Why Do People In Star Wars Use Blasters Instead Of Guns?

Logistics and stopping power. One small plasma cartridge can give a blaster rifle over 500 shots, which makes blaster ammunition far lighter to carry than physical rounds, a serious advantage across a long war. The bigger problem was power. Bullets just were not powerful enough. Armour that a blaster bolt went straight through would comfortably stop most slugs. (Ultimate Star Wars; The Star Wars Sourcebook)

Conventional guns do exist, and they have a name#

The galaxy did not forget how to make a rifle. Conventional firearms are called slugthrowers, and the physical round they fire is a slug. They show up constantly once you start looking. (Aftermath: Life Debt; Obi-Wan and Anakin)

The reference material is full of them: cycler rifles, scatterguns, autopistols, needlers, Verpine shatter rifles and shatter pistols, sharpshooter's rifles, rotary cannons. On Brentaal IV, an inventor named Andel Tanner was said to have made a pair of slugthrower pistols more than 6,000 years before the Galactic Civil War, and they were still prized enough to be stolen from the musician Fitz Roi. (The Star Wars Sourcebook; Star Wars Adventure Journal 4)

They were in service in the modern era too. General Grievous, back when he was the Kaleesh warrior Sheelal, specialised in a slugthrower rifle during the Huk War and introduced his comrade Kummar to the Czerka Outland rifle. In the months before the Battle of Jakku, the bounty hunter Jas Emari carried a custom slugthrower rifle. (Unknown Soldier: The Story of General Grievous; Aftermath: Life Debt)

So the question is not whether the technology exists. It is why nobody built armies around it. (The Star Wars Sourcebook)

The Jedi problem cuts both ways#

There is a well-known argument that slugthrowers should have been standard issue against Force users. Point a lightsaber at an incoming slug and the metal melts on contact, and the molten result keeps going, straight into the face of the Jedi doing the deflecting. A lightsaber is superb at redirecting an energy bolt and much worse at stopping a lump of metal that behaves like a liquid the moment it touches the blade. Not every slug gets through, mind: skilled Jedi parry them without trouble. (Obi-Wan and Anakin; The High Republic: Light of the Jedi)

That is genuinely a better anti-Jedi weapon in the right moment. It is also a niche one. (Obi-Wan and Anakin)

Armies do not equip for the rare case. In a galaxy-scale war, the overwhelming majority of what a trooper shoots at is another trooper, a droid or a vehicle. Optimising every infantry weapon in the Galactic Republic around the handful of enemies who carry lightsabers would be a strange trade, and it would cost you on every other axis. That is our reading rather than anything a character says, but it follows from the rest. (The Star Wars Sourcebook)

Ammunition is the real argument#

Blasters convert a gas into a bolt. Tibanna is the famous variety, harvested from Bespin, but eleton, orveth, sig and skevon all served as blaster gas as well. That gas is compressed into a canister and fed through the weapon, and some blasters could get over 500 shots out of a single relatively small one. (Rogue One: The Ultimate Visual Guide; Ultimate Star Wars)

Now think about supplying an army with the equivalent in slugs. Five hundred rounds is weight, bulk and a manufacturing chain, per soldier, per resupply, across thousands of worlds. A canister and a power pack is a fraction of that. (Ultimate Star Wars)

Then there is cost. Lighter, simpler ammunition is cheaper to move, and in a long, drawn-out conflict that difference compounds. The Clone Wars ran for three years across the whole galaxy. The Galactic Civil War ran longer. Whoever is arming those fronts is thinking about cost per shot, not about the one Jedi in a hundred thousand engagements. (Revenge of the Sith; Return of the Jedi)

Bullets could not get through#

The decisive factor is the simplest one. Armour that could not stop a direct blaster hit was extremely effective against most slugs. Canon shows it too: on Haruun Kal, the natives' crude slugthrowers were useless against stormtrooper armour. (The Star Wars Sourcebook; From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back, "The Final Order")

That single fact ends the debate. If a cheap set of plates on an average soldier reliably defeats a slug, then a slugthrower is not a weapon you can build an infantry doctrine around, no matter how well it works against a lightsaber. Meanwhile the blaster bolt goes through that same armour. (The Star Wars Sourcebook)

You can see the same logic playing out one tier up, with materials rather than armour grades. Cortosis was prized precisely because it could withstand energy weapons like blaster bolts and lightsabers, which made cortosis armour a genuine threat to the Jedi. Nobody needed an equivalent counter-slug material, because slugs were already being stopped by ordinary kit. (Thrawn: Alliances; The Star Wars Sourcebook)

Where slugthrowers survived#

They stuck around in the places where their weaknesses did not matter and their strengths did. (The Star Wars Sourcebook)

Bounty hunters, criminals and specialists kept using them. Palm shooters, needlers and shatter pistols are concealment weapons, and a slugthrower has no bolt to give away your firing position. Hunting rifles stayed slugthrowers on plenty of worlds. Verpine shatter weapons in particular had a reputation that had nothing to do with anti-Jedi work. (The Star Wars Sourcebook)

The pattern is exactly what you would expect from the economics. Blasters won the mass market because they were cheap, light on logistics and effective against armour. Slugthrowers persisted as a specialist tool for people who needed a specific advantage and were happy to pay for it. Legends even argues the blaster made slugthrowers more useful, since people stopped wearing heavy armour that could not stop bolts anyway. (The Star Wars Sourcebook)

The Jedi were never the design brief#

One last thing worth straightening out, because it is the source of most of the confusion. (The Star Wars Sourcebook)

People frame this as a puzzle: the galaxy had a Jedi-killing weapon and refused to use it. But nobody in the Galactic Republic or the Galactic Empire was designing their standard infantry weapon around Jedi. Blasters were the dominant weapon for thousands of years before the Clone Wars, long before any war where killing Jedi at scale was the objective, and they stayed dominant after the Order was gone. (A New Hope; Revenge of the Sith; The High Republic: Light of the Jedi)

The Empire, which genuinely did hunt Force users, did not switch its stormtroopers to slugthrowers either. It sent Inquisitors with lightsabers of their own, because the answer to a Jedi was never small arms. It was another Force user, or overwhelming numbers, or an orbital bombardment. (Star Wars Rebels, "Rise of the Old Masters"; Revenge of the Sith)

Where anti-Jedi thinking did show up, it went into materials rather than ammunition. Cortosis armour and cortosis-clad battle droids were the actual attempt to solve the lightsaber problem, and the Confederacy tried exactly that during the Clone Wars. A slug that melts into a Jedi's face is a neat trick, but it only works once per Jedi and only if the Jedi tries to block it. (Thrawn: Alliances; Obi-Wan and Anakin)

Blasters are what an interstellar civilisation arms its armies with. Slugthrowers are what you bring when you have one specific problem and one chance to solve it. (The Star Wars Sourcebook; Obi-Wan and Anakin)