Not to be taken especially seriously.

Oh, Szymon Wyrda. The post-Polish Idol years have not been kind to you.

Szymon Wyrda, for those poor benighted souls who have yet to bask in his unparalleled beauty, was a runner-up in Idol’s first season back in 2002. He is a vocalist and poet with some genuine talent and an ego approximately the same size that his country became after King Jadwiga married Grand Duke Jagiełło of Lithuania.

In a recent interview Mr Wyrda made very explicit his opinions on legal issues of copyright as they relate to a Web-dominated age. His views, perhaps a bit surprisingly given the well-documented tension that often exists between creators and publishers in matters of copy and patent, are intensely in favour of continued protectionism on the part of the industry. ‘Music piracy’, Wyrda said, ‘is more evil than killing people with a gun.’

Now, I have on a few occasions—not many, but a few—downloaded music from the Internet, typically without much concern one way or the other as to the technical legality of my doing so—neither I nor the record companies have incurred either profit nor loss due to my actions. So, knowing from Wyrda as I now do that I have, even if only once or twice, committed a sin graver than homicide with a firearm, I’m understandably worried about my immortal soul.

But questions abound! Why a gun, specifically? It is a mystery. It is clear, however, that Wyrda is of the belief that there is a sliding scale, perhaps one expressible through logarithms or the calculus, of evilness, which varies not only from sin to sin but within sins based at least in part upon the precise means by which the act was carried out. In order to investigate the relative evilness of killing with a gun versus killing with a knife, sword, battleaxe, arrow, bardiche, poison, garrotte, naginata, Klingon bat’leth, sock full of pennies, broken bottle, or other such implements, let us consider exactly how a gun kills.

Guns are notable because the projectiles that they fire, bullets, are made to impact, not to pierce. With humans and other fleshy substances a bullet, particularly the ones with hollow tips so they actually expand and fragment in the body, may very well do more damage than an arrow, all other things being equal. Against such things as cinderblocks, brick walls, and suits of armour, however, bullets can in many circumstances be woefully inadequate. An arrow will shatter a cinderblock; a standard bullet will splatter against it like a wad of gum.

Most bullets are made of lead. Lead, of course, is poisonous, and getting hit with a lump of it travelling through the air at supersonic speeds hurts, a lot, whether it’s fatal or not. Even if it hits you somewhere like the meaty part of the thigh a bullet will put you in excruciating pain for at least a little while.

The same is, truth be told, true of most other weapons as well.

Now, with regards to ‘curving the bullet’, like Angelina Jolie teaches her acolyte to do in the trailer of Wanted (I didn’t actually see the movie), it is indeed possible to affect a bullet’s aerodynamics such that it will ‘spin’ and tumble through the air. But a bullet is not a baseball. There are not ‘fastball’, ‘curveball’, or ‘knuckleball’ shots and the level of conscious human control that it is possible to exert over a bullet in the process of being fired is far below that depicted in our Hollywood. Whether or not the aerodynamics of the weapon is of relevance to the relative morality of killing with the particular weapon concerned is beyond my competence to determine; however, it ought to be said that a relatively greater degree of precision is had with handheld than with ranged weapons, even as ranged weapons have a wider variety of uses in modern combat.

I live in the United States (which is cheeky of me). Since Bill Clinton came to power in 1993 and started enacting urban renewal projects there has been a drop-off in violent crime relative to the high rates during the Carter, Reagan, and Bush 41 years. The most recent comprehensive Justice Department statistics on violent crime are those for 2008, in which the overall homicide rate in the United States was 5.8 for every hundred thousand people (as compared to 1.82 in Canada, 2.03 in the United Kingdom, 0.64 in Japan, 0.91 in Ireland, and 89 in Iraq). Of those approximately eighteen thousand homicides, over twelve thousand were committed with guns, whereas of the six hundred homicides committed in Canada in the same year, over four hundred were not committed with guns.

This is a little odd since Canada has, in general, extremely lax gun control laws. But Johnny Canuck is not Uncle Sam in terms of his culture, including the type of culture that governs what sorts of things he buys guns in order to be able to shoot. A man in Houston and a man in Thunder Bay are not going to want to blast the same sorts of things to kingdom come.

I realise that this is something of a generalisation, but Canadians own comparatively more rifles—mainly for shooting animals—and Americans own comparatively more handguns—which are less useful for hunting and more useful for shooting other Americans (or, increasingly commonly in the American mind, ‘damn wetbacks’). There are actually statistics for this: handguns are far more popular in the United States and rifles rather less so. I’m not up on my criminology enough to know whether or not this means that the relative morality of various murder weapons is different in Canada, but I’d like to think that it does.

In conclusion, killing people with a gun is probably less evil than bludgeoning them over the head but probably more evil than force-feeding them cyanide.