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What was the regulation on iron swords? As I understand it, they propagated out quite rapidly because the military edge, no pun intended, was too great to ignore.
Automobiles are a terrible example. First, there were obvious analogues to the regulatory regime we’d eventually use. It still took decades to notice the skulls and make a fuss. I’m sure smart policymakers complained that wailing mothers were just “reactionaries.” I’m sure they liked their scare quotes, too.
Second, automobiles were more of a material issue than a skill issue. Elites weren’t concerned about losing their monopoly on highway speeds. They were afraid of getting hit by fucking cars.
Compare gun regulation. The buzzkills aren’t a warrior class, complaining that butchering civilians used to take skill. No, they don’t want anyone committing a massacre, and decided not to let any moron have his own machine gun. The ban was born of an overwhelming sentiment that potential for abuse outweighed benefits.
There is a smooth continuum between laissez faire and bans; direct enforcement of unwritten rules is somewhere in the middle. The cries to ban generative AI now surely involve some class interest—all that dark money in furry art has to go somewhere! They also represent a sentiment, a vibe, that the promise of endless art or smut isn’t actually worth all that much. That maybe, just maybe, the technology is worth more to scammers than to reasonable people.
So we end up with knee-jerk reactions. Negotiating positions from which we try to work out just which unwritten rules need to make it to the page. How else are we supposed to figure it out?
It was not uncommon for swords to be banned in urban areas or when walking around in public. Sometimes broader attempts were made: the Qin dynasty (ever the innovator in methods of social control) mass confiscated weapons more generally and only allowed agents of the state to own arms. That was comparatively rare, even in China: if you have hordes of barbarians always testing the reach and authority of your state, you need peasants to be able to defend themselves.
I’m not seeing any suggestion that those bans arose from technological instability. Link?
Arguably the Japanese policy mentioned in @Ioper’s link, where relics and art pieces are allowed, but mall ninja shit is banned…except that comes at it from the complete other direction. We disarmed Japan at gunpoint, and they kept to it after we left, but added an exception for cool artifacts.
Driving down the cost of something that used to be expensive to near-zero is itself a destabilizing force- you make iron working cheap, you make swords cheap, and the distribution of swords is the definition of "balance of power". It's why the usual suspects are also terrified of 3D printers (because you could create scary guns with them) and drones (see Ukraine), though they seem to be more distracted by the fact that blasphemous imagery is now cheap as free at the moment.
Which doesn't appear to have happened with swords.
The timing is all off. Western Europe didn't have the state capacity to ban La Tene weapons, and I haven't seen evidence they tried. Qin China may have done so, but they existed right as iron supplanted bronze; hardly a too-cheap-to-meter situation. Then the Japanese sword hunts are centuries after their metallurgy developed.
Those are all bad examples for someone trying to argue that elites are Luddites.
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Arms control is quite common and not inherently or even generally a response to new technology.
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"Sword hunts" was a fairly common occurrence in Japan as well.
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