if the while premise of “let’s get violent, they can heal” was true, it would still lead to less violence
