According to the article, the attacks are currently ineffective for a number of reasons, one being their js code is bugged. Imagine Gavrillo Princip's gun was prone to jamming consistently.
This... actually inspires very little confidence. The assassination of the archduke involved several assassins who each failed iteratively for ridiculous reasons on the motorcade route. Princip himself had decided to give up on the assassination, only to find out the cafe he had gone to ended up being directly on the motorcade path. The serendipity of his proximity was probably the only reason Ferdinand ended up dead that day.
The cannon doesn't have to work all the time, just once effectively, and possibly even accidentally.
The Merck attack seemed to be an accidental offshoot, and nothing on an international political scale happened from that. Until we have some more tech literate politicians, or an agency to explain what's happening in simpler terms, I don't see these kind of attacks being taken seriously, or even understood on a basic level.
In reality it was the setup of the triple entente by Edward VII that was most responsible for the WWs. The archduke may have been the match, but the triple entente was the detcord strung around Europe.
Well, Gavrillo and his co-conspiritors planned to kill Archduke Ferdinand with a thrown bomb, which the Archduke defected with his arm. The bomb exploded without doing much harm, and only later by pure chance the Archduke drove by Gavillo and was shot. It's a miracle that the assasination worked at all, the story is full of incompetence from the assassins. As such the parallel to the Great Cannon fits perfectly.
Given Gavrillo Princip's gun was only involved because the grenade missed and then everyone concerned made a series of unfortunate decisions that allowed a second attempt, that example isn’t bringing me any hope.
Wait, didn’t that happen though? I thought the arch duke was originally supposed to be killed in a failed bombing, and the handgun was a second and happenstance scenario.
There was a royal procession to City Hall in Sarajevo, during which a grenade was thrown at the Archduke. It (barely) missed, they drove off, and had a meeting with some local magistrate.
After the meeting, Franz wanted to travel to the hospital to visit the civilians who'd been wounded by the errant grenade. En route, his driver, confused, took the same route from the morning procession. When they realized what was happening, they told him to turn around and get the out if there. When the driver stopped to turn around, they were ~1 block from the site of the first assassination attempt. One if the co-conspirators (who had lost his nerve the first time, and had been milling around and hoping that Franz would come back by), was standing where the car came to a stop. Two shots killed Fran's Ferdinand and his wife.
Fun fact about this--Franz Ferdinand's death was not the cause of the Great War in the way that people tend to think it was. The assassination caused the war in the sense that it was a convenient excuse for a war that the Austro-Hungarians already wanted, but not because (Austro-Hungarian Emperor) Franz Joseph wanted revenge or anything like that. In fact, Franz Joseph's secretary later said that he "almost seemed grateful" that Ferdinand (whose marriage was so problematic that he had been forced to proactively abdicate on behalf of his children) was out of the way.
My middle school history teacher always stressed the point about reasons vs. triggers for events, and it has stuck to me since then, as it makes looking at things like this much easier. Basically, there is a giant list of political reasons for the Great War, I am not gonna list all of them here, but I fully agree with you that the assassination was not one of them. Franz Ferdinand's assassination was the trigger.
