The title of the article alludes to the contemporary American debate about the significance of firearms for killing and violence; is it guns or people that’s kill? But the aim here is to take this further and ask, more generally, what role do material things have for conflicts, power relations and societal change? This question theoretically concerns various forms of materialism and concepts such as dialectic, entanglement, affordances and possibilism.  

In this text, technology and material culture’s role in social formation and historical change is contextualized and discussed based on the building and presence of new heavily armed warships during the 15th and 16th centuries. How do these material innovations relate to the transformation of the society? What role did the big new ships have in the change from Medieval to Modern? The archeological and historical examples are taken from the Baltic Sea region and the Scandinavian countries.