[prescience]

Originally Posted by arkhangelsk

I'll agree that it is reasonable to hypothesize on the basis that they have a higher overall tech level that they have better weapons. It is not reasonable to insist on said hypothesis when the weapons are turning in below par performances.

I'd be interested to hear where you're getting these "below par performances" from. All we know is that, in all cases where mass-based weapons have been used against mages, they have failed to be effective. From this, all we can infer is that the weapons used in these cases are ineffective against magic defenses. If we see the weapons failing to do damage to targets without magical defenses (that they would be expected to damage in the real world), then yes, we could conclude that their performance is below-par. But until then, this argument holds no water.

Not to mention in some cases, a weapon with a low speed and warhead effect performance is actually more logical than a high solution. For example, when it is a "howitzer" made from an arm, mounted on a more or less human sized body.

I would like to take object with your general insistence that timing measurements are admissible as evidence in this debate. You say that you judge the events shown in the story by the same standards as you would judge events in real life. But, even setting aside the possibility that the writer deliberately sacrificed realism for the sake of making things look cool (a well-documented occurrence even in live-action series/films), these details are only going to be coherent to the extent that the writer actually thought things out. I find it much more believable that Tsuzuki doesn't care about the details and just threw things in willy nilly because they sound cool, than to think that he decided to make the mass-based weapons used in the series utterly crappy by terran standards, and carefully planned the timing of all the scenes in question to be consistent with this. But maybe that's just me...

As for why don't thugs use guns more like ours, I'll say that large scale re-development efforts are spotted and splashed before they reach fruit. As for the average thug (or small group of them), a modern gun is a rather complex affair and it is unlikely the thug will successfully to design and make one with the help of only a non-specialist education. More likely, any illegal slugthrower they make will be cobbled together based on conveniently available aftermarket parts, with correspondingly low performance (if it has high enough performance, its application as a mass weapon would be clear and access will be restricted or banned).

... or they could just steal a bunch of M16A1s (or, more likely, AK47s) from Earth. If Fate could come over and steal Jewel Seeds as a 9-year-old kid, surely an organized crime syndicate wouldn't have any trouble finding somewhere to steal assault rifles from.